Two thirds my age, I’d say. She was coming out of the inner offices, to the public desk, after receiving the diagnosis. She has cancer and they’d be taking out (that was inaudible, to me), and some lymph nodes. She was distraught. She was shaking, and in tears. Her daughter was in shock. I held her, a stranger, in my heart.
Sitting there seeing all these people in the hospital – I found myself calling up a mantra, to keep me present for their pain. I wasn’t doing tonglen. There was metta, naturally. But most of all I just wanted, in the midst of the bustle, the cyclone of coming and going, in the presence of their pain and sorrow, and fear, I just wanted to really be there.
I found myself saying “Tayatha om muni muni maha muniye soha.” And, a great space just opened up. And the woman and her daughter came out of an office, nearby. Oh, my – she was so shaken.
In the Anguttara Nikāya, when Girimānanda is stricken, and might well die, the Nikāya Buddha reminds him of nine perceptions worth cultivating. One is (what I translate, in modern terms, as): the vulnerability of the body. A common translation of “ādīnava” is ‘danger.” ‘This body is a source of pain and danger.’ Well, that’s true, I suppose. But, it sounds a bit as though we could be body-hating, there. So, instead I translate it as: ‘This body is vulnerable.’
We have a much longer list of names, I’m sure, these days, than the Nikāya Buddha has for the ways the body can meet misfortune, yet the causes are fundamentally the same: our bodies fall ill from infections and disease, they’re wounded in conflict, damaged by accident or negligence, or stray from the norm in development. Nobody has any control over this vulnerability. If we could, wouldn’t we ask our bodies to co-operate with our desire to live a long, healthy life? We’d command: “This body will be without cancer, without wounds, without accidental damage, or mishap.”
This vulnerability makes sense of the place in the Attalakkhana Sutta, where the Nikāya Buddha says, “”Practitioners, form is non-self. Were form self, then this form would not lead into suffering, and one could control form: ‘Let my form be such and such a way; let my form not be such and such a way.’ And since form is non-self, so it leads into suffering, and no-one can control form: ‘Let my form be such and such a way, let my form not be such and such a way.'” Of course, she’s distraught!
It’s a great irony of this big life that bodies are sites for the creative life of cells, and that this unpleasant side we call ‘vulnerability’ is inevitable. One could wonder what the advantage of such a contemplation is, when one is in the throes of a life-threatening illness, as it seems Girimānanda is.
I can say that such a thought helped me when I got my cancer diagnosis. Because of this understanding of natural vulnerability, I didn’t have the particular kind of resistance, from which I would surely suffer, if I said: ‘This shouldn’t be happening to me.’ Truth is, it was happening. Where else was I going to be, but there for it?
And, sometimes it definitely shouldn’t be happening; for example, such as when we can link Monsanto’s ‘Roundup’ with cancer; or James Hardies’ practices to asbestos-related diseases in Australia (which we can in both cases).
However, whatever the fault of others in the situation, by perceiving the body’s vulnerability the sufferer has a chance to come home to the life process. This body is a local representative of the great life, in any and every condition; this body is in everything and everything in this body. It’s an odd comparison, but ‘for better or worse, in sickness and in heath’ this body is wedded to all the universe, here and elsewhere. So, right in the midst of peril, we can find the unimperilled (nirādīnava).
There are more fortunate ways to learn this, than to suffer a disease, for sure; but, because it’s true, it’s worth learning at any time, whatever the circumstance. Why? Because it brings a particular kind of peace, deeply – the peace of intimacy with the big what is.
No-one controls the natural process we call ‘body’ – no self, no mum, no dad, no government or religion, no gods or God in the sky. We don’t know when it will be, or what the cause will be, but we will die.
On the way up into this building, today, in the lift, an old man – much older than me – was going in, alone. He told us he was there for a hernia operation. An hour later, as we were leaving, I saw him sitting alone, and I went over and wished him well. He told me his operation was at 1:00. I hope he is alive and well, now. This body’s vulnerability is. It is happening, the big and intimate life.