Today I would like to share a beautiful reflection on death by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, who recently laid down his mortal body. The text is titled A Kaleidoscope.
“As a child, I loved playing with a kaleidoscope that I made myself from a tube and a few small pieces of glass.
When I turned the tube, wondrous patterns and colours appeared.
Each time I made a small movement of my hand, one image vanished and another emerged.
I did not cry when the first disappeared, for I knew that nothing was lost — another beautiful vision always followed.When we look into a kaleidoscope, we see a beautiful, symmetrical image; and when we turn it, that image disappears.
Can we call that birth and death?
Or is the image simply a manifestation?
One manifestation follows another, equally beautiful — nothing is ever lost.I have seen people die very peacefully, with a smile, because they understood that birth and death are only waves on the surface of the ocean, not the ocean itself, just as the lovely images in the kaleidoscope are not the kaleidoscope itself.
There is no birth and no death.
There is only continuation.”
(from Thich Nhat Hanh, My Life Is My Teaching, O.W. Barth)