Image Grace Candra
I don't know if any of you saw the two part drama about the Tsunami, the last of which was on TV last night, but I found it on one level very informative as when the Tsunami happened, we had just moved to France and I lost a lot of what was going on on a day to day basis as we only had French TV and my French was not so good at that time.
It was very moving in parts and incredibly sad and frustrating for so many people, but one part which I was a little perturbed by was the bit where the Buddhist monks were incinerating the increasing number of bodies prior to them being identified which I have since found out was not shown in a strictly truthful light. I was thinking how terrible it would be to never know if your loved one had been found or not and it was not until one of the reporters who was Thai and a Buddhist himself explained to the other that the monks do not treat the body as a person, only the spirit which lives on.
I investigated this further today and have unvealed the truth that the monks were asked to do this very difficult task as there was really no option, thousands of bodies were building up in a very short space of time and there were not enough mortuaries to handle this number of corpses.
But the other interesting thing I found out was that the monks were trained in 'corpse meditation'. The special "corpse meditation" enabled each monk to deal with the nightmarish task.
"Corpse contemplation", or corpse meditation, is just literally [meditating on] a picture of a dead body, or a body at one of the actual stages of decomposition," one monk explained.
The macabre photographs, which many Thai monks keep in their personal possession and are publicly sold in religious shops throughout Thailand, include news photos of people killed in accidents, suicides, fires, and also medical autopsy pictures of corpses open during dissection or sewn up. Some photos show the grisly progression of decomposition on the human body.
The purpose of this common, traditional form of meditation is to "simply to hold in your mind, very clearly, that when you look at a [living] person, you're seeing only the external aspect of that physical person".
The monk went onto explain: "We say, 'everyone has a human heart', but what does it look like? We forget. We are obsessed with the externals. No one wants to see the internals. But we try to see them in an equal light, neither delighting nor being repelled by the attractive or the unattractive signs of the external or the internal,"
"It is very common with us to have [corpse meditation] pictures with us, to use them, or just to have in your hut, or have with you when you are eating, or just to look at and to contemplate," he said.
This threw up some interesting things for me:
Why is it necessary to stare at these photos and meditate whilst looking at these supposedly grotesque images if the external appearance is not important? The external appearance of a dead, bloated body should not have any importance to the monks according to what I have read?
Do you believe that when you look at a person you see only the external aspect. I do not view people like this, from a distance maybe, there is only the external appearance to go by, but once talking to a person, watching their gestures, the way they talk, how they react with me, what they talk about, the external seems pretty insignificant. To me this gives us great insight into what the human heart is like. Even on this blog whre we perhaps do not all know each other, you can gauge what someone's heart and mind is like to a certain extent. What do you think?
Lynn, you may also be able to throw some light on how the dead were dealt with in New Orleans...we all saw the bodies lined up on pavements or floating in the water, but what was the process of dealing with the large amount of losses in this instance.
I did find this programme incredibly sad for the people trying to deal with the great loss and personal loss of life and injury, and for the local people coming to terms with not just losing their families but also their villages, their sense of place, once the developers moved in a few days later to start flattening their homes in readiness for the development of large hotel complexes.
Tsunami
Red Wall rising up out of Sea,
a construct carved of fault.
Watery pillar of salt
licking Asia’s shores.
Tsunami, your wave signals goodbye.
7 comments:
Swan,
Wow! I am sitting here in complete amazement after reading your story. I have several feelings about this post. First, I am in agreement with you regarding the religious practices used by the monks. I wonder if this meditation is practiced in order to help the dead transcend? I don't understand why they would carry a picture of the dead with them. The inside of a body is still the outside of a human. Our heart, as you mention has nothing to do with what's beating inside our chests. This is how I feel, anyway.
Unfortunately I didn't see the program. I will look out for a viewing of it here in the states. New Orleans was completely unprepared for a tragedy like Hurricane Katrina. Still, to this day, less that 1/2 of the city is populated. My brother's neighborhood still looks like a bomb went off in it. There are houses left exactly as they were the day after the storm & flood. I'm talking miles and miles of unpopulated areas of New Orleans still untouched by the human hand to clean up the city. Homes I spent most of my life spending time in. It's quite upsetting. And here's the REALLY upsetting part. They are still finding dead bodies in some of the homes.
I will never get comfortable watching the footage shown on TV of the dead in New Orleans. I have very close friends who are in the medical field, who stayed in the city at hospitals to take care of the critically ill during the hurricane. One of my friends, I am sorry to say, had to inject critically ill patients with overdoses of morphine so they could go into a sleepy state and die in peace. The city was drowning, literally. It's hard to believe how many people laid on the streets dead. Rows and rows of them. One man who died was put in a green plastic garbage bag and put next to a garbage can on the street. People were walking over him trying to escape from the city. He was there for days!!! THis is only one incident. One police officer picked up a dead body and drove around for 72 hours with it in his back seat trying to find a place to bring the body. Eventually, he had to bring it back to where he picked it up -in the street somewhere. There are so many sad stories of how people watched their parents die or children die.
I'm afraid I didn't answer your question, Swan. I start talking about New Orleans and my mind forgets everything else. I will jump in and take this opportunity to ask for prayers for my home town. Not just for the citizens, but for the many crooked politicians still running Louisiana. They need all the prayers they can get.
I'm very interested in seeing the program you mentioned. Was it a National Geographic program?
Much love for you Swan. I can feel your heart from here.
Peace,
Lynn xo
Dear Swan,
I reread your question regarding the dead bodies in N.O.
The airport in the city was used as a morgue, as well as other commercial buildings. I believe that there were many bodies sent out of state for some reason and this caused a lot of heartache for families. Noone knew where their relatives were, if they were alive or dead. Some are still looking for family members. There have been a number of articles written about the deaths due to Katrina. None are pleasant to read. There is still so much pain here.
Forever,
Lynn xo
Dear Swan,
Thank you for drawing our attention to these important issues. Lynn's moving replies are so heart-felt and full of pain and compassion.
I could give you a dry academic answer to your questions about why Buddhists, not just monks, are advised to contemplate the illusory and temporary nature of the flesh, but I feel it would be out of place in the face of Lynn's personal involvement in such a tragedy. So I will save it for another time.
Let me ask instead that we join together in sending our prayers of love and healing to those who are having to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the Tsunami. Both of these events prompted waves of compassion around the world and we remember that they are not yet over, but will affect generations of families to come.
As we are quickly getting to know you personally Lynn we can also dedicate our thoughts specifically to you and hope these help to heal the hurts you and your family and friends have been through. Please pass on our prayers to them. We are all part of one family.
Love
Bruv
Hi Lynn
It was a BBC TV drama and in fact had a lot of controversy prior to its submission as it is obviously coming up to the 2nd Anniversary of the Tsunami. Obviously it is based on fact but it was not a documentary. The writer spent 7 months in Thailand researching this programme and spent a lot ot time talking to the victims about their experiences. So the characters are based on actual events, however, as with all dramas there is perhaps some artistic license and over-dramatisation although I felt it was very well done overall.
I do really feel for you right now going through this terrible disaster on your own doorstop and I send you much strength in your voluntary work there - it is a very admirable thing to do and to face on a daily basis.
And yes as Bruv says lets all think about the people who are still suffering terribly in both the aftermath of the Tsunami and New Orleans.
With love Swan x
Swan asked about the Buddhist practice of 'corpse' meditation. I will try to give an explanation without dwelling on the gorier elements of this.
The purpose of this meditation is for us to truly recognise the transitory nature of our human life. We live our lives for the most part ignoring the fact that we are made up of raw bones tissue, hair, nails and blood. Only when we are physically hurt are we confronted with the truth of our physical nature and for us this is often a shocking experience. We recoil with horror when we see our inner workings exposed. Why is this? It is because our mind hoodwinks us into forgetting what our insides are like. It draws a veil over the facts of death and decay. This is one of the reasons why we in the West have developed this cult of youth, of wanting to appear to stay young forever. In doing so we are denying our true physical nature.
When the monk in Swan’s post said ‘Everyone has a heart but we forget what it looks like.’ He was not referring to our loving heart, he was referring to the physical organ itself. He meant that we go through life denying the truth of our physical bodies, pretending that our insides don’t exist and that cosmetics and surgery will defeat the ageing process.
Buddhists, in order to achieve enlightenment, must attempt to see life in all its reality. When I was on retreat at the Buddhist monastery, I prepared the monks a lovely meal and they prayed before they ate it. I asked a monk what they prayed and was shocked when he said that they prayed that the food would appear loathsome in their sight! ‘Why was this?’ I asked. Because they must renounce the pleasures of the flesh by seeing things as they really are, he replied. They contemplated the fact that when the body has processed your lovely meal it becomes nothing more than excrement. In a similar way when one looks at an attractive person one does not see them as they will be when they are ravaged by time.
All physical things are transitory, our bodies decay and die. This is the nature of reality. To truly look at life in this way is to try to root out attachment and desire which is the cause of our unhappiness in life. However do not get the impression that all is doom and gloom. For Buddhism is a joyful philosophy, believe it or not. It says enjoy things as they are when they are in their beautiful form, in the moment, but also accept that things do not stay the same forever and to want them to do so is to create unhappiness for yourself.
I am always encouraged by the example of Namaste. Her real mum died when Namaste was a child. Because of the nature of her mum’s fatal illness, Namaste has always had a pathological dread of blood. However she has in later life embraced a career in the medical services working in hospitals and doctors surgeries to overcome her natural dread. When confronted with physical shocks we always quote Marlon Brando’s famous line in Apocalypse Now, “You must make a friend of horror.”
Love Bruv
Thank you Swan and Bruv! All higher thoughts are welcomed here. I send the same to you. I am glad to see that Bruv explained the Buddhist meditation practice. I'll keep an eye out for the BBC special.
Luv on all today!!
Lynn xo
Hi All,
I would have loved to have seen this programme Swan and what a very interesting topic to raise.
People only seem to realise they have insides when something goes wrong with them. People nowadays, myself included, seem to be quite shallow in the way they view themselves. Young people seem to want to conform to the social norm of thin-ness, not that I had to try hard to achieve this as I was always a stick insect in my youth!, and if they cannot conform they suffer from depression about it Older people often cling to the idea of eternal youthful looks and forget their inner spiritual qualities and needs.
I want to thank Bruv for saying how I have confronted my fears. I must add that this was not a conscious action but it did stem from my wanting to do voluntary work in caring for people. As part of this process, I have had to become more immune to my fears and have handled such things as people collapsing in the surgery.
With regard to the Tsunami, it was only good fortune that my brother and his family left Thailand shortly before the Tsunami hit, although his wife lost family in it.
With the way the world is going we can expect more and more of these disasters, so any pressure we can put on our governments to address global warming is vital.
Lots of love and healing thoughts,
The Nam
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