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The Buddha Meets Ötzi
Posted on September 12, 2003 in Anthropology Book of Days Myths & Mysticism
Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.
Today’s topic: In a cemetery.
People buy tombstones and embalming in denial of impermanence. The latter preserves only long enough for a few days worth of viewing. The former lasts longer, the length depending on the type of stone you choose. Marbles, limestones, and slates deteriorate relatively quickly; acid rains make them look like melted ice cream even faster. The best stuff, I am told, is industrial granite, which lasts for a few centuries before the lettering on your stone becomes unreadable. Even this, however, wears away under the elements.
Denial of death is a major theme in contemporary human culture. We want at all costs to feel immortality, that this impassioned mazurka of consciousness will endure. We see the soul somehow partible from the body — either it goes on to another plane of existence, jumps into a new body, or lingers around as a ghost. We want always to be and always to have been. We will be and we have been, but not in the way that we think.
Taking a walk in a cemetery with the Buddha, I think, would give us a different sense of what death and continuity are all about. The place I’d really love to visit with him is the cryogenic crypt where they keep Ötzi the Ice Man. I can imagine the Light of Asia peering through the tiny window into the stainless steel chamber where Ötzi is entombed. Undoubtably, he’d be fascinated by the sight and with the exhibits that accompany the corpse. He’d advidly follow the reports stemming from the tissue sampling which was performed during a dethawing in September 2000. And I think he wouldn’t resist using our Bronze Age friend as an illustration of how he perceived existence.
“Who is that?” he’d say, pointing through the window.
“That’s Ötzi,” we’d probably answer.
“No,” he would say. “Is a person the sum of his parts? Of course not. We haven’t a clue who that is. Ötzi is a term of convenience that we use to designate this particular collection of petrified sinew and bones. Who he was and what he was doing up on that glacier cannot be known by us because it happened many centuries ago and there are no survivors to tell us. What was the person who we called Ötzi is both here and not here. There is no person there and yet there is Ötzi. You give it a name and a history, speak of it in familiar terms in part because it is convenient for things to have names and, in part, because you fear the disintegration that comes at death. Ouml;tzi is yet another sign of your false belief of the immortality of the self. I say unto you that this identity you hold to be constant changes and in time will cease to deny its separateness. In death, the spirit lets go of the illusion that it exists apart from the world.”
He would smile as we reflected on what he said. “You know that Ötzi cannot possibly last another five thousand years, even with this technology.” He’d let us think about that, allow us to wonder if the shiver that went up and down our spines was due to his words or our proximity to Ötzi’s tank.
“Did you see the other exhibits?” he’d announce suddenly. “Here are a pair of what we have called for want of a better word ‘socks’. Funny — not even the shape of our clothes last. And yet something carries on in spite of everything.”
Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.
Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: There’s a bar in Austin, Texas called “Jake’s Place”.
