Dying – The Universal Game of the Divine

By Br. Aadi

“The Sannyasin is to love death. …We must die, that is certain; let us die then for a good cause. Let all our actions -- eating, drinking, and everything that we do -- tend towards the sacrifice of our self." – Swami Vivekananda (Sannyasa – Its Ideal and Practice, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Vol III)

I arrived at the cremation of one senior Sannyasi in Belur Math, just as the fire was beginning to tickle the air. At the same moment it began to rain. We brahmacharins sat under a tarp roof and watched the fire grow as the rain poured down heavily. Slowly, yet rapidly, the fire worked at the pyre. I thought of the transience of the physical body as the logs crumbled, and simultaneously thoughts of the immortality of the Soul arose as I saw the flames ascending towards subtler regions and listened to the nice Bengali devotional music. We all gathered around the pyre with a large bucket of ghee and with a blissful solemnity poured in giant spoonfuls to the beatific and powerful chanting of “Hari Om Ramakrishna.” When the brahmacharins got their turn with the 10-foot ladle, they all piled on and could barely avoid spilling everything for enthusiasm and poor coordination. Soon the Swami in the form of fire had finished his meal.

By the north side of the pyre the grass had turned to mud under the feet of the monastics who were attending to the fire, and I was standing next to it and brothers who had cremation duty were in the mud next to me. In no time, some of the brothers were armed with mud and menacingly came towards us who had been watching from under the tarp. A brother, who was my first assailant and was swaggering towards me muttering my name in the funny way he sometimes does. I got away for the moment but only for another brother to chase me down and smack a big muddy handprint on my back. I knew the mud was going to take a lot of scrubbing to come out, but on the other hand that mud printed on my back was a symbol of a life divinised by sacrifice.

Whether we know it or not, renunciation is bearing down on all of us in the form of death like a brother with a handful of funeral mud. So, better to love death and to grow even through death by understanding our whole life-death affair as an attempt to sacrifice our little life to participate in the universal game of the Divine.

Then with full enthusiasm we can start dying even now – just by acknowledging that living and dying is an ongoing game; it ends – what a stupidity to down a cyanide pill and locking lust and greed in the garage with the car running!