Living and Dying

Great Master Kassan Zenne (805–881) was a successor of Master Sensu Tokujō. At the suggestion of Master Dōgo Enchi, he visited Master Sensu and attained the truth under him.  Later he lived and taught on Mount Kassan. 

It is said that Master Jōzan Shinei, a successor of Master Isan Reiyū, once told Kassan,  

“Because in life and death there is no buddha, then it is not life and death.” Kassan replied, “Because in life and death there is buddha, then we are not deluded by life and death.”

Although the words “life” and “death” exist in all languages, Zen Master Dōgen taught that we are not able to understand intellectually what our life and death actually are, saying that their real meaning is embedded in our actual day-to-day life itself.  He described life and death as the real momentary state of the present moment.  In our daily life, life and death both exist in undivided wholeness.

Dōgen paraphrased Kassan's exchange with Jōzan by writing,

"Because there is buddha within living and dying, life and death do not exist. We can also say: Because in life and death there is no buddha, we are not deluded by living and dying."

Dōgen uses the phrase "living and dying" to refer to the ever-flowing, ever-changing conditions that have no permanency, and the phrase "life and death" to refer to the delusion of static, unchanging conditions that are created by the discriminating mind. So, by substitution, we can say, 

Because living and dying exists as ever-flowing, ever-changing conditions that have no permanency, life and death are not the static, unchanging conditions falsely perceived by the intellect.  We can also say that since the static, unchanging "life and death" perceived by the intellect is a delusion, we should be present with the ever-flowing, ever-changing conditions of impermanent living and dying.

However we conceive of life and death, they are just that - concepts, mental constructions, schema, samskara.  But real living and real dying are the actual experience of this very instant, this very moment, not the past of our memory or the future of our imagination.  In this moment, right now, life neither comes into existence not disappears, it's just here, as it is, thus.

It is a mistake, Dōgen taught, to think that we go from being alive to being dead. In the Genjō-kōan, he said that although firewood becomes ash and can never go back to being firewood again, we should not take the view that ash is its future and firewood is its past.  Remember, in the eternal here-and-now, firewood abides in the place of firewood and ash exists in the place of ash.  Although each has a past and a future, the past and the future are cut off in the eternal now. 

Similarly, human beings, after death, do not live again.  At the same time, it is an established custom in Buddhism not to say that life turns into death.  Instead, we speak of “no appearance.” How can something end that does not exist in the first place?  And in the Buddha’s very earliest teachings, he established that death does not turn into life. This is why we speak of “no disappearance.”  How can something exist that does not end? 

Life, then, is an instantaneous situation, that is, the state of this very instant, and death is also an instantaneous situation.  

Death

The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime.

You shuffle in the gloom of the sickroom and talk to yourself as you die.

Life is a short, warm moment and death is a long cold rest.

You get your chance to try in the twinkling of an eye: eighty years with luck or even less. 

- Pink Floyd

"Tomorrow when you're old and your mouth is paved with gold, you'll begin to feel the cold inside."

- Viv Stanshall

It goes without saying that we should consider the inevitability of death.  We should be resolved not to waste time and refrain from doing meaningless things. We should spend our time carrying out what is worth doing.

So we need to ask ourselves, among the things we do, which are really the most important? 

Death

Everything in the universe comes into being from other conditions.  When certain conditions come together, phenomena are manifested, and when those conditions are absent, the manifested phenomena ceases to exist.

We are no different.  When certain conditions come together, specifically a physical form, sensations, thought, a mental schema, and consciousness, our sense of an ego-self arises.  When any one of these conditions is absent, the ego-self is gone.

There's an easy way to test this hypothesis.  Find a comfortable place and sit there in an upright and alert posture. Breathe naturally, and perhaps watch your breath rise and fall for a few minutes.  Try to ignore the thoughts that arise in your head, but don't try to suppress them either.  Just let them go.  Eventually, you might find yourself entering into a state not of "not thinking," but of "non-thinking," the distinction being that thinking hasn't stopped but attention to thought has.  Of course, as soon as you recognize and identify this state, you're engaged in your thought again and have to start over.  But once the thought is gone, the mental constructs of thought fall away, including the concept of an "I."  To put it another way, when there is no more thinking, there is no thinker.

There's nothing at all mystical to this.  Try it.

An interesting conclusion that comes from this experiment is in the recognition that the self is not a permanent and abiding thing, but comes and goes according to conditions.  Bodies are born and bodies die, but there ultimately is no "self" that can be found that dies.  This does not mean that we don't mourn the loss of people that we've known and loved, or want to cling to life while we are still alive, but it does reassure us that, in the end (literally) there is no real loss of anything.