LITMIR.BIZ

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of our wealth, our technology and our habit of avoidance, it is perhaps easier for us than for any other society in history to minimize our first-hand experience of big suffering. We all know about the pain in the world, yet, until it touches us directly, are able to keep it at arm’s length. I do not like to contemplate how easily, with just one little twist of the kaleidoscope, it could be me who is starving in the Sudan, me who is imprisoned, tortured or shot for my beliefs in Turkey or Chile, me who is dispossessed and oppressed because of the colour of my skin in South Africa or Australia. I have never yet had to choose between my physical survival and my self-respect, between being a passive collaborator or an active resister, when I know that for my resistance I will very likely be killed.

      Yet I can, if I am honest, sense in myself the potential to be the villain. I can see that it is the same obsession to be comfortable, to accumulate and hoard, that I have which makes multi-national companies turn vast stretches of Africa into farms that only produce cotton which the people cannot eat, and beef which they have to sell. It is the same urge for release and avoidance that I have which makes the subsistence farmer take this payment into town and blow it all on beer, while his wife and children grow hungrier. It is the same wish for power and control that I have which makes governments spend money on arms rather than on small, easily-serviced water pumps for the poor people in the countryside. It is the same short-sightedness that I have which makes people cut down trees for shelter or profit, which loosens the top-soil, which washes away in the next flood, which turns farmland into yet more man-made desert, which makes yet more famine. It is the same need to look good and impress that I have which makes presidents, prime ministers and first secretaries spend millions of dollars on inauguration or commemoration parties and lie and twist and bribe to protect their reputations. I cannot be sure that I would not have manned the gas chambers, nor that I would not have joined the others in hurling rocks at Jesus. What’s more I cannot even be sure that I would have felt reluctant as I behaved barbarically. If I am to follow the Buddhist path, I have to be prepared to seek out in myself just those attitudes that I condemn most vociferously in others.

      But whether or not pain is caused by other people, whether or not I can understand it if it is, real pain exists. Even in an enlightened world there must be the pain of childbirth, the pain of cancer, the pain of accidental injury or food poisoning. Can Buddhism get rid of this? No, it can’t. As Michael Carrithers says in The Buddha:

      

      

      It is not claimed that liberation puts an end to physical pain this side of the grave, for painfulness is admitted to be the nature of the body ... It is rather mental suffering, the extra and unnecessary anguish of existence, that is progressively dispelled by the Buddhist training.

      

      

      And Aldous Huxley in his utopian novel Island adds his usual touch of poetry to the same sentiment:

      

      

      Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact – sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature, and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world that is wholly indifferent to our well-being, towards decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two-thirds of all sorrow is home-made and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

      

      

      We are back to courage, serenity and wisdom. There are some pains we can avoid by taking pains, and it is sane and healthy to do so. There are others that we can seem to avoid or reduce, but there are buried costs in doing so, costs that will damage our well-being and our relationships in a wider sense. If we blame others we can avoid the pain of responsibility, but incur the pain of loss of goodwill. We can drink to forget, but must pay the price of addiction and incompetence. Then there are the self-generated pains that we can avoid if we wake up to what we are doing, and stop doing it. And finally there are the pains that must simply be borne – par excellence the sadness of bereavement, the sensations of sickness, the dependency of disability, the decline to old age, and the final unknown of our own death.

      The remarkable discovery that Buddhism can make available to us is that even physical pain changes in its quality and intensity when we give up the abortive attempt to avoid it. There was an unsensational programme on the television the other day about a clinic in America that was treating children who had some rare disease or other, I forget what it was, that required daily injections directly into the spine which were, undeniably, intensely painful. Their special approach was to teach the children everything they could about the injections, to allow them to practise giving the injections themselves to life-size dummies, and to encourage parents to be involved all the time. What they did not do was tell the children that it wouldn’t hurt, nor did they tell them to be ‘brave’. Through this process the children, incredibly, were able to stay completely relaxed and peaceful throughout the injections, experiencing the pain, but not resisting it. Precisely by not resisting, the experience became bearable. Millions of mothers have thanked their ante-natal classes for something of the same transformation of labour. Thousands of meditators, as we shall see later, have learnt to sit peacefully through long retreats while strong sensations of various sorts arise and fade away in different parts of their bodies. It is no mere fatalism, but active intelligence, to give up trying to avoid the inevitable, for in doing so it actually becomes less aversive. (As I heard a politician say on the radio a year or so back, ‘We must plan for the inevitable; and unfortunately these days the inevitable all too frequently happens.’)

      To the medical profession, there are no two ways about it: pain and death are the enemy, to be reduced and postponed wherever and for as long as possible. In a sense this is the easy way out of the impossible moral dilemma with which medical technology has confronted us. If we have drugs that can soften pain and prolong life, then it is hard not to use them, or at least to believe that we ought to use them. In the old days, doctors did what they could, and lots of people died anyway. Now they are frequently confronted with a choice that they would rather not have to make. In many individual cases it looks as if the best thing to do is to keep on trying your hardest to keep people alive – despite the increasing misgivings of families and patients themselves. Yet the collective upshot of these individual decisions is an increasingly elderly, infirm and dependent population, many of whom have had enough.

      The decisions involved are truly difficult, for families and especially for doctors, and I would cope no better if I were in their shoes, I am sure. But the medical profession has largely brought the difficulties on themselves. By persisting in treating pain and death as technical problems that can and should be fixed, they have educated the world at large to think likewise, and have undermined the vital resources of serenity and acceptance that we are all going to need sooner or later. And at the end, when medical science has given its all and ‘failed’, as it must, dead bodies are spirited away and either hidden or spruced up as if they were going to a party. How many dead bodies have you seen in your life? How many opportunities have you or your children had to get used to the physical fact of death? If your teenage daughter persisted in writing English assignments around the theme of her parents dying, and what it is like being an orphan, would you feel this was a healthy attempt to deal in imagination with the greatest and most legitimate fear of all, or would you think her ‘morbid’ and try to encourage a more cheerful outlook?

      How at ease are you with bereavement – can you feel sadness and regret without also feeling anger and guilt? Is death to you the enemy of life, or simply one of many threads that run inextricably through it? And what of your own death? Some people are scared of the fact of being dead, and hope for some kind of Hereafter, so that it shall not end. To them for death to be a full stop makes a mockery of life. Others feel less worried about death itself, but are scared of dying – of the unknown process with its fierce connotations of pain, loss of control, and loss of consciousness. Perhaps you are not aware of any apprehension at all – but do you act, in your daily life, as if death were a friendly

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