About Our Minds and Our Bodies
With heretofore private disclosures about mine
I asked Substack’s AI Chat help desk about the standards for displaying photographs of the dead or dying. It replied with the following “general considerations” (slightly shortened): consider the ethical implications and potential harm, respect privacy and the wishes of the families involved, and ensure that the content serves a clear public interest or journalistic purpose.
The purpose of the photo is to demonstrate the difference between mind and body. In Western cultures, we tend to believe that the mind and awareness are situated in the brain. Buddhism and some other Eastern religions teach that the mind and awareness are somewhere else, maybe no place or everywhere.
Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc remained still in the lotus position for about 10 minutes on June 11, 1963, in Saigon, as flames consumed his body and made the air unbreathable. Journalist David Halberstam, a witness, wrote: “As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound….” His act was a protest against the mistreatment of Buddhists by the Catholic regime installed in South Vietnam by the United States government led by President John F. Kennedy, who said about the photograph: “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”
In the Vietnam era, graphic news photographs and videos were ordinary. If you’ve grown up after that time, you may have been “protected” from the “harm” you might experience from viewing them. But that’s another long story.
I saw the immolation on TV news when I was 17. In college, a year or two later, I became an anti-Vietnam War activist. In my early 40s, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh became my teacher, and I began to learn a bit about Quang Duc from the perspective of his sangha mates. Then, just last month, in a retreat, author and spiritual teacher Andrew Holecek led me to view Quang Duc’s act in another way: as a demonstration of mind as separate from body and of mind creating reality.
You could say that Quang Duc used the mind to create a reality without pain and panic. Or, from a more Vajrayana or Pure Land Buddhist perspective, he released his mind (more precisely, his pure Buddha Nature) to Parinirvana, a Pure Land, immediate rebirth, or the bardos.1
Not taking life is the first Buddhist precept, and suicide is the taking of life, but precepts and karma are nuanced. If one’s actions and true motivation are to reduce suffering, the positive karma may outweigh the negative. Quang Duc acted to relieve the suffering of Vietnamese Buddhists and others under an authoritarian regime. Kennedy did eventually withdraw support for the regime Quang Duc was protesting, but subsequent governments were not much better, and the war caused immense suffering for more than another decade.
With our limited human vision, we’ll never know whether the self-immolation resulted in less suffering. But Buddhists in Vietnam and elsewhere venerate Quang Duc.
Here’s a clearer-cut example I know about only because I heard the story from a witness: In the early 1970s, the leader of a small Buddhist convent in the Himalayas led her sangha on a camping retreat. At five every morning, she went to the participants’ tents and woke them. One morning, after she failed to wake them, they could smell smoke further down the mountainside. They found that she had built her funeral pyre, laid on it, and set it ablaze.
A note she left explained that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 terminal cancer and knew that the convent could not afford the care she’d need. She took her own life for the survival of her convent. That sounds like positive karma to me.
Now, to my “heretofore private disclosures” mentioned in the headline’s subline. First, I have no plans to self-immolate. I’m far too cowardly and reluctant to speed up global climate change. But at age 78, I have concerns about my body and mind.
My body is old. I’ve had five total joint replacement surgeries and one partial one, so my mobility suffers. I’ve had a cancer scare that got me thinking but turned out to be not serious. My ancestry is more than 99% Ashkenazi Jewish, and I have a gene variant seen in that population that indicates a slightly increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease. I’ve been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment that indicates a high probability of developing some form of dementia, and blood tests confirm the likelihood. I’ve started taking the drug donepezil and plan on more testing.
But the brain is part of the body. The mind, with its innate Buddha Nature, is not part of the body. My symptoms so far make speaking in some situations difficult because I confuse words, sometimes can’t find the one I’m looking for, or lose my train of thought. I also often forget or confuse names and faces.
My mind and my logical processes remain strong. When I write nonfiction prose, like this blog post, I’m returning to a skill developed professionally and recreationally over more than 60 years. I get into a groove I’ve noticed in many accomplished musicians whose bodies no longer function well. Maybe riding a wave is a better way to describe it.
Riding that wave feels great, so I plan on blogging as long as it carries me.
But here’s the thing: I’ve seen what happens when dementia patients beg to have their lives ended because they are suffering and causing suffering to others after they have lost the ability to carry out suicide themselves.
While I love life, I will try not to let that happen. Using the resources of the Final Exit Network, I have a plan to end my life painlessly in meditative awareness if and when my symptoms progress to the point when I expect to become a burden. If that time approaches, I need to be sure that I can carry out the task entirely on my own. Enlisting anyone else in the details would place them in legal danger.
In the meantime, I maintain my Buddhist practice and ride the blogging wave.
NOTE: Nothing I’ve written is meant to encourage the taking of any life, including your own. If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a crisis, please reach out to the Suicide Prevention Lifeline or dial or text 988.
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My wife Carol and I had the honor of seeing jazz trumpet master Clark Terry play a song or two shortly before his death at 94. Not much about his body worked as he sat on stage in a chair. I doubted that he’d succeed in raising the trumpet to his lips, but he did, and what came out was beautiful. Today's musical bonus: a video of him playing with the Woody Herman Big Band in 1985. Keep watching as, at about the 4:30 mark, they slide into the hilarious Terry song “Mumbles.”
“Bardo“ is Tibetan for a transitional state. It can be used in many ways because almost anything can be seen as a transition. Still, more specifically, it refers to states of life and death, especially states of existence immediately after death.