Our Brother - Cher Hock

Life’s Humblest Moment

In the over 20 years of my faith in the Mystic Law, I have often come across guidance that allude to the ‘final victory’ or ‘winning in life’. Though I know what these phrases meant, I could not truly say I understand them. I have always tended to associate them to winning over the many existential challenges such as getting the coveted job; overcoming illnesses amongst others.

.When I received the phone call from my niece that he has suffered a sudden heart attack – many thoughts raced through my mind. It was the first time that it had happened to an immediate member of our family. We read or hear of deaths every time – we come across them in the newspapers, we hear of our friend’s and their friends dying of many causes. While we were sad, it remained someone else.

Only when it happened to your own dear and close one can you truly say you understand what a loss like that means. As I was involved intimately with the many events until his final rest, I found myself having to piece all the information up until his death to give my grieving family members comfort.

Seeing my brother deceased and on the hospital bed must count as my life’s most humbling moment – I witnessed the ultimate law in our existence – that of impermanence. For those moments as I wept and told him that he should rest while we commit to help him look after his family, all the human concerns meant nothing to me. All the riches in the world, the most intense arguments or quarrels one might have had with others, the most influential job or work that one aspire to be were meaningless to me.

Though he did not practice the Lotus Sutra, he knew about the chanting that my parents and we do at home. The only words that could come out of me was Nam-myo-ho-renge-kyo as I pray sincerely and earnestly that he has entered Buddhahood.

Hock had always been a responsible, cheerful and reticent person. He was a man of few words, preferring to show his emotions in his own small ways.

Hock is survived by his wife and four beautiful and lovely children. He also has a close-knit extended family – his parents, and 5 siblings of 4 brothers and 1 sister. As we grieve his loss, we found ourselves speculating and debating the many ‘what ifs’ or ‘what could have been’. He was a loving husband to his wife and a doting father to his kids. He took good care of his health – kept to his medication for his diabetes and exercised regularly while watching his diet.

He was a responsible man – precisely because he knew he had a family to look out for that he kept to quite a conscious regime of exercise and medication.

To those of us who knew him, we are comforted that he had lived a victorious life

In the Buddhist philosophy, life is eternal though our existence as we know it is impermanent. To borrow from a book I read entitled How We Die by Sherwin Nuland –

“…death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature’s ongoing rhythms. Even the confrontation with disease should be approached with the realization that many of the sicknesses of our species are simply conveyances for the inexorable journey by which each of us is returned to the same state of physical, and perhaps spiritual, nonexistence from which we emerged at conception. Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end.”

So what do we know – that life and death are permanent fixtures in this universe. It affects every phenomenon – from microcosms to humans to stars and galaxies. We also know that our karmic destiny is different from each other. Some are born poor, others rich, some are more fortunate in other aspects while the others are always struggling with different karma – of illnesses, financial or relationships and even careers.

As President Ikeda shared in guidance - “Our lives are ruled by impermanence. But simply realizing that changes nothing. There is no value in bleak pessimism. The challenge is how to create something of enduring value within the context of our impermanent lives. The Lotus Sutra teaches us to do this.”

We will always miss and remember him – but we must also celebrate his life. In the context of our Buddhist practice, – we must focus not on how he died but rather how he lived. We need to measure his life, not by how long or short it was, but by the values he had created and the impact he had on the lives of those around him. To us, we find great comfort knowing he had lived a fulfilling though some might say tough life.

He was the first in the family who stayed in a landed property; drove an MPV even before such cars was a craze in Singapore. He started his business and saw the ebbs and flows of the industry. He married and raised four sensible and beautiful children, three of whom have either completed or are doing their university education. His youngest child is also a sensible child who is doing well in school. His spouse is a good mother to their children and a pillar of support as well as a soul-mate to him.

He had always been kind to others – especially to us, his siblings and filial to his parents. I still remember when I lost my job in the early 90s, he found his own way to help me by giving me a big red packet during the lunar new year – because he did not want to compromise my pride by giving me a handout. Whenever we needed help to get some printing jobs done – name cards, letterheads and greeting cards etc, he would volunteer to do for us without expecting payment. The last time he printed for me was my EQ brochures and he even delivered to me personally.

For quite a period, he visited our parents weekly – though he had a very busy schedule of watching over operations and doing business development for his company.

With hindsight, we could not have wished for a fitting finish to his life – though we would have wanted for him to live to a ripe old age and go on to achieve even more – but our span in this existence is the working of our karma and the mystic law. His death was peaceful – his expression was serene. In the words of my mother, he looked rested as if in sleep. From piecing the information leading to his demise, the only pain he suffered must be the chest pains.

Hock’s passing made us think a lot about our own lives. They make us reaffirm our faith in the mystic law and to do the things that truly matter to us – and more importantly to show love and care towards our dear ones. We should commit ourselves to do more for kosen-rufu – to share the greatness of this philosophy with others and show more compassion to our fellow human beings.