The Fear of
Death is not an instinct: it is a reaction of the animal who is
conscious enough to become aware of himself and his
inevitable fate; so it is something we have learned.
But exactly what is it we have learned? Is the
dilemma of life-confronting-death an objective fact
we just see, or is this, too, something constructed
and projected, more like an unconscious game that
each of us is playing with himself? According to
Buddhism, life-against-death is a delusive way of
thinking it is dualistic: the denial of being dead
is how the Ego affirms itself as being alive; so it
is the act by which the Ego constitutes itself. To
be self-conscious is to be conscious of oneself, to
grasp oneself, as being alive. (Despite all their
struggles to keep from dying, other animals do not
dread death, because they are not aware of
themselves as alive.) Then death terror is not
something the Ego has, it is what the
Ego IS. This
fits well with the Buddhist claim that the Ego-self
is not a thing, not what I really am, but a mental
construction. Anxiety is generated by identifying
with this fiction for the simple reason that I do
not know and cannot know what this thing that I
supposedly am is. This is why the "shadow" of the
sense-of-self will inevitable be a sense-of-lack.
Now we see what the Ego is composed of: death
terror. The irony here is that the death terror
which is the Ego defends only itself. Everything
outside is what the ego IS terrified of, but what is
inside? Fear is the inside, and that makes
everything else the outside. The tragicomedy is that
the self-protection this generates is
self-defeating, for the barriers we erect to defend
the Ego also reinforce our suspicion that there is
indeed something lacking in our innermost sanctum
which needs protection. And if it turns out that
what is innermost is so weak because it
is...nothing, then no amount of protection will ever
be felt to be enough and we shall end up trying to
extend our control to the very bounds of the
universe.
If, however, the Ego is constituted by such a dualistic way of thinking, it means that an Ego can die without physical death and without consciousness coming to an end.
What makes this more than idle
speculation is that there is ample testimony to the
possibility of such Ego death:
- No one gets so much of God as the man who is completely dead. (St. Gregory)
- The Kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dead. (Eckhart)
- We are in a world of generation and death,
and this world we must cast off. (William Blake)
- Your glory lies where you cease to exist. (Ramana Maharshi):
"All of a sudden, he was seized by a chill of
Fear. He felt he was almost dying by an all encompassing Fear of Death. Trying to prevent this feeling from weakening him, he began to think of what he should do. He said to himself:
"'Now death is approaching. I am dying. What is death? This body gets lost.'
"Then he held his breath completely, closed his lips and eyes, lay down as one dead, and began to ponder:
"'Now my body is dead. They will carry this body, motionless, to the cremation ground and burn it. But do I really die with this body? Am I merely this body? My body is now motionless. But still I know my name. I remember my parents, uncles, brothers, friends and all others. It means that I have a knowledge of my individuality. If so, the "I" in me is not merely my body; it is a deathless spirit.'
"Thus, as in a flash, a new realization came to Venkataramana. His thoughts may seem boyish fancy. But one thing must be remembered. Usually a man wins God realization by performing tapas for years and years, without food and sleep; he subjects the body to great suffering. But Venkataramana won the highest knowledge without all these. The fear of death left him. Venkataramana became the
Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi."
- Your glory lies where you cease to exist. (Ramana Maharshi):
A moving example of death and resurrection is of
course one of the sources of Western culture; but
examples are found in many religious traditions. The
problem is demythologizing these myths, extracting
the core of psychological and spiritual truth from
the accretions of dogma and superstition that all
too often obscure their meaning, in order for that
truth to spring to life again within our myth--the
technical, objectifying language of modern science
(in this instance, psychology). Blake's quotation
(from The Vision of the Last Judgment) points the
way because it implies that we are not seeing
clearly but projecting when we perceive the world in
terms of the dualistic categories of birth and
death.
Precisely that claim is central to the Buddhist
tradition. "Why was I born if it wasn't forever?"
bemoaned Ionesco; the answer is in the anaatman "no
self" doctrine, according to which we cannot die
because we were never born. Anaatma is the "middle
way" between the extremes of eternalism (the self
survives death) and annihilationism (the self is
destroyed at death). Buddhism resolves the problem
of life-and-death by deconstructing it. The
evaporation of this dualistic way of thinking
reveals what is prior to it. There are many names
for this "prior," but it is surely significant that
one of the most common is "the unborn."
In the Pali Canon, what are perhaps the two most
famous descriptions of Nirvna both refer to "the
unborn," where "neither this world nor the other,
nor coming, going, or standing, neither death nor
birth, nor sense objects are to be found."
"There is, O monks, an unborn, an unbecome, an unmade, an unconditioned; if, O monks, there were not here this unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, there would not here be an escape from the born, the become, the made, the conditioned. But because there is an unborn,...therefore there is an escape from the born...."
Similar claims are common in Mahayana scriptures
and commentaries. The most important term in
Mahayana is Sunyata, "Emptiness, " and the
adjectives most used to explain Sunyata are
"unborn, " "uncreated, " and "unproduced." The
best-known Mahayana scripture, The Heart
Sutra, explains that all things are Sunya because
they are "not created, not annihilated, not impure,
and not pure, not increasing and not decreasing."
This is echoed by Nagarjuna in the preface to his MMK,
Muula Madhyamaka Kaarikaas, which uses Eight Negations
to describe the true nature of things: they do not
die and are not born they do not cease to be and are
not eternal, they are not the same and are not
different, they do not come and do not go.
Moving from India to China, we read in the "Song
of Enlightenment" of Yung-chia, a disciple of Hui-neng, the
Sixth Patriarch of Zen, : "Since I abruptly realized
the unborn, I have had no reason for joy or sorrow
at any honor or disgrace." That "all things are
perfectly resolved in the Unborn" was the great
realization and later the central teaching of the
seventeenth-century Japanese Zen master Bankei:
"When you dwell in the Unborn itself, you're
dwelling at the very wellhead of Buddhas and
patriarchs." The Unborn is the Buddha-mind, and this
Buddha-mind is beyond living and dying.
These passages (many more could be added) are
important because, although it may not be clear what
"the unborn" refers to, in each case it is an
immediate experience that is being described (or at
least claimed) , rather than a philosophical
conjecture about the nature of reality. For a case
which combines personal experience with
philosophical acumen, we shall turn to Japan's
foremost Zen master and philosopher, Dogen:
"For Buddhism, the dualism between life and death is only one instance of a more general problem, dualistic thinking. Why is dualistic thinking a problem? We differentiate between good and evil, success and failure, life and death, and so forth because we want to keep the one and reject the other. But we cannot have one without the other because they are interdependent: affirming one half also maintains the other. Living a "pure" life thus requires a preoccupation with impurity, and our hope for success will be proportional to our fear of failure. We discriminate between life and death in order to affirm one and deny the other, and, as we have seen, our tragedy lies in the paradox that these two opposites are so interdependent: there is no life without death and--what we are more likely to overlook--there is no death without life. This means our problem is not death but life-and-death."
At issue are the boundaries of the Self as a
symbolized entity. There is a clear sense
of the relationship between awareness of death and a
delineated Self. The second is impossible without
the first. Even prior to the disturbing syllogism,
"If death exists, then I will die," there is an
earlier one: "Since 'I' was born and will die, 'I'
must exist."
If we can realize that there is no
delineated Ego-self which is alive now, the problem
of life-and-death is solved. And such is the
Buddhist goal: to experience that which cannot die
because it was never born.
If our minds have created this dualism, they should be able to un-create or deconstruct it.
This is not a devious intellectual
trick which claims to solve the problem logically,
while leaving our anguish as deep as before. The
examples above make it clear that we are referring
to an experience, not some conceptual understanding.
It can be no coincidence that the praj~naapaaramitaa
scriptures of Mahayana also repeatedly emphasize
that there are no sentient beings.
The following are two views of venerated Masters regarding the Ego and any death thereof:
From AZIZ KRISTOF, a non-traditional Advaita-Zen Master:
Enlightenment does not annihilate the ego. Why would someone want to annihilate something so useful and extraordinary? It has not been by chance that we have mentioned many times how important the mind and ego are as the creative force of our intelligence. We need to dissolve this dangerous spiritual conditioning that has taken deep root in our habitual way of thinking. Irresponsible psychological language has caused a lot of harm to those on the Path. The ego concept needs to be defined in a way that relates to our everyday experience, and to all those complicated processes in meditation and on the spiritual Path.
In the case of people without insight into the nature of consciousness, the mental activity is in the center of consciousness. Every thought creates a new center, a new identification which is the ego -- there is nothing else there. We cannot talk about “one” ego but rather about a flow of conscious or semi-conscious events, being capable of operating in a relatively integrated way. This is the function of the ego.
When Enlightenment takes place, the Presence becomes the center, and there is the feeling that all the thoughts are only witnessed objects-events on the periphery of consciousness; they are guests coming and going, having nothing to do with the stillness of our being. For that reason, it is easy to conclude that there is only Witnessing, and the rest is irrelevant, impersonal and objective. But this popular conclusion is one-dimensional and is not able to grasp the dynamics of human consciousness. Thoughts are being witnessed and observed. The center is empty and uninvolved. Is that all? Not fully. Although the thoughts are witnessed, the intelligence which is using them represents also a parallel center of relative consciousness - it is also the “Me.”
We can speak about two centers within us, as manifested beings: one is the Witnessing Consciousness -- a constant flow of presence, and the second is the moving self-conscious center of our personality. When we see this clearly, there is no doubt that the thoughts, which are being witnessed, are simultaneously an indivisible part of Me, and it is Me who is thinking them! In the case of an Enlightened being, although thoughts have a different quality, still they remain as a function of consciousness and as a functional self-relating center, which we interpret as “me.” The absolute Me and the relative me are one. Being and self-conscious expression are one.
The ego concept refers not only to the gross level of
thinking or to the gross will. We have already spoken about
the fact that to divide our consciousness into thinking and not-thinking
is far too simplistic. Consciousness is extraordinarily rich.
There is intuitive knowing, feeling, gentle checking and being attentive
to what is happening in our consciousness and surroundings. This
movement of intelligence has a quality of self-referral which is also what
we call -- the ego. The personality without Presence is ignorance of
course, but Presence without the personality is like a tree without fruit,
the sun without rays or a flower without fragrance. They are one
organic whole. When we fully understand that ego is “good,” the
whole issue of eliminating it drops off by itself. But this is not
yet the end. We are coming now to the next complicated problem: what
kind of ego should we have?
From the book Here Lies the Heart in a written response to the book's author
Mercedes Da Acosta, from the Enlightened sage Sri Ramana Maharshi:
Bhagavan was asked many times about his egoless state. He explained it and said, "The Gnani (the Enlightened) continually enjoys uninterrupted, transcendental experience, keeping his inner attention always on the Source, in spite of the apparent existence of the ego, which the ignorant imagine to be real. This apparent ego is harmless; it is like the skeleton of a burnt rope--though it has form, it is of no use to tie anything with."
RECOUNTING A YOUNG BOY'S NEARLY INSTANT TRANSFORMATION INTO THE ABSOLUTE DURING HIS ONLY DARSHAN WITH THE MAHARSHI
SEE:
ANATTA: THE CONCEPT OF NO-SELF IN BUDDHISM
Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.
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David Loy is a tenured professor in the Faculty of International Studies at Bunkyo University in Chagasaki, Japan. Dr. Loy has also served as a Senior Tutor in the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore from 1978 to 1984. Dr. Loy received his BA degree from Carleton College in Northfield , Minnesota, and his MA in Asian Philosophy from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, Hawaii. Dr. Loy then pursued his PhD in Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. Dr. Loy undertook a Zen journey in 1971 that included attending a sesshin with Yamada Koun-Roshi in Honolulu, Hawaii. Dr. Loy then moved to Kamakura in 1985 to continue Koan study, and in 1987 he completed the formal course of Koan study and was recognized as a Zen sensei. His most recent publications include A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack (2002) and The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory forthcoming in June 2003. Dr. Loy also sits on the editorial boards of Cultural Dynamics, Worldviews, Contemporary Buddhism, and the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. BIO EXCERPT PROVIDED THROUGH THE COURTESY OF: I was found by a onetime bottom-of-the-line GI everybody called "the Cat" (a play on his name). The Cat, who went on eventually to receive a bronze star, was a former or to-be 1st Air Cav medic on TDY doing routine corpse duty when he came across my partially unzipped body bag. In the process of closing the bag we BOTH somehow discovered I most likely no longer fell into the specifically dead catagory. Months later he told me that sometimes shift workers, when they find that a person has died on their shift, will put the body in the shower and let hot or warm water run on them --- sometimes for hours --- then, just before they go off shift, put the body back where it belonged for the next shift to find and deal with. The only thing is, in my case, this time the GIs who did it were caught. Even though my body had dropped quite a bit less than normal temperature, if not "warm" (because of the hot running water of the shower), my body was still at least supple. In the fact that I had absolutely no vital signs that anybody could tell --- and it had been previously noted that I flatlined --- I was hastily stuffed into the body bag without further checking. Hours later the Cat came across me no longer DOA and helped me out of the bag. (source)
Philosophy east and west
Volume 40, No.2 (April 1990)
P.151-174
(C) by University of Hawaii Press
Institute for Peace & Justice
University of San Diego
FOOTNOTE [1]
THE SAIGON TEA GIRL