MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Death
Even in the midst of our heedless enjoyment of the feast of health, we are secretly haunted by fear of the death's head: the unimaginably remote but still inevitable annihilation of our individuality, the certain cessation of our beloved body-and-mind to which we cling throughout life as our self-identity. But one day sooner or later Reality, which cannot be escaped or denied, will award us a serious illness that, by bringing us to the brink of the Abyss, is able to cure us of our delusion that we shall live forever. If we can heed this forceful warning, such an illness may be more salutary than many years of untroubled health, which so often hardens the heart and makes thicker and more opaque the walls between this world and the next. But shocked into awareness by such drastic treatment, the chain of attachment to life may snap and we may awaken to acceptance of the ultimate fact. Though the pain of approach to the black doorway leading into No-thing may be truly terrible, that is caused by the body's struggle to live, not by death. If we submit with humility and patience through this ordeal, we may be granted a brief glimpse of what lies beyond. With liberating tears we discover that it was our long attachment to life that was the cause of all our suffering, whilst the death of self, not unselfishness but the realization that the Not-Self is birthless and deathless, opens the dreaded door on bliss. Death is no longer what all men believe and so hate and fear but is gentle, compassionate, and kind. Pure Faith and the calling of the Divine Name are powerful enough to bring one safely through this trial. Thereafter one is ready to leave this world at any time or to stay on for any time, as the Other Power wills, for to live and to die are equally good.
So we should cease thinking of death as an unmitigated evil and of life as an unqualified good, for as a Buddhist proverb puts it: Shindareba koso ikitare, - "Only by reason of having died, does one enter into life". In truth, we are all dying at every single moment of our lives and being reborn in the next moment and could not live without so dying. Hence the synonym for Samsara is ‘birth-and-death’; for, Metaphysically, ‘Every birth is a death and every death a birth’, not only from moment to moment during this lifetime but in our states of existence before and after it.
That the death of the self is a basic principle of the spiritual life the mystics and metaphysicians of many Traditions have affirmed in epigram and paradox. ‘The Kingdom of God’, says Meister Eckhart, ‘belongs only to those who are thoroughly dead while still alive in this world’. On the other side of the globe the Zen master Shido Bunan expressed the same idea in two lines of verse:
Die while alive, and be completely dead;
And then do what you will, for all is good.
Similar sayings are recorded of sages as far apart in space and time as Angelus Silesius and Shri Ramakrishna, Muhammed and Ramana Maharshi. But it is one matter to have entertained this idea mentally, even to have given it adequate verbal expression, and quite another to have ‘proved it upon your pulses’, so that as the ‘veiled shadow’ said to Keats:
Thou hast felt What 'tis to die and live again before Thy fated hour.
But a wilful exposure to danger or the accidental proximity of death is not enough to bring about this true extinction of self. The rash and reckless are none the better morally or spiritually for their show of bravado. By daring the devil, the defiant ego may only be seeking to enhance its self- esteem, when what is needful is a willing acceptance of its own non-existence. Only by actually undergoing the experience of spiritual death and rebirth can one's whole being be transfigured. Then alone is the promise of Paradise assured, just as the dead root-stocks of the peonies, grown in the raised bed with granite sides in the Chinese style near the entrance to the Ginkaku-ji garden, will surely rise from their tomb to bud and bloom again next spring.
Whereas the summer solstice opens the Gate of Purgatory, marking the beginning of the Yin phase of the yearly cycle and the departure of the sun, the winter solstice opens the Gate of Paradise with the beginning of the Yang phase and the solar return of warmth and light. ‘At the moment of death’, Plutarch assures us, ‘the soul experiences the same impressions as those who are initiated into the Greater Mysteries’, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which describes the Bardo, or intermediate state after death, confirms this doctrine.
It is not only our experience of life that has been qualitatively impoverished by a technosciential education, even our experience of death has been similarly stripped of all spiritual richness and rationalistically sterilized. Recent accounts by hundreds of patients who have clinically died and later been revived evidence that their posthumous experiences in almost every case were abstract and vague, prosaically lacking in that mythic imagery which so vividly clothed the after-death encounters of those fortunate enough to be reared in one of the great Traditions.
As one who has made the agonizing approach to that dark initiatic portal leading out of this world, I have had the good fortune to foresee, during that moment of awe, the dazzling joy and inconceivable peace beyond, before being drawn back again by unresolved karmic residues into the Round of Samsara. But whoever receives this blessing, which makes tears of joyful gratitude start from the eyes, is thereafter utterly changed. For the dead who are still alive can never return to their old identification with this world and at bodily death are assured, through firmly established Faith, of Rebirth in Paradise. The dove of the individual psyche, frozen to death on the bough, is thus transformed into the immortal Phoenix; for as the Book of Lambspring confirms: 'of the Dove is born a Phoenix, Which has left behind blackness and foul death, And has regained a more glorious life'. Thomas Traherne in an unpublished "Select Meditation" says of the Phoenix: ‘Felicity is a Bird of paradice so strang, that it is Impossible to flie among men without Loseing some feathers were she not Immortal’, so that any poet's attempt to catch her in a cage of words must inevitably dim something of her splendour.