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TEACHINGS | EASTERN HORIZON 11

My own past self, that young, healthy student, This story gives me two possible ways of relating to
attempted to understand the relationships among time: a clear view into a known future and a conditional
buddhas. My focus was entirely upon those past, view that can’t tell me anything in absolute terms. I
present, and future buddhas. I wasn’t much interested want an unconditional declaration of my future with
in what was happening to all the ordinary people in cancer. In my illness I want my own prediction. I want
the crowd around them. Experiencing this story now, to know where I stand now in the timeframe of my
my illness brings me into the crowd, a crowd of people, own life. I want the clarity of a definitive prognosis, not
who, like me, know that their present is limited and the foggy, groggy prognostication of statistical tables.
perilously uncertain. I don’t want to pine for the possibility of a new clinical
trial opening up in time that might extend my life,
Rereading this story with my now-shaky grasp of time, should I meet the necessary conditions for that trial.
I view it from a different perspective. I no longer read The future that I live toward is infinitesimal compared
it from above with a spotlight on the bodhisattva’s to the temporal frame of this Buddhist story. I’m not
aspiration for the future and the buddha’s prediction hoping for a geological leap across millions of years
that time will absolutely unfold precisely as foretold. A in time. I desire to know: will I live for six months or
clear prediction of my remaining time, I had thought, seventeen? For a year or for years? How many? I want
would make my diagnosis and prognosis bearable. to know for certain what this cancer was going to take
As I moved through the stages of treatment, I began away from me and when. I want what I cannot know.
to rethink the purpose of the prediction stories that I There is something important in my not-knowing. The
studied for so long. They were not only for the sake of impermanence and interconnectedness of time is real.
the bodhisattvas who receive them. They were intended Really real. My cancer makes me see it, deal with it, live
also for those following behind the exalted beings on with it, grow and transform with it.
the path, those people in the crowd who would be
reassured by a known future, one in which a buddha This excerpt from Stored Companions by Karen Derris,
would be present to care for them. ©2021 by Karen Derris, is reprinted by permission of
Wisdom Publications, www.wisdomexperience.org. EH

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