Death at the Rubin

The weekend before Fourth of July, my mom and I traveled from Nashville to New York City to go to an exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art and see two wind telephones. I wasn’t feeling well, so the wind telephones didn’t happen, but the Rubin more than made up for it.

The main exhibition until January is Death Is Not the End, a comparison of Tibetan Buddhism and Christian art depicting the afterlife. Because I’m Buddhist and my mom is Christian, this was of great interest to us. Both of us felt that the exhibit was incredibly well-done and respectful of both religions. My mom was an art history major and was so impressed with the collection. She also became obsessed with what the Tibetan paintings used to still look so vibrant after hundreds of years, but they just said ‘pigment’ - we found out later that the Tibetans used ground-up semiprecious stones to make the pigments, so they’re less likely to fade!

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to write blogs and educational pages based on the Rubin’s magazine, Spiral. The current issue is about death, dying, and various kinds of bereavement, so it’s perfect.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Howard Kaplan’s contribution, ‘Spiritual First Responder’ on page 9:

‘He [Swami Sarvapriyanda] spoke about a chapter in the Bhagavad Gita that references changes and transitions in life, from childhood to youth to maturity to old age, followed by death and a new life, as akin to shedding old clothes and putting on new clothes, showing that death is the end of the physical body but not of the spiritual being.’