August
31, 2015
The Endless Further
Last February neurologist and
Awakenings author Oliver Sacks learned he had terminal
liver cancer. He shared this news with the world in an
op-ed piece in the New
York Times. I was moved by his thoughts about dying and I wrote
a blog
entry about it. As you may already be
aware, Sacks died Sunday. He was 82.
His cancer was metastatic, and I’ve read
that liver metastases is considered an absolute contraindication
for liver transplantation. However, it was treated. Sacks
stated in a
July 24 Times piece that
in February, the cancer was treated with embolization, a procedure
where substances are injected to try to block or reduce the blood
flow to cancer cells, and the metastasis was “wiped out.” But a
July 7 CT scan showed the metastases had regrown and spread beyond
the liver.
He’d started immunotherapy treatment,
but it was only to buy him time, and obviously it did not buy much
of it.
In an appraisal written for yesterday’s
edition of the Times,
Michiko Kakutani wrote
that in his work, Sacks cast light on the interconnectedness of
life. The interdependence of life is a well-known Buddhist
doctrine. There is, too, an interconnectedness of
death, as stated so well by John Donne:
any man’s death diminishes
me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Life and death are interconnected. What
Buddhism calls “the cycle of birth and death” is a continuum. Life
is the active phase and death is the passive phase. It is said that
the continuum of a human being, or more precisely consciousness, is
beginningless. As to whether it is endless or not, there are
divergent opinions.
From my perspective, finding myself in a
situation very similar to that of Sacks, beginningless and
endlessness are not so important. What matters most is the
indivisibility of life and death. Fear is one of the greatest
sources of anxiety, particularly fear of one’s own death. When we
realize the oneness of life and death, its interconnectedness, and
the emptiness of all things, there is, as the Heart Sutra says, no
fear and no illusion. This is wisdom and with this wisdom we enter
into nirvana, which is nothing more than this mundane world of life
and death.
That is from the ultimate truth. The
relative truth was stated by Sacks himself: “I cannot pretend I am
without fear.”
To my mind, “no fear” does not refer to
the absence of fear, but rather to how we handle fear. It
means the absence of anxiety, or better, winning out over the
anxiety that fear brings. It means facing even death with hope and
confidence.