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Struggling with Bankei's Comments about Grief being Bad Karma
Hey everyone, I've been reading "The Unborn: The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei" and have found it really inspiring. However, I've gotten to a passage that I'm really struggling with. It is possible that there are aspects of it that I don't fully understand, in which case I invite any further elucidation or education you may be able to offer, but it also may be that I just plain disagree with the points that he is making. The passage in question involved a "large number of grieving women" coming to see Bankei, many having lost their parents or their children. Bankei's response is "don't give any more time to grief. Cease it right now" as well as "since there's no way for the dead to return, don't give any more time to grief."
I'll quote the rest of the passage:
" Now you don't know it, but by grieving like this, you're actually creating a hindrance for the dead person. You all mourn your parents or children because you pity them. You believe that you're doing it for their sakes. But really, you're hurting them. For all your professions of pity, you're not really showing them pity, you're acting as if you had something against them. Well, if you do, then lamenting them is the right way to express it. But if you feel truly sorry for them, you should stop mourning. It's wrong for you to mourn them out of pity. You could do nothing more foolish than to go on like this, marching your minds around your grief day and night, lamenting the un-changeable, filling every thought with sadness and regret, uselessly pouring out endless tears, ruining your health in the process, oblivious to what others try to tell you. It's senseless. And don't forget, foolishness is the cause of an animal existence.
Were you to die in such a state of mind, it goes without saying that you'd fall, together with your parent or child, right into an animal existence. If that happens, you'll have to spend that existence fighting with one another constantly.
Each person comes into the world with nothing but the Buddha-mind his parents give him. When you turn this unborn Buddha-mind into a state of ignorance because of your parent or child, inwardly you're living as a first-rate animal. This is true during your own lifetime, but even after you die, you'll fall directly into an animal existence, where parent and child constantly fight tooth and nail among themselves. Now do you see anything praiseworthy in that? I'm sure you'll agree that it's absurd and deplorable beyond words.
Pay attention, then. It's natural for parents to feel compassion for their children and for children to be devoted to their parents, but if the child, by dying first, saddens his parents and causes them to grieve and become ignorant animals, can you call that filial piety? Do you imagine an unfilial child that dies, causing his parents to fall into an animal existence, is destined for a peaceful life in his future existence? Of course not. The outcome can be only one: Parent and child will fall together into the evil paths of existence.
If the parent allows himself to be overwhelmed by sorrow over what cannot be otherwise, and becomes deluded on account of his child, turning into an animal himself and sending the child he deeply loves into hell as well, can that be called parental love? No, it’s parental hate.”
My objections are as follows:
From my reading, it appears to me that Bankei is maligning a very natural and healthy process that human beings need to go through after the death of a loved one. Even if he is somehow referring to a specific form of grief rooted in pity (although this distinction is not clearly articulated in the set-up to the answer) then at the very least he is dangerously overstating his case by conflating ruminative grief with grief in general. Although he later states the danger of "grieving endlessly," he seems to cast a pretty general set of judgments around any expression of grief or mourning, which are processes that I believe and have witnessed to sometimes necessitate a long time to properly process.
Although I understand that karma is not a means of "justice" and that it does not operate "fairly," the effect of both parent and child being reborn as animals or in hell seems extremely disproportionate for the act of mourning one's dead loved one.
Bankei seems to imply a kind of karmic volition on the part of the deceased to do harm to their loved ones, or that the deceased are somehow responsible for the emotional reactions of their loved ones. I don't believe either of these things are accurate or healthy perspectives.
If anyone has any enlightening advice or feedback I am open to it. Again, my objections could very well be rooted in my own misunderstandings and I have found almost everything else Bankei says to be deeply wise. It is also possible that there are semantic nuances that are lost on me as I don't know the original Japanese language used to express such words as "grieving" or "mourning." Thanks in advance for your time and thoughts.
He’s describing the process of reincarnation in relation to excessive grief. Not condemning any kind of grieving. He points out that it’s natural for parents and children to have compassion for one another; this implies it’s natural to grieve. But that excessively grieving to the point that it ruins the rest of your life is actually the opposite of compassion. It leads to falling into the lower realms, and drags down those close to you as well.
It’s not that just by grieving, karma causes you to fall. It’s by becoming obsessed to the point of ruining your life, and those around you, that you cause your fall, and possibly the fall of the one you grieve. Best way I’ve heard it put is that the law of cause and effect is severe. What seems harmless, to an ignorant person, might land them in the greater hells for hundreds of millions of aeons.
The karma affects the deceased as well, because karma is something that affects many generations of people involved in your lives. It’s said that if one becomes enlightened, the last seven generations of loved ones are reborn in heaven. So i imagine it works the other way too. People who generate lots of bad karma drag others down too. It’s really a complex system, and one to be careful of.
a very natural and healthy process that human beings need to go through
That's a widespread belief, but I don't think there's much evidence for it. Bankei is reflecting long-standing Buddhist advice, here.
...the Blessed One said to him, “Enough, Ānanda. Don’t grieve. Don’t lament. Haven’t I already taught you the state of growing different with regard to all things dear & appealing, the state of becoming separate, the state of becoming otherwise? What else is there to expect? It’s impossible that one could forbid anything born, existent, fabricated, & subject to disintegration from disintegrating.”
When the Blessed One totally unbound, simultaneously with the total unbinding, some of the monks present who were not without passion wept, uplifting their arms. As if their feet were cut out from under them, they fell down and rolled back & forth, crying, “All too soon has the Blessed One totally unbound! All too soon has the One Well-Gone totally unbound! All too soon has the One with Eyes disappeared from the world!” But those monks who were free from passion acquiesced, mindful & alert: “Inconstant are fabrications. What else is there to expect?”
Then Ven. Anuruddha addressed the monks, “Enough, friends. Don’t grieve. Don’t lament. Hasn’t the Blessed One already taught the state of growing different with regard to all things dear & appealing, the state of becoming separate, the state of becoming otherwise? What else is there to expect? It’s impossible that one could forbid anything born, existent, fabricated, & subject to disintegration from disintegrating. The devatās, friends, are complaining.”
It does take on a very different context if it’s the Buddha telling this to his disciples who have dedicated their lives to seeing past delusion in contrast to a group of laypeople in active grief due to traumatic recent loss.
But that’s the point, that humans can become hopelessly lost in delusion and grasping and likely fall into lower births as a result, even when this is done in a a natural or innocent manner. If this was not the case, then no one would practice darmha. There would be no need to take refuge in the three jewels.
I have mixed feelings about this, when my grandmother passed and we were performing postmortem rites the monk told our family members to not cry, but if you absolutely had to then leave the room to do it. I still don't know what to make of that personally.
The stated reasoning is that the funeral isn't about you, it's about helping the decedent move along.
Plenty of other families also have their own anecdotes of relatives who are on the verge of death, but because the process takes so long they have a monk come in to find out why, and he'll then tell the family it's because the house is too lively and the person can't pass on in peace. The person then dies not long after everyone makes an effort to quiet down.
From my understanding,
It's mostly disparaging those people who would stall their life for months and years staring at a tomb physically or metaphorically. Isnt it ungrateful, unfilial to the parents who wished for their child's happiness? Grief is mostly a mental state and not a physical obstruction. So I guess a slightly less prickly translation of motives is 'hurry up and process it'.
Grief as a hinderence to the dead, yes there is also a chance that the dead would stick around out of worry for their child, miss the chance for reincarnation and thus get stuck as a ghost, a state of being worse than animals.
Indirectly, I suppose a more long term effect can be that too. If the griever does waste away then the deceased does have to accept some responsibility for it, thus the bad karma.
In general, your state of mind tends to influence what kind of karma will ripen first. Having been reborn for so long, it's good to assume you have all kinds of karmic seeds. So if you prepare all the conditions for, say, an animal, then you would really become an animal.
The way you put it does sound much more reasonable to me, if this is in fact what Bankei is saying. It just seemed to have been put in a very abrupt, confusing, and insensitive way to me when I read the original answer.
I think you should follow your intuition here, you sound like a compassionate person and that's always a good thing.
Also, on the topic of death of a relative, there is this story which is Buddhist in leaning, to be found on suttacentral: https://suttacentral.net/pv12/en/kiribathgoda?lang=en&reference=none&highlight=false
I agree with the teaching, I guess I just think that when it’s presented like this it seems counterproductively harsh and more likely to lead to repression or denial of emotion than acceptance of it and the ability to truly move on from grief.
As for #2, karma has never been "proportional", under any school of Buddhism.
"Monks, for anyone who says, 'In whatever way a person makes kamma, that is how it is experienced,' there is no living of the holy life, there is no opportunity for the right ending of stress. But for anyone who says, 'When a person makes kamma to be felt in such & such a way, that is how its result is experienced,' there is the living of the holy life, there is the opportunity for the right ending of stress.
"There is the case where a trifling evil deed done by a certain individual takes him to hell. There is the case where the very same sort of trifling deed done by another individual is experienced in the here & now, and for the most part barely appears for a moment.
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