Modern Tantric Buddhism by Justin von Bujdoss

Author:Justin von Bujdoss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623173968
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2019-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Secret Speech

Chöd/Charnel Grounds

Whether I’m traveling or at home in New York City, I make it a point to practice meditation in cemeteries. One of the most beautiful places to do this is Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Since its creation in 1860, it has attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors. This monumental 478-acre cemetery is home to 560,000 graves, including those of Leonard Bernstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Boss Tweed, and many other illustrious artists, politicians, and inventors. It’s also an amazing place to practice chöd and to be with death.

Over the years, our culture has very effectively averted its eyes from death. We love to avoid the topics of death, illness, and old age. Perhaps this is convenient because it allows us to feel ever young and invincible. However, a visit to Green-Wood (or any cemetery) helps shake loose the taboo nature that death occupies, effectively reeling it in from the periphery of our experience of daily life. On a recent trip to Green-Wood with my wife and sons, we meandered through the beautiful grounds, observing the memorialized names of those who are no more. The comparatively young age at which many of Green-Wood’s residents passed away—at least a third of the graves we saw that day were those of young children or young women who died in childbirth—is particularly striking. As one would expect, a wide variety of ages and cultural backgrounds are represented, further demonstrating, with basic simplicity, the fact that death does not discriminate.

It is easy to accidentally gloss over recognizing impermanence, which the Buddha came to recognize so early in his spiritual quest. Realizing that all beings are subject to birth, sickness, old age, and death serves as the core spiritual foundation upon which the rest of Buddhism, in all of its forms, is based. Perhaps, over time, this can feel a little stale. It is easy to forget about death when we hide it away so well. Just as was true when the Buddha was still Prince Siddhartha, we as humans remain adept at running away from sickness, hiding old age, and trying to bargain to keep death away from our immediate view. In a sense, death, and even illness for that matter, has become somewhat abstracted, and aging is something that we are told by various forms of media to avoid for as long as possible. Talk about suffering! Nevertheless, we are born, we will experience illness, most of us will experience old age, and all of us will experience death—there’s no real hiding this fact. However, joy is to be had, and we can find this joy when we come to terms with the fact that these profound events affect everyone, that we are all linked together by these similar existential events, and that there is a certain beauty in knowing that not only are we not alone, but we are surrounded by countless other beings who share similar existential circumstances.

On one occasion a number of years ago, I went to Green-Wood

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