Climbing UP the hill in Fremont, CA on a slightly curved road on a lovely spring morning the sky was extraordinarily blue, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun was warm, not too hot.
It felt nice to be warm and the leaves were shining and sparkle was in the air. It was really a most extraordinary beautiful morning. The high mountain was up there, impenetrable and the hills below were green and lovely.
As you walked along quietly, without much thought, one saw a dead leaf, yellow and bright red, a leaf from the autumn. How beautiful that leaf was, so simple in its death, so lively, full of the beauty and vitality of the whole tree and the summer.
Strange that it had not withered.
Looking at it more closely, one saw all the veins and the stem and the shape of that leaf. The leaf was all the tree.
Why do human beings die so miserably, so unhappy, with a disease old age, senility, body shrunk, ugly?
Why can’t they die naturally and beautifully as this leaf? What is wrong with us?
In spite of all the doctors, medicines, and technology and all the agony of life, and the pleasures too, why don’t we seem to be able to die with dignity, simplicity, and with a smile?
Once walking along a lane, one heard behind one a chant, melodious, rhythmic, with the ancient strength of Sanskrit.
One stopped and looked around. The eldest son, naked to his waist, was carrying a pot with a fire burning in it. He was holding it in another vessel and behind him were two men carrying the dead father, covered with a white cloth, and they were all chanting.
One knew what that chant was, one almost joined in. They went past and one followed them. They were going down the road chanting, and the eldest son was in tears. They carried the father to the beach where they had already collected a great pile of wood and they laid the body on top of that heap of wood and set it on fire.
It was all so natural, so extraordinarily simple: there were no flowers, there was no hearse, there were no black carriages and black horses. It was all very quiet and utterly dignified.
And one looked at that leaf and a thousand leaves of the tree. The winter bought the leaf from its mother on to that path and it would presently dry out completely and wither, be gone, carried away by the winds of time and lost.
As we teach our children mathematics, writing, reading, and all the business of acquiring knowledge, they should also be taught the great dignity of death, not as a morbid, unhappy thing that one has to face eventually, but as something of daily life — the daily life of looking at the blue sky and the grasshopper on the leaf.
It is part of learning as you grow teeth and have all the discomfort of childish illness. children have an extraordinary capability of curiosity.
If you see the nature of death, you don’t explain that everything dies, dust to dust, and so on, but without any fear, you explain to them gently and make them feel that the living and dying, they are one — not at the end of one’s life after fifty or sixty or ninety years, but that death is like that leaf.
Look at the old men and women, how decrepit, how lost, how unhappy, and how ugly they look.
Is it because they have not understood either the living or the dying?
They have used life, they waste away their life with incessant conflict, collecting, possessing, growing, accumulating, securing, defending…
We spend our days in such varieties of conflict and unhappiness, with some joy and pleasure drinking, smoking, late nights and work, work, work. And at the end of one’s life, one faces that thing called death and are frightened of it.
It feels like this can always be understood, felt deeply. The child with his curiosity can be helped to understand that death is not merely the wasting of the body through disease, old age, some unexpected accident but that the ending of every day is also the ending of oneself every day.
Maybe there is no resurrection, maybe that is dogmatic.
Everything on earth, on this beautiful earth, lives, dies, comes into being, and withers away.
To grasp this whole movement of life requires intelligence, not the intelligence of thought, of books but the intelligence of love and compassion with all its sensitivity.
One is very certain that if the educator understands the significance of death and the dignity of it, the extraordinary simplicity of dying — If he understands not intellectually, but deeply, then within that, he may be able to convey it to the child.
If all human beings who have lived before us, past generations upon generations still lived on this earth how terrible would it be. The beginning is never the same shade of ending.
And one would like to help — no, that’s the wrong word.
One would like in education to bring death into some kind of reality, actuality, not of someone else dying but of each one of us, however young or old, having inevitably to face that thing.
It is not a sad state of affairs, of tears or loneliness or separation. We kill so easily, not only the animals for one’s food but the vast unnecessary killing for amusement, called sport — killing a deer because this is the season. Killing a deer is like killing your neighbor.
You kill animals because you have lost touch with nature, with all the living things on earth, you kill in wars for so many romantic, nationalistic and political ideologies.
In the name of God, you have killed people. Violence and killing go together.
As one looked at that dead leaf with all its beauty and color, maybe one would very deeply comprehend, be aware of, what one’s own death would be, not at that very end but at the very beginning.
Death isn’t some horrific thing, something to be avoided, something to be postponed, but rather something to be with day in and day out.
And out of that maybe there comes an extraordinary sense of immensity…
