Does mortality make life meaningful?

The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi; the cover of his recent book Running Toward Mystery: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life. PICs/IMONK.org

Between the world's richest, swimming in pursuit of money, that's morphed into a metaphor, to the poorest, brutally struggling for survival - and all shades of 'making a living' in between - life could be a robust distraction from death itself. Just as art is a distraction from life.

Not that one needs a series of celebrity/family/suicide/COVID deaths in a year to become aware of one's mortality. Still, could the fact of people, in 2020, across the world, sitting helplessly at home, observing deaths of co-passengers - watching them casually pass on, the way life usually passes by, have a universally transformative effect on humans, per se?

No way for me to know, so I asked the Buddhist 'young monk', The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, if he had a view on this. "It has brought us closer to the idea of mortality in a way that we couldn't have experienced [before]," Venerable suggests, adding, that's a good thing.

"Humans are rare species aware of mortality. It's remarkable what that self-awareness can do," he says. Pointing, chiefly, to how it lends meaning to moments: "If this was your last day, imagine the gravity of words you'd say to someone; or if it was the last time they were meeting you - we might actually become kinder, more honest, and caring individuals, by that simple reflection.

"If people thought about death more often, perhaps they would engage less in the meaninglessness of things, which sometimes could be an entertaining/wonderful pastime. But a vivid experience, that moments are actually fleeting, adds a level of seriousness to life. It doesn't mean you lose sense of humour/fun - just that you begin to enrich every aspect, knowing that this could be the last day."

Like that famous Sartre line, no? "Do you think I count the days? There is only one day left. Always starting over. It is given to us, at dawn. And taken away from us, at dusk."

India-born Venerable also marks a distinction between how eastern and western cultures funereally respond to death. While the Hindu ritual is loudly ceremonial, in-your-face, often walking the talk on the street - "it's a very raw experience, bringing it to closer to nature, by way of the cycle of life and death; what happens oftentimes in the West is the cosmetic cover around death. There are open caskets, yes, but the body you look at, with layers of makeup, wearing a three-piece suit or beautiful dress, takes away from the aspect that this chapter is coming to an end."

Or as his late friend, Catholic monk Thomas Keating, used to say, "Death has a very negative PR in the West!" Not that there is any right or wrong way to deal with the passing on of a loved one. It's way too personal. So have individual responses been to the totalitarian spectre of corona - a microscopic virus, beating mighty humans, each of whom has different threshold levels of how they must physically/mentally deal with this new 'paranormal'.

A common plight though has been a "sense of loneliness and alienation that people have experienced," Venerable points out: "If we discovered solitude [as a result]; understood the beauty of human connection, that we'd taken for granted; thought about the true essentials of our lives… Hopefully, if these were the learnings, we won't go back to the mechanical rut."

Eternal optimist, polymath monk, Venerable, who runs the Dalai Lama Centre for Ethics and Transformative Values at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has written this lovely memoir, Running Toward Mystery, which lives up to its subtitle: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life. Most of all when he deals with a realm that's beyond the polarising binary of rational and irrational - having run away from boarding school, at age 10, quite literally, chasing a visual dream, to land right on it.

My conversation with him - about going from "cynical to clinical"; the importance of inter-spiritual dialogue; acknowledgement of church-state separation as a farce; and organised religion being another human weapon for power and greed - took place for Jaipur Literature Festival, in Colorado, while I'm in Bombay, and he's in California! COVID-19, of course, explains this. It's 7 pm for him, and a punishing 8 am for me.

Which only leads me to inquire if religion and philosophy, let alone Buddhism, has anything to say about 'morning people' and 'night people', while never the twain meet: "That's individual preference.

Doesn't matter when you sleep - so long as you're not sleep-deprived, which is a major issue of our times. As a society, we haven't been as sleep-deprived as over the last 50-60 years!"

Whatever your wonky patterns/cycles, hopefully, you slept enough in 2020. As for when you were up, I don't know a better exchange than between Charlie Brown and Snoopy: "Some day we will die, Snoopy!" "True, but on all the other days, we will not."

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper