The Monk Talks: How Understanding Death Teaches Us To Care
(Alvin’s Note: Our dear fellow Life Coach, and passionate personal development extraodinaire, Paiboon Busayarak, has embarked on a 3 month initiation into Buddhist monkhood in his native Thailand. He just sent me this post via email sharing the conversations he’s had with his teacher. The words are his, the grammer tweaking is mine 
Enjoy!)
The death of a friend or of a loved one changes our life forever. Even the deaths of those we don’t know, such as the thousands who died in the Tsunami at the end of last year, alters the way we think. Death is a fact of life and, when understood, teaches us how to care.
Many years ago in Thailand, my teacher, Ajahn Chah, raised his ceramic mug.
“See this!”, he told us, “It has got a crack in it.”
The monks looked closely at the cup but could see no crack.
“The crack is invisible now”, Ajahn Chah continued, “but it is there. One day someone will drop this mug and the crack will appear and split my cup apart. That is its destiny.”
“But if my mug were made out of plastic”, explained the teacher, “then it would have no invisible crack. You could drop it, knock it or kick it, and it wouldn’t break. If it were plastic and unbreakable, then you could be heedless. But because my mug is fragile, for that reason you must take care!”
“In the same way”, Ajahn Chah began to emphasize, “your body has a crack in it. The crack is invisible now, but it is there. it is called your future death. One day there will be an accident, a disease of old age, the ‘crack’ will appear and you will die. That is your destiny.”
“But if your life lasted forever”, Ajahn Chah concluded, “if your body were unbreakable like a plastic mug, then you could be heedless. So it is because our life is fragile, because we know that we will die, that is the reason why we must care!”
Understanding death teaches us to care, for ourselves and all other beings.
Thank you for the article, Alvin. That’s beautiful.
Hi Alvin, just wanted to introduce my self. I think I found my way over here from Andrew Wee’s blog, but I could be wrong. I absolutely love what and how you wrote about this experience in Thailand. Very inspiring. I never even thought about what meditations could really do until I recently listen to the audio book of “Autobiography of a Yogi” which I really enjoyed. Thanks again for this post. I look forward to reading more in the future.
Thanks guys, I’m glad you found my post of value
I can’t wait to try Vipassana meditation myself. Meditation for me consists of me doing Yoga for twenty minutes then Shavasana for ten. I need to step up my meditation to a new level.
Thanks for the push!
Are you still anticipating in Vipassana every now and then? I do it everyday now, makes my life much smoother than before. Glad to see people who actually care for the goods of others