The Rawness of Grief

All Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Venerable Master, Dharma Masters, wise teachers, and Dharma friends: good evening. My name is Thao Amanda Phi. This fall I began my third year of work with Dharma Realm Buddhist University as a staff member and my first semester as a graduate student at the University of San Francisco. I could not find more joy in what I do than working in and studying higher education. 

As I was preparing this talk, I realized that tonight marks exactly one year to date since I moved to Ukiah. It is unfathomable how much can happen in a single year. This past year has been one of great transition for me. Not just transition but transformation. I find myself almost unrecognizable from a year ago. If you asked me where I thought I would be today, I would not have said “speaking in the Buddha Hall”, but I am so grateful to still be here.

The last time I spoke in the Buddha hall was this past March. It had been eleven years since the first time I spoke in the Buddha Hall in 2004, shortly after my mother passed away. I spoke about how it had taken those eleven years for me to properly and fully heal because I didn’t know how to process death as a child. Without fully realizing it, it affected me into my adulthood, but I was able to confront the trauma head-on when I moved back last fall.

After I gave my last Dharma talk, I truly felt things had come full circle. I spent so many years talking about my mom’s death and finally felt like that part of my life was healed. I was ready to move forward and close that chapter on talking about the experience. I remember thinking to myself that I would have nothing else to give talks on anymore.

In retrospect, I feel both naïve and foolish for thinking that. Of course death would occur again. Death is inevitable, but sometimes we lose sight of that. 

“The fact [is] that we are all born to die. This is a large part of the stimulation of serious entry into the spiritual life. Not just for Buddhism but for all religions. And not just for all religions but for almost everything in life. How we deal with this really determines what our life's about. You're either going to deal with it directly and wrestle with it. Or you can go into denial. Either way, it's a response to this. This is why it's called the one great matter. Nobody avoids this.”

There’s a universal sadness when anyone passes away, but it becomes further removed depending on how close you are with this person. The closer you are to the person who passes away, the greater the magnitude of the impact. These are things I knew too well as a child who lost her mom and would only continue to see others pass away as I grew older. 

Some are confronted earlier, some later, but eventually we all encounter death in some regard. If not our own, then someone else’s. We fall somewhere on the spectrum of either recoiling or being resilient. Both paths bring struggle, but one brings more insight. It is very easy to mold misfortune into bitterness and cynicism; you can lose your way, lose your spirit, and never fully recover. However, it is in our most broken moments that we may be humbled and opened. As we pull the fragmented pieces back together, we can discover a clearer sense of purpose for life. While extremely difficult and many times painful, I’ve made the conscious choice to remain open and find strength in vulnerability.

“Often it's when someone who is very close to you passes away that you have that moment of possible breakthrough. There are two moments that Buddhists recognize as possible moments of profound insight. The natural awakening process from your self-cultivation that is internally driven by this curiosity to be liberated. That's the positive one. But often the illusory attachments that we form are so deep and so gripping that sometimes it takes a really profound event to cause us to momentarily stop. We can almost break our hold. And often that's when someone very, very close to us passes away.”

The tragedy of the human condition is not simply that we all must die but rather that we choose to live by illusions. Death provides the platform for us to see through these illusions, and the death of someone close makes this illusion fall away in an immediate way. Losing my mom at such a young age was a profound lesson for me. The loss of the most important person in my life, the person who brought me into this world, drove me to search for answers to questions I wasn’t even sure of. 

I would later learn that it was not about looking outside of myself but rather looking within to find I already had the answers I was searching for. That was difficult to grasp when I was 12, but by 24 I felt confident that I had learned and shared all I possibly could from the experience.

I shared my previous Dharma talk with a close friend, and he gave a response that was similar to what I heard from others. He told me he didn’t know I had so much I was still working through, but he was glad to hear of my progress.

I had no idea that same friend would unexpectedly die over the summer. When I learned about his death, I felt the illusion come crashing down all over again. I was absolutely devastated. There are approximately 7 billion people in the world, but suddenly there was no more of him. My whole world felt shattered and diminished by the loss of one person. 

His death triggered the very things I thought I had just healed from. His passing had uncanny similarities to how my mother died – leaving Ukiah, on the way home, and an unexpected car accident. I saw the community and my mom’s Dharma friends come together to help our family during this difficult time. I couldn’t believe I was witnessing it yet again but this time with the next generation of Buddhists.

Not only did I feel foolish but that I should’ve been more humble. Six months ago I was giving my Dharma talk about my mom’s passing and how much I learned from it. I sat up here and told the assembly the following words that I still stand by, that the only way to end grief is to go through it. There is nothing else to do but go through the experience – to feel the sadness, feel the grief, let it rise, and let it go.

I felt so strong in my resolve six months ago, and here I am in one of the most fragile states I have ever been in, knowing very well and deeply believing in what I previously said about the experience and condition of grieving.

I could sit here and tell you the obvious things we know as Buddhists. That everything is impermanent. That it is part of the human condition to suffer. That we must be diligent in our cultivation because it is certain we too will pass, but it is uncertain when that time will come. 

All of these things are true, and I believe in them wholeheartedly. As cultivators, these are the principles we constantly wrestle with on our path to liberation from this mundane existence marked by suffering. I really thought I had a decent understanding of these teachings through my mom’s passing. But take heed; anytime you think you’ve gotten a grasp of anything, that too is an illusion that will just as quickly slip away.

There’s a verse in The Platform Sutra about teaching in accord with contexts and conditions:

“If you hope to teach and transform others,
You yourself must have skillful means;
Do not raise doubts in others
And their essential nature will manifest by itself.”

A wise teacher must use skillful means to adapt teachings to the person and conditions. The nature of dharma is that it is given when it’s appropriate and timely. The common analogy I’ve heard is comparing dharma to giving medicine to the ill; it is not medicine unless prescribed precisely to that person’s ailment and conditions.

If you are not speaking to the individual’s conditions, you are not speaking to them. And frankly, I am not at that state. The profound teachings about death, impermanence, and tireless cultivation do not wholly address my current conditions – that despite these things holding true, I am still a human; I am still grieving and going to through the pain and suffering of losing someone close to me.

He was a role model, a mentor, and most importantly – a Dharma friend. Surely, there is more to learn from an unexpected passing of someone so dear beyond just that we should practice more.

One of my favorite Buddhist passages comes from the Upaddha Sutta about the importance of Kalyanamitra, or spiritual friendships:

Ananda said to Shakyamuni Buddha, "This is half of the spiritual path: admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie.”

Shakyamuni Buddha responded to Ananda: "Don't say that, Ananda. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the spiritual path. When [one] has admirable people as friends, companions, and comrades, he can be expected to develop and pursue the noble eightfold path.”

 Spiritual friendships are so precious. It is so easy to overlook that when you live and work among a community like this, but please do not underestimate the importance of supporting each other on the spiritual path, in whatever form that may take. 

As a Dharma friend to many, we wanted to support him on his path forward. Many gathered to recite for him the first 49 days, and I even copied the entire Earth Store Sutra by hand. His family and friends wanted to support him and in turn, his passing enabled us to be more diligent and resolute in our own practice. And what a noble friendship that is – to have been on the spiritual path alongside someone who was able to do enough groundwork that lead to so much goodness beyond his time on this earth. On the other end, those of us who are still here must remain steadfast in supporting each other as well.

Moreover, there is the importance of looking within. Anything that happens in our world can be looked at as a mirror, reflecting back onto ourselves. When death occurs, it is a reflection of where we are going. It is from reflecting that we can learn the most. An unexpected death causes us to stop, slow down, and re-evaluate how we relate to our causes and conditions from here on forth.

Recently, two teachers spoke about karma and repentance. The concept that resonated with me the most was about purging the ugly things that we bury deep down inside us. The things that pain us the most, that we want to hide away and forget because it is too overwhelming to look at. But it is these very things that we must examine. We must purge the darkest depths of our suffering, bring it out, and be honest about it.

Sometimes people have so much pain inside them that they’re not even aware of it. Be aware – do not repress it; do not get taken over by it.

When I moved up here last fall, I was told that being here forces you to work through your layers. You are working through the same things but a different layer of it. You encounter the same battles over and over again, but each time a layer of dust is removed and there is a little more light shed upon that same matter.

One of the most difficult things I am learning from this is how things do not fit into a timeframe or linear path. Much like our own cultivation, we must be proactive in our efforts and cannot expect to be awakened after a certain period of time. We must be mindful every single moment. Some moments will be progress; some will feel like regression. But the point is not to give up. Keep going.