This Jisei, or death poem by the 19th century Japanese poet Kiba captures so poignantly the ephemeral effervescence that is a human life. Life is so fleeting.
My old body:
a drop of dew grown
heavy at the leaf tip
Kiba, 1868
We are born, and most of us cling so tightly to life. But in the end life slips from our grasp, and we die. The dew drop grows heavy, and heavier, and heavier still – until it cannot cling any more. It drops.
Life falls away, regardless of how tightly we cling to it. Regardless of how many face rejuvenating serums we applied, how many ’10 things to do to live longer’ we try, regardless of our efforts at being healthy.
AI image of Life’s Fleeting Nature: Kiba’s Poignant Jisei Death Poem
Nothing against ‘eating healthy so we enhance our wellbeing so we can help our fellow living beings’. This is such a blessed thing. Absolutely beyond wonderful.
But one day the dew drops
When? We don’t know. We die
And we are gone. Gone with but memories in others’ minds. Maybe something in the world that we did persists? Maybe we made a dent.
But gone we are. In this vast universe – a tiny effervescence. A mote of dust.
No need to cling
We are not this apparent body. We aren’t this apparent mind, or any of its contents.
What we are is vast, open and so very far beyond clinging.
Find this vast empty luminosity. Rest there. Rest as this, from this, in this, of this.
Find that which is deathless
Then the dew drop can do what the dew drop will do. And you will feel the utter beauty of apparent death. From the deathless.
AI image of Life’s Fleeting Nature: Kiba’s Poignant Jisei Death Poem
Mind itself is a vast expanse, the realm of unchanging space.
Its indeterminate display is the expanse of the magical expression of its responsiveness.
Everything is the adornment of basic space and nothing else.
Outwardly and inwardly, things proliferating and resolving are the dynamic energy of awakened mind.
Because this is nothing whatsoever yet arises as anything at all,
from The Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomenon – Longchen Rabjam (Longchenpa) Padma Publishing, 2001
Longchenpa
This amazing ‘is-ness’, so very hard to express in words, just so, just this way, just ….
How vast is mind, this spacious ‘nothingness’, which nurtures and embraces its myriad expressive displays.
So utterly pure, still and silent, endlessly vast, unborn and unchanging. Far beyond words, far beyond concepts, no wonder people say things like ‘god’, ‘shiva’, ‘self’, ‘brahman’, trying to say the unsayable.
Longchenpa points to the basic space – Dharmadhatu – the ‘realm’ which is the deepest nature of how life presents, of our mind, of experience. Utterly still and pure, untarnished and natural, so utterly beyond and transcendent.
When we open to this basic space, it is stunning in its purity, and remains utterly unperturbed by the magical display. Words can’t begin to capture how beyond it is. This field about which you really can’t say anything – why am I then trying and fumbling? As I write, all words fail, yet I write them nevertheless.
Yet there seems to ‘also’ be an endless display, what we call experience – for most of us how we know we are alive and so-called awake. Thoughts come and go, sensations come and go, emotions and feelings – arising and ceasing. An endless flow.
When the basic space is in view, this flow of life, of experience seems like a truly magical display, a magic show with irrepressible expression, coming from nowhere, nowhere when there, and nowhere when subsiding again. As Longchenpa says, proliferating and resolving, inwardly and out, just the dynamic energy or expression of awakened mind.
How marvelous this utterly still, pure, unchanging space expressing itself as an endless display, a conjuring trick of ungraspable expression!
How more wondrous still that the display is not different from the unchanging space, the space not different from the magical display! Nondual.
This Dharmadhatu is empty, so it can manifest as anything at all – empty yet full.
Yet what seems to appear is utterly groundless, utterly ungraspable, utterly beyond holding. Basic space adorned with its own nature. Shiva and Shakti.
Such a reasonable question – why does it endlessly express? Yet such a idiocy to ask!
Responsive, expressive, creative.
This entrancing dream which so often we are lost in, in illusions of self and other, of this and that, of now and then.
Dance on this magical display, where nothing really happens, where space plays as things appearing in time. My words utterly missing the mark.
