The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
Question: My respect to Venerable. Recently, my son told me that he donates his whole body for research purposes which means after he dies, they will harvest his organs and won’t return the body to the family.
As a parent, I don’t know who will go first. In case that he dies first, what can I do for him without a body, and a funeral?
Than Ajahn: Well, if he donates his body, then his body will be given to whoever he donated to, right? If he donates it to the Red Cross, when he dies, you just call the Red Cross and they will pick up his body so that they can harvest the organs. After that, they could return the body for a funeral service.
You can still have a funeral because whether you have the dead body with you in the funeral or not doesn’t matter. You have to understand what a funeral is for. The purpose of having a funeral is to get rid of the dead body. In Buddhism, we also encourage people to take this opportunity to make merit for the person who died and for yourself. But most importantly, the merit is for yourself because most of the merits you make belong to you, you can only share a small part of it for the deceased. So, this is basically about a funeral. You can do it whether you have the dead body in the casket or not, because when you close the casket, nobody knows whether there’s a body in there or not.
Actually, if he donates his body away, then you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to have a funeral if you don’t want to because the purpose of a funeral is to get rid of the dead body. If somebody takes that responsibility away from you, then you don’t have to do anything.
But if you believe in making merit, in rebirth, you can do some charity, and share the merit from doing that charity for the deceased. You don’t have to have a funeral. You can just donate some money to whichever charity you like, for example, make donation to temples, hospitals, schools, etc. So, really!
There is no need to have a funeral if there is no dead body to get rid of, right? Like in the case of a plane crash where the rescuers couldn’t recover the body, what would you do?
But due to your ignorance, you still want to do funeral because you don’t know what a funeral is for. You think that a funeral is done for the deceased, and whether you have the dead body or not, you still have to do a funeral. It might also due to social tradition in which you have to tell everybody that this person has died and you have cremated the body or buried it. That’s about it as far as a funeral is concerned: it’s to get rid of the dead body.
In the Buddha’s time, people just wrapped the dead body up in a cloth and left the body in a cemetery to rot and to let the animals feast on the dead body. And monks used to go to the cemetery.
First, to collect the cloth that wrapped the body which was how monks got their cloth materials to make robes because in the Buddha’s time, nobody gave robes to monks, so monks had to make their own robes. They had to find the materials for the robes, so they went to the cemetery where the clothes were left on the dead body and no one wanted to pick them up.
Second, the Buddha used the corpses to teach Dhamma to monks, ‘Life is impermanent.’ The body is just the composition of the 4 elements, the body is just the 32 parts. Once the body stops functioning, it returns back to the 4 elements: this is the Dhamma teaching. Sometimes, you have to go see the real thing to be able to have an impact in your mind. If you just hear about it, in a few minutes, you’ll forget it. If you see it with your eyes, it can stick with you longer. So, this is the purpose of going to cemetery.
In modern days, according to Buddhism, going to a funeral is to teach the mind the same thing.
Now, you don’t go to a cemetery, you go to funeral services so you can reflect and say, ‘This man used to be with me yesterday, but now he’s no longer with me, so will my body, it’s the same thing. Today I’m here but tomorrow I’ll be gone also.’ When you teach this to your mind, then your mind can become more knowledgeable and can loosen its grip on the body, its attachment to the body.
It might also lessen the stress on living because a lot of stress arise from fear of death. People don’t want to die but as you look at the dead people in the funerals, then you’d say, ‘This is something unavoidable.
Sooner or later, it’s gonna get to me. I’m gonna be next.’ So, if you can learn and accept this truth, you might let go of your attachment to your body or at least, resist the thought of not wanting to die. If you can get rid of this thought and be willing to die, there will be no stress in your mind. You can live happily while you’re still living and die happily when you die. So, this is the purpose of a funeral.
Layperson: Thank you.
“Dhamma in English, Jun 7, 2019.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
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