Monday Morning Greetings 2024 #39 – Embrace and Love Death
Dhanurdhara Swami September 23rd, 2024
I am fascinated with monastic communities. I recently watched a short documentary about one.[1] Mount Athos is a somewhat inaccessible mountain on the Athos peninsula in northeastern Greece governed as an autonomous region by a community of twenty monasteries and various small and single occupancy hermitages. The architecture of the monasteries is beautiful, and the art decorating them and stored there is priceless. They feature, however, a more traditional monastic life as compared to my more modern and social preaching life as a Hindu monk (sannyāsī). I was impressed and humbled in many ways as I learned about them. I thought it must be so peaceful to just completely leave everything of the world. Could I be so renounced? Maybe one day I can also chuck it all in and just retire completely to Govardhan. Would Śrīla Prabhupāda approve? I’m not sure. But certainly, I could do much better in my renunciation.
I remembered an interview in the documentary with one very educated American born monk, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, who in his interview talked about how his loving father in the USA on his deathbed requested to see him for one last time. He hadn’t seen him in twenty-seven years. This monk never went, never even thought for a second of going, and was completely unmoved about it. It seemed to me so heartless. I felt for his father. He explained it, however, philosophically. His eternal relationship is with God, all others are temporary. Okay, he’s a traditional monk who left the world with faith in God. Isn’t that what traditional monks do?
What really hit me was another interview with a monk who revealed the “mantra” which all the two thousand monastics living there accept as their mission statement: “Embrace and love death.” They see death as their ticket to heaven and their lives as monks as paying the price of that ticket. That “mantra” really struck me.
When I heard that phrase, I felt some relief, but why? I don’t obsess excessively about death, and my vision is usually philosophical and optimistic. Maybe I still have some lingering fear of death, and the monk shared the phrase with such conviction that it gave me hope to transcend it.
A monk looks at death in a different way. For him real death is not the death of the body, but the death of the false ego, the illusory conception of enjoyer and controller. The consequent attachment with the body is the vehicle to fulfill one’s illusion. Monkhood therefore means practicing death by a fully renounced life. Therefore, instead of living according to the dictates of the body, the monk leaves the world to facilitate a life of the eternal soul fully surrendered to God’s will.
The bhaktas don’t have to leave the world to be renounced. Their renunciation is giving up those things that have no value in serving God. That doesn’t discount the benefit of living and striving for a life more unencumbered by social and economic restraints. And there is a need for one in my order of monkhood (sannyāsa), to be an exemplar of a simple and renounced life. In that sense, I admire the monastics of Mount Athos and strive also to fully embrace and love death. Isn’t that our philosophy?
“My dear King, if you want to be fearless in meeting your death next week (for actually everyone is afraid at the point of death), then you must immediately begin the process of hearing and chanting and remembering God.” (Nectar of Devotion, Chapter 2)[2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mXl8C4-M_4
[2] This quote by Śukadeva Gosvāmī is paraphrased in the Nectar fo Devotion. If anyone knows where the verse from the Bhāgavatam is located please write us.
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