Just Things?

It was the great 11th-century Buddhist scholar Atisha who taught what are known as the nine contemplations on death. As with memento mori in the Christian tradition, reflections on mortality urge us to live our lives meaningfully and virtuously. In this issue, Roshi Joan Halifax walks us through Atisha’s reminders, providing useful commentary and suggested practices to help us internalize what we all say we know but often act as though we don’t: Our time here is limited. (See “The Nine Contemplations” on page 30.)

It’s not the first time I’ve come across these teachings, but each time I do, I find that one of the nine assumes new resonance. This time, it was the seventh that jumped out at me. It reads, “At the time of death, material resources are of no use.”

For all the effort we expend saving, accumulating, or fretting about the market’s vicissitudes, there is no cushion against death. “Every single penny, every single item must be left behind—all the comforts for which you worked so hard. They will be utterly useless,” Roshi Joan writes. “Consider that all of your cherished objects will be redistributed when you die.”

From Vanessa Zuisei Goddard’s “Gain and Loss”—the two “Eight Worldly Winds” she explores on page 37—to Henepola Gunaratana’s dharma talk (“Clinging,” p. 40), there is plenty in this issue to help us rethink our attachments to our cherished objects. But it is the latter reminder—the idea that one’s goods will be redistributed—that prompted writer and longtime Tricycle contributor Noelle Oxenhandler to consider the tedium her heirs will face when she is gone: the daunting task of sorting through the mountain of objects she has collected over a lifetime. (See “Everything Is Buddha,” p. 58.)

Age is a great motivator to let go. In reflecting on her growing readiness for death, Oxenhandler acknowledges her next thought with mild embarrassment and a little humor: “But I have too many things to die!” Shortly after that she notes, “Just as pregnant women often feel a strong urge toward nesting, it’s common later in life to feel a strong urge toward winnowing.” What follows is a lovely essay on objects and our complex relationship with them. While we often hear that things are just things, in so many ways they are so much more.

My college roommate used to call me “the monk.” I owned very few things. There was nothing virtuous about this. It was a personality quirk; you might call it a neurosis: I felt crowded by things, and I could never quite think my way through clutter. Yet over the decades that followed, my place began to fill—with books reaching as far back as high school; a Persian rug my grandmother bought in the 1920s; a bronze Buddha; an Eames chair manufactured in the year of my birth. Only things. Just the same, I have begun to sort through them, assigning each to those who will succeed me, tossing others.

Why now? I need only turn to the third contemplation: Death comes whether I am prepared or not.