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No birth, No death
Feb. 25th, 2025 07:13 amThe last section of the book is on how interdependence means, ultimately, there is no birth and no death, since we are all present in each other. He tells the story of a friend who left his mother behind in Vietnam, but she told him whenever he was missing her, to look at his hand and know she was present. "The presence of his mother is not just genetic. Her spirit, her hopes and her life are also present in him...From his hand, he can penetrate deeply into the reality of beginningless and endless time. He will be able to see that thousands of generations before him and thousands of generations after him are all him. From time immemorial until the present moment, his life has never been interrupted and end his hand is still there, a beginningless and endless reality. He can recognize his "true face" 500 million years ago and 500 million years from now. He exists not only in the evolutionary tree branching along the axis of time, but also in the network of interdependent relations. As a result, each cell in his body is just as free from birth and death as he is."
He also tells a story of rumors of his own death reaching a Vietnamese Buddhist nun who was quite upset. "But life and death is only a fiction, and not very deep; why do you cry, sister. You are studying Buddhism, doing what I am doing. So if you exist, I also exist. What does not exist cannot come into existence and what exists cannot cease to be. Have you realized that, sister? If we cannot bring a speck of dust from "existence" to "non-existence," how can we do that to a human. On earth, many people have been killed struggling for peace, for human rights, for freedom and social justice, but no one can destroy them. They still exist. Sister, do your think that Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Lambrakis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are "dead people?" No, they are still here. We are they. We carry them in each cell of our bodies."
He concludes by reminding us that we are not simply the wave, we are the water. "All the work of meditation is aimed at awakening us in order to know one and only one thing: birth and death can never touch use in any way whatsoever."
He also tells a story of rumors of his own death reaching a Vietnamese Buddhist nun who was quite upset. "But life and death is only a fiction, and not very deep; why do you cry, sister. You are studying Buddhism, doing what I am doing. So if you exist, I also exist. What does not exist cannot come into existence and what exists cannot cease to be. Have you realized that, sister? If we cannot bring a speck of dust from "existence" to "non-existence," how can we do that to a human. On earth, many people have been killed struggling for peace, for human rights, for freedom and social justice, but no one can destroy them. They still exist. Sister, do your think that Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Lambrakis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are "dead people?" No, they are still here. We are they. We carry them in each cell of our bodies."
He concludes by reminding us that we are not simply the wave, we are the water. "All the work of meditation is aimed at awakening us in order to know one and only one thing: birth and death can never touch use in any way whatsoever."
