Cast a Cold Eye on Life, on Death

What I Don’t Know About Death by C.W. Huntington, Jr.  Wisdom Publications.  167 pp.  $16.95.  *****

This is how suddenly it can happen: in January of 2020, C.W. Huntington seemed to be in perfect health.  He and his wife had friends over to celebrate the new year, and after the celebration he doubled over with intestinal pain for perhaps half an hour.  He recovered eventually, but that moment was scary, and he continued to have intestinal distress in the days that followed.  Toward the end of the month, at his wife’s suggestion, he went to his doctor, who scheduled a sonogram, thinking he might have gallstones.  But a few hours after the procedure, the doctor called with dreadful news: there was a tumor on his pancreas, and it looked as if cancer might have spread to his liver.  Without treatment he had only two or three months to live.

One of the things that moved me most in his account was how utterly alone he felt: everything depended on him.  He had to find an oncologist by calling repeatedly for an appointment, get put on hold, listen to the insipid music, deal with people who were just doing their jobs but couldn’t accommodate him.  (Finally he said to one woman, “For you and the doctors this is just another day at work, another anonymous patient; but for me time is running out.  I’m dying!”).  He eventually got a doctor, and chose to go through the treatment, which was difficult and debilitating, and only did so much good.  He died early in July, six months after his diagnosis.

It doesn’t say anywhere that he wrote this entire book in those six months, but that’s my impression.  Really the book sums up of a lifetime of studying Buddhism and Eastern thought; he first got interested in college and studied Sanskrit while getting his PhD.  He says somewhere that Nagarjuna’s Verses of the Middle Way in Sanskrit was the greatest reading experience of his life.  He was a practitioner too, and wrote a novel about his quest, entitled Maya.  He’s a wonderful combination of practitioner, scholar, and superb writer.  This would be a marvelous book in any case, but when you consider the situation of its composition, it’s stunning.  I can’t praise it too much.

Huntington doesn’t just write about death (however one would do that) or his own situation.  He starts at the beginning, examining the life and death of the Buddha, and his most basic teaching, the Four Noble Truths.  (I sometimes think that’s his only teaching, that and the three marks of existence.  Everything else in Buddhism goes back to those things.)  He doesn’t gloss over the teachings, but examines them deeply.  I haven’t seen better explanations anywhere.

The other wonderful thing about Huntington is that he doesn’t (as do so many teachers) confine himself narrowly to Buddhist teachings.  He was an avid reader of all kinds of literature, and he’s as likely to quote Marilynne Robinson or Tolstoy as Dogen.  He’s even read such offbeat people as Douglas Harding.  His bibliography alone is a delight and an eye opener.

As much as I appreciated the early chapters on the Buddha’s teaching, it was when he got to the later chapters, and really cut loose, that I most enjoyed this book.  I bought it in the first place because I read his chapter on shunyata in Tricycle and thought it was the most fascinating article I’d ever read in that magazine.  He begins by talking about it as a mathematical symbol; the concept of zero was revolutionary when it was first formulated, and he knows the whole history.  But he also talks about the way mathematics help us understand the Buddhist doctrine, so that shunyata is simultaneously nothing and everything.  The concept is mind boggling.

He has a long chapter on “Waking Up,” comparing it, among other things, to falling asleep (you can prepare the way for falling asleep by doing all the right things, but the actual moment of conking out, like the moment of awakening, is something that you can’t do; it arrives by grace).  In “A Pathless Land,” he talks about the age-old conundrum of whether awakening is sudden or gradual.  He also faces the possibility—as most writers don’t—that there is no such thing.  There really is nothing to accomplish.  You can take the Heart Sutra literally.  Maybe Ryokan wasn’t kidding with his poem.

Too lazy to be ambitious

I let the world take care of itself

Ten days worth of rice in my bag;

A bundle of twigs by the fireplace.

Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?

Listening to the night rain on my roof,

I stretch out my legs and relax.

In the final chapter, “Letting Go,” Huntington talks about his own illness, not because he’s self-obsessed, but because it illustrates everything he’s been talking about.  A brief Epilogue tells the fact of his passing.

This is the kind of book that, in the past, would make me find contact information for the author and write him a long letter, but I can’t do that.  Instead I’ve written this piece that only suggests the book’s richness.  The subject is grim, and Huntington doesn’t hide that, but by facing it we discover the true beauty of life.

This book is one of a kind.