Life, Death, and “Gone”

Life, Death, and “Gone”– we take life for grant­ed, putting off the work we need to do. And then, poof… we’re gone.

Our last trip to Nicaragua from Cos­ta Rica was on a love­ly bus. The trip went pret­ty well, but maybe an hour south of Grana­da we got stuck in a traf­fic jam. Turned out there’d been an accident.

We sat for about an hour, then inched past the crash. A trans­port truck was on its side; it stretched from the oth­er lane, over a ditch, and the cab was on its side in the tall grass.

Then… we passed a crumpled motorcycle.

Then, two “lumps,” each cov­ered over with a blan­ket. Clear­ly, the recent­ly deceased occu­pants of the crum­pled moto. Lump in throat time.

My head went to the con­clud­ing lines of the “Heart Sutra:”

Gate gate para­gate parasasam gate bod­hi svaha.

I first learned this mantra from Ram Dass, who used it to teach how to use a mala for chant­i­ng / meditation. 

Being a sutra, or a mantra, it defies easy trans­la­tion. But we’ll have a try at it anyway. 

Now, the tra­di­tion­al trans­la­tion of this short mantra has to do with enlight­en­ment, and how that plays out. You see that aspect in the word “bod­hi,” which means awak­en­ing or enlightenment.

The word that caught my atten­tion, how­ev­er, was gate.
Gate means “gone.”

I thought the “gone” part also might apply to the two lives snuffed out in an instant. Here, then gone. It puts anoth­er spin on the tra­di­tion­al translation.

OK, first, the traditional interpretation

The front end is pret­ty easy to trans­late. It’s the last two words that are a lit­tle tricky when com­bined. We’ve got bod­hi=enlighte­ment, or wak­ing up, cou­pled with the word sva­ha, which is col­lo­qui­al. Some­one trans­lat­ed the two words as: “Enlight­en­ment! Whoopee!” Here are two oth­er attempts at trans­lat­ing the mantra:

Edward Conze: Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone alto­geth­er beyond, O what an awak­en­ing, all hail!
The 14th Dalai Lama went with: Go, go, go beyond, go thor­ough­ly beyond, and estab­lish your­self in enlightenment.

The rest of the Heart Sutra, which I just might talk about soon, has a real “Here is how to live in the world as it actu­al­ly is” flavour to it. But let’s get real. 

And “real” is: life is as it is, and one aspect of life is that life is sim­ply the fore­run­ner to death.

The issue becomes: how do I live an enlight­ened life NOW? In this moment? How do I wake up NOW? 

Because each of us is the liv­ing, breath­ing being, while at the same time, each of us is a blan­ket-cov­ered lump on the side of the road. 

Try Conze’s trans­la­tion, above, with a slight­ly dif­fer­ent trans­la­tion in the con­text of the moment of death:

Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone alto­geth­er beyond, O what an awak­en­ing! Damn!

What an awakening, what a surprise, indeed!

We tend to act like humans instead of Bud­dhas (our true nature, the Bud­dha told us,) and one thing that sep­a­rates us from Bud­dha­hood is sim­ply this:

We plan on sort­ing things out “tomor­row.”

• “After I have wast­ed a lot of time feel­ing sor­ry for myself.”
• “After I find the right person.”
• “After… after… after.”

We are addict­ed to pain, sor­row, and espe­cial­ly addict­ed to think­ing we actu­al­ly have a tomor­row. Or even a next moment, see­ing that, in this instant, a metaphor­i­cal truck might crash in our path.

Gate, gate paragate parasasam gate bodhi svaha.
Gone. Gone. Really gone. Altogether gone. Oh what an awakening!

If only I’d not wast­ed my life and had instead done the work nec­es­sary.

Of course, I’m mak­ing no judge­ments about the peo­ple from the acci­dent.

I’m talk­ing about where my head went upon see­ing the acci­dent. I only want to say that they like­ly had­n’t planned on that par­tic­u­lar end­ing to their sto­ry. Had­n’t planned to be done so soon, to be gone so soon. It was just going to be a nor­mal, unevent­ful ride. 

Which reminds me of John Lennon’s line: “Life is what hap­pens to you while you’re busy mak­ing oth­er plans.” The “gate” mantra address­es this by sug­gest­ing that there is some­thing “beyond,” but it’s not in the heav­en sense. It’s going beyond the pet­ty mean­ness, the dra­mas we cre­ate, the “putting it off” stuff that is the basis of most of our days, me, of course, included.

It’s a beyond state that lets us see, right now, that the only moment we can completely engage with–the only moment we have to do our lives differently, is this one. With this breath, right now.

No wait­ing, no pity par­ties, no sleep­ing through the moment. No, “if only’s” no “shoul­da, woul­da coulda.”

Now. It’s far bet­ter, I think, to be gone now, before you’re gone… forever.

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