An old Buddhist saying one finds in the literature goes something like this, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” A rather shocking directive. But, when the dreaming tree dies, do we remember the tree, or the dream? What remains in the aftermath of the collision of being and nothingness? Somewhere, there is becoming beyond the meaningless nothingness of the things we see daily. Perhaps that is the reason for the emphasis on the now. But we wait for what dreams may come all the while our trees die and what may become fades in the wind. Is all that’s left the excremental remains of existence? Do we live in a universe defined by our hopes, or do we live in a shitiverse of selfish ambition and hatefulness? A choice stands between the dark and the light. Between hope and despair, we must become the possibilities we are over and against the forces that would tear us apart. To kill the Buddha is to let go of the things that would hold us in a world of selfishness, to free us to a world that may be.
We drink the wine of remembrance for the fallen, but the fallen do not return. And what purpose remembrance? To what end do we recall the fall of others in the stream of time? In the deep time of thought, we remember those whose words have left profound impacts on the ways we see the world in its manifestations. In the shallow time of experience, we remember those we have lost because our hearts hurt and we need to believe in the substance of our existences. To invest in the life of an other is to desire a return, usually the love of the other. When they leave us, a void opens and in the question lies the remnant of our days: what was our love for one another? Did it have meaning? What is meaning in the void of a universe driven by selfishness?
Sacrifices made for a greater good can be world-changing, but if we focus on the sacrifice, we forget the greater good and the world goes back to the way it was. The dreaming tree dies when the heart and soul of our loved-ones leave us too soon. They usually do not sacrifice themselves for us, but in their death there is a kind of sacrifice, a forgoing of suffering that spares the living. It is a world-changing loss as sacrifice and those of us who live bear the burden of relief. The sacrifice of the dying becomes the burden of the living, unless we understand that all things that come to be must pass away. Nothing is forever and all loss is a sacrifice to the living. That is our burden. It is the dialectic of life and death.
If the thought transcends the thinker, why glorify the thinker. Anyone could have been the conduit for the thought. The buddha sat beneath the bodhi tree and attained enlightenment. We sit beneath the dreaming tree and search for a life of meaning, a life full of becoming. Being is static and always negated by Nothingness. What is left is becoming, the dynamic lacuna between the monolithic “that which is” and the “that which is not.” In the end, being and nothingness are chimera that distract us from living in the moment. All of our lives make up the richness of existence, a richness Being cannot equal. In contrast, nothingness is negated by our actions in a world we create. What remains is the variety of living in the now. This is not a positive everything-is-beautiful moment, but an acknowledgement that our lives have meaning in the richness of their experience. It isn’t always good, both experientially and morally. But it is the life we have.
All of this comes to the point that we live in a world of forgetting. If we do not forget, we are burdened with suffering of infinite proportions. We must forget. In forgetting we let go the suffering of others and of ourselves. We acknowledge the coming to be and the passing away of all that is. Forgetting allows us to move forward. Forgetting is not disrespect or diminution of loss and sacrifice. Forgetting is the beginning of living beyond the now of suffering. Forgetting is the birth of tomorrow.