A ligkaribe Article - on death

This is harder than one may think, blogging -: when you know there really is no one listening, but I guess I have the experience to stand me in good stead. I have steadily kept a private journal for some years now, I’m not an exact person but I must have started when I was sixteen or so. I really do it for myself mostly; I want to be able to read all this stuff especially when I’m older I think it should give me a kick. In my experience I can sometimes go for months on end without bothering with a new entry, its better that way in the long run. With this site I’m trying hard not to just throw in any crap that just happens to be running through my head at a time. Its not easy, to try and make the needed effort, but its fun and worth it eventually.


In today’s environment we have a situation were death is all around us in fact some of us live with it on a daily basis. We breathe it, we walk it, we think of it in the mornings and before we go to sleep. I think to face death in the eye is the bravest thing that any of us can do, it is also the hardest. There seems to me nothing that any person can ever say to make a difference. Here I have tried to look at perspectives on death from a number of different cultures, beliefs and philosophies. With a hope to maybe destroying the power that it has on us.

It is expressed by Mariama Ba, a Senegalese writer as “the tenancy passage between two opposite worlds, one tumultuous, the other still.” Africans have always believed in the existence of our ancestors, that we do not die but we carry on looking over our descendants and their coming and going. “Death is a privilege…because it is neither final nor the treacherous villain that some men have made it out to be” Sly Cheney Coker-Sierra Leonean writer. I do think Africa is the one culture in the world that seriously goes about the business of talking to our departed ancestors and making them our gods; most other cultures do not actively practice this belief:

“The dead are not dead
are not down in the earth
They are in the trembling trees
In the groaning woods
In the water that runs
In the water that sleeps
They are in the hut
They are in the crowd
The dead are not dead”
{Birago Dio[ Senegalease poet}

Slowly the muddy pool becomes a river
Slowly my mother’s disease becomes death
When wood breaks it can be repaired
But ivory breaks forever
An egg falls to reveal a messy secret
My mother went and carried her secret along
She has gone far
We look for her in vain
But when you see the kob antelope on the way to the farm
When you see the kob antelope on the way to the river
Leave your arrows in the quiver
And let the dead depart in peace.
{Yoruba, Nigerian funeral song}

The day we die the wind comes
To wipe us out, the traces of our footsteps
The wind creates dust which covers
The traces that were where we had walked
{Bushmen, Botswana, poem}

Return to the hut and search no more
You will not find him in the reeds or tree
Kemo, kemo, he is not there,
His campfire burns now among the stars
{Ovamba, Angolan funeral song}

And Swahili poet, Shaaban Robert says of his departed wife Amina,
“Amina you have withdrawn yourself, like a flower you have closed.”

Japanese people have a tradition of writing death poems when they are about to pass away:
i.e. a poem that was ostensibly written by a kamikaze pilot before his passing
the wild cherry blossoms of
Yamato
when they fall
may dazzle even heaven
{Yamato (poetic name for Japan)}
These poems I find are very touching and in a way comforting, in their acceptance of death and celebration of a life lived.

and here is a story about our inevitable appointment with death:
The legend of the appointment in Samarrah, has never failed to captivate me:
A servant overheard in the market place that death was looking for him – he raced home and told his master he must flee to the neighboring town to Samarrah so that death would not find him.

After supper that night there was a knock upon the door. The master opened it and saw death standing upon the threshold, in his long black robes and hood.

Death inquired after the servant.

“He is ill in bed,” lied the master hastily, “he is too sick to be disturbed”

“That’s odd “responded death, “then he is surely in the wrong place, for I had an appointment with him tonight at midnight – in Sammarrah.”

This story has never really failed to really bring home to me the issue of our impermanency and its inevitability,

One follower of Buddha said this
“Thinking makes good and bad, life and death,
And without thinking there is no universe,
No Buddha, no dharma.
All is one and this one is empty”

Is this really about death, or is it more about non death, is it that death is a reality of our existence or is it that death exists in our mind? The followers of Zen Buddhism believe in the existence of the divine in all human beings, all of us have the Buddha nature we must only realize it through enlightenment. They believe that in this state of enlightenment one goes beyond even the existence of death.

I will present you with two more death poems:
Sixty six times these eyes have beheld
The changing scene of autumn
I have said enough about moonlight
Ask no more,
Only listen to the voice of pine cedars
When no wind stairs

For sixty six years I lived as best I could
Making my way in this world.
Now the rain has ended,
The clouds are clearing
The blue sky has a full moon
Both these last two were written by a Buddhist nun.

An ill student of Zen was advised as follows:
The essence of your mind is not born,
So it will never die.
It is not an existence which is perishable.
It is not an emptiness, which is a mere void
It has neither color nor form
It enjoys no pleasure and suffers no pains
I know you are very ill
Like a good Zen student you are facing that
Sickness squarely.
You may not know exactly who is suffering,
But question yourself.
What is the essence of mind?
Think only of this, you will need no more.
Covet nothing,
Your end which is endless is as a snowflake
Dissolving in pure air

Another student just before passing away received a visit from his master
Master-: “shall I lead you on?”

Student-: “I came here alone and I go alone.
What help could you be to me?”

Master-: “if you think you really come and go
This is your delusion.
Let me show you the path on which
There is no coming and no going?”

With these words the master had revealed the path so clearly the student smiled and passed away.

And we shall end with yet another story:

Zen master Hoshin lived in China many years. He then returned to the north eastern part of Japan, where he taught his disciples. When he was getting very old he told them the story he had heard in Ching.

One year on the 25tth of December, Tokufu who was very old said to his disciples.” I am not going to be alive next year so you fellows should treat me well this year”
The pupils thought he was joking, but since he was a great hearted teacher each of them in turn treated him to a feast on succeeding days of the departing year”

On the eve of the New Year Tokufu concluded “you have all been good to me. I shall leave tomorrow afternoon when the snow has stopped”

The disciple’s laughed thinking he was aging and talking nonsense since the night was clear and without snow. But at midnight snow began to fall, and the next day they did not find their teacher about. They went to the meditation hall there he had passed on.

Hoshini told his disciples it is not necessary for a Zen master to predict his passing but if he really wishes to do so he can.”

“Can you?” someone asked.

“Yes” he answered “I will show you what I can do seven days from now”

None of the disciples believed him and most had even forgotten when he called them together.

“Seven days ago”, he remarked “I said I was going to leave you. It is customary to write a farewell poem but I am neither a poet nor calligrapher. Let one of you inscribe my last words”

He dictated

“I came from brilliancy
And return to brilliancy
What is this?”

The poem was one line short of the customary four, so a disciple said:
“Master you are one line short.”

Hoshin with a roar of a conquering lion shouted “kaa!” and was gone.

By Rekopantshwe Kgomo
“And to each of us God has sent our own personal angels, so that if we are ever to know the true meaning of love we may experience it first through these beings, these beings are called mothers, do you love your mother? Endeavour to treat all beings as though they were your mother.”



What am I saying here, I speak of death, I have faced death on some occasions before I remember the first time I was in a car accident, my first lucid thought was if this is what I was born into I would rather have never been born. I was 23 at the time, and shaken to the core. I cried like a mad woman, I have to admit. I was literally bowling at the top of my voice. Not because I was hurt but because I was quite shaken. I only remembered the accident itself much later; it occurred to me that had I died that time I would not have known that I had died. For all that it left me with a lesser fear of my own immortality. I realized that worrying about the issue is pointless. “death is the thing that makes life even more worthwhile, one is never more alive than in the moment of death.”

My only fear now is not death itself, but what I will do between now and then?

The second time around was when a fellow African brother decided to pull a knife on me, I screamed and screamed like I have never done before, I didn’t even know I had it in me to scream so much. I was puzzled afterwards by the look of shock on his face when I started screaming but I later realized that, he had probably never heard anyone scream so loud before either. The brother had bad intentions, but on that night things did not quite go in his favor so to speak.

I like my evening walks, on one occasion, I was listening to the radio at the same time, and they were talking about the genocide in Rwanda. I remember feeling a great and huge presence of evil. It was so much that it was almost suffocating me, not the kind that a simple person such as me can even confront. I was even hesitant to cross the road in spite of the fact that there were no cars at the time. I eventually did, as I walked I felt the slightest of sensations on my right shoulder. I ignored this as it was illogical that there was anything there, this happened twice, I was too busy keeping an eye on my fellow pedestrians. The third time it was my left shoulder I decided this time to look, and there he was behind me coming so fast, and ahead of me the white van just by the bus stop. It was right by the junction of the stop to the road, and as I was walking by the edge of the road I would have had to pass by it. I moved faster and went in a different direction on the road side and as I turned back he was saying something but I couldn’t hear because of my ear phones. He got in the van and they sped of just as I was passing it on the opposite side, only then did I realize that he was with the van.

I truly believe an angel saved me that night, the thing about it is that its never expected is it one time on my way to the dojo I realized there was someone behind me in the shadows, luckily I found two people already inside what would have happened if I’d been number one that day? On another occasion we were walking back, three of us tall grass, no street lights and suddenly the ground right in front became two people sitting on the edge of the grass. We were walking in rural style, with a few feet en us, and guess what just like me I was bringing up the rear. The thing is whoever was in front couldn’t worn us because it was already too late by the time they saw them. They never said a thing nor moved a muscle, we never said a thing either. It was really jarring though.

One thing I know is that it is unexpected always, and it is certain always.