When Sadness Rages Like Fire

 

08.14.2020 WHEN SADNESS RAGES LIKE FIRE In the Fall 2020 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly, Pema Khandro Rinpoche tells the life story of the great Tibetan yogi, Shabkar, whose practice and teachings were inseparable from loss and grief. Shabkar was no stranger to grief, having experienced immense loss, sadness, and pain throughout his spiritual awakening. However, his grief didn’t shut him down completely. Instead, as Pema Khandro Rinpoche writes, “the sorrow and loss he felt fostered a raw and openhearted compassion toward others.”   None of us are strangers to grief in these times of great loss and upheaval. Thankfully, there’s a wealth of Buddhist wisdom to help us navigate it. Below, you’ll find the story of Shabkar, alongside two other teachings from the pages of Buddhadharma on working with grief. They each teach us grief can become a gateway to compassion, love, and tenderness.  As Pema Khandro Rinpoche writes in “When Sadness Rages Like Fire”: “However many losses we go through, there remain many people who are suffering and need to be loved.” —Lilly Greenblatt, digital editor, LionsRoar.com

Here at the End of the World “Grief is how we love in the face of loss,” wrote Joan Sutherland in the Fall 2019 issue of Buddhadharma. Now, in this new time of so much loss, her teaching on coming to terms with grief feels especially relevant. Grief is a buddha. Not something to learn lessons from but the way it is sometimes, the spirit and body of a season in the world, a season of the heart–mind. Grief is a buddha, joy is a buddha, anger is a buddha, peace is a buddha. In the koans, we’re meant to become intimate with all the buddhas — to climb into them, let them climb into us, burn them for warmth, make love with them, kill them, find one sitting in the center of the house. You’re not meant to cure the grief buddha, nor it you. You’re meant to find out what it is to be part of a season of your heart–mind, a season in the world, that has been stained and dyed by grief, made holy by grief.

When Sadness Rages Like Fire Pema Khandro Rinpoche shares the life of the Tibetan yogi Shabkar, whose practice and teachings were inseparable from loss and grief. Sometimes, we cannot give love to the one we wish to give it to. Maybe that person can’t receive it, or maybe they have passed away by the time we have the love to give. Other times we may try to give love and it falls on deaf ears. Sometimes it is not safe to love a person directly. But grief opens us to much tenderness and love, and we can give that love to someone else, even if it is only with our lost one’s memory in our heart. In doing so, we can also dedicate the merit of our altruism and compassion to the loved one we wish we could have given it to. There is satisfaction in this.

Calling on Jizo In Japan, Jizo Bodhisattva is the “guardian of children who have died.” Zen priest and grief counselor Dojin Sarah Emerson recalls how the Jizo Ceremony helped after the death of her daughter. The archetypal qualities that Jizo embodies — fearlessness, protection, and fierce love — are the qualities we call on when invoking Jizo in the ceremony; they are also the very same qualities we call forth in ourselves whenever we turn fully toward the complexity of our grief. The Jizo ceremony is, among other things, simply time carved out in busy lives to spend with grief. In the face of loss, just showing up for the ceremony requires a kind of fearlessness that is challenging in our predominantly death-denying culture. To do this in a room of people who have also made this choice forms a kind of collective courage, mirrored, infused, and bolstered by Jizo’s presence and fearlessness.

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