The Five Remembrances (and the Buddha’s Overprotective Parent)

I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit on Wednesday, September 25, 2024. I recording follows.

I thought we’d reflect on the Five Remembrances briefly this morning:

This verse, the Five Remembrances, is part of a discourse attributed to the Buddha that’s titled “Subjects of Contemplation.” The Buddha wanted us to actively contemplate old age, illness, death, and loss.

I must admit I found this verse rather stark and arresting the first time I chanted it. Pow! Well, there it is. It seems Buddhism doesn’t sugar coat things.

This verse made Buddhism seem so very different than other religions and wisdom traditions. Why this strong emphasis on human fragility and contingency?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Siddhartha Gautama was a prince whose father apparently went to great lengths to make his life extra pleasant—to the point of insulating him as much as possible from the realities of old age, illness, and death.

As some of you have heard me say recently, Buddhism begins with overprotective parenting. I wonder whether Buddhism even would exist if it weren’t for the Siddhartha’s father’s well intended but overreaching efforts to insulate his son from life’s harsh realities. It seems that left Siddhartha even more haunted by them.

Most of us have existential questions. Most of us experience angst about old age, sickness, and death as we become aware of them. There are modest efforts to deflect our attention from them in our culture—certainly more so than in some others—but nothing like what Siddhartha is said to have experienced. I remember attending open casket wakes and funerals growing up as a Catholic. More and more people today seek hospice care at home, breathing their last breath with loved ones who will continue to inhabit one’s place of departure.

And yet many of us still divert our attention from the realities of old age, illness, and death much of the time. No tradition other than Buddhism seems quite so determined to remind us of them.

In the sutra that contains the Five Remembrances, the Buddha explains why he offered them. He recognized that life is change and that unrealistic attachment to youth, health, the things and people dear to us, and life itself produces suffering. He hoped to help us shed those attachments.

But why include the fifth remembrance about our deeds being the ground on which we stand? Well, our suffering isn’t just about losing youth, health, life, and what and who is dear to us. It’s also about how being overly identified with conditions we especiaqlly like diminishes our appreciation of life and contentment when those conditions aren’t present. 

How are we thinking about and responding to whatever is arising? Are we grasping for what seems attractive and pushing away what’s not? How we think, speak, and act in response to our contingent experience determines the quality of our own life and affects the quality of others’ experience.

The Buddha likened himself to a lion and his teachings to a lion’s roar on those rare occasions when he spoke of himself in relation to other teachers of his era and to their teachings. As you’ll know if you’ve ever seen one in the wild, a lion’s presence pacifies all other beings across vast space.

Here’s what the contemporary Buddhist teacher Tara Brach says about all this:

“We typically think of our happiness as dependent on certain good things happening. In the Buddhist tradition, the word sukha is used to describe the deepest type of happiness that is independent of what is happening. It has to do with a kind of faith, a kind of trust that our heart can be with whatever comes our way. It gives us a confidence that is sometimes described as the lion’s roar. It’s the confidence that allows us to say, `No matter what life presents me, I can work with it.’ When that confidence is there, we take incredible joy in the moments of our lives. We are free to live life fully rather than resist and back off from a threat we perceive to be around the corner.”

Experiencing that “deepest type of happiness” is what Buddhism’s constant reminders of our vulnerability, and of how much our orientation and response to it matters, is all about.