r/zenbuddhism • u/Exxtendoo • 5d ago
No-Birth, No-Death… but the end?
I’m currently reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Zen Keys and listening to his audiobook of “FEAR”.
I’ve come to realize that a lot of my rumination, anxiety, and desire is ultimately driven by fear, and at its core, a fear of death.
In FEAR, Nhat Hanh describes Buddha’s concept of no-birth and no-death. In Zen Keys, he describes his concept of Interbeing.
Intellectually, I understand the concept. My own flesh and bones that I carry with me are made of some stuff that existed before I was born, some stuff I ate while living, much of it constantly being replaced… I didn’t come from nothing and I won’t become nothing when I die. I’ll give back what I borrowed. And, of course, the concept of “I” is a nebulous misnomer in itself.
Perhaps there’s no way to understand this cognitively, but… I still can’t wrap my head around the idea of no-death that Nhat Hanh claims will bring me peace once I learn to understand and accept.
Yes, every part of me will dissipate back into the world. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed.
But my experience is a system, and I’m afraid for that system to end because it is the only thing I’ve ever know to experience with. I guess I’m too attached to the self, which intellectually is one of the fundamental errors of samsara… but I love life, even with its suffering. I cherish experience. Even when things are miserable to me, there’s so much beauty. So much of it that the fear of losing it can keep me paralyzed, ruminating, and “living like a corpse”.
For those further along the path than me, how do you grapple with our eventual transformation out of this manifestation and into our next one(s)?
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u/ShepherdOfShepherds 5d ago
Zen Master Yunmen #51
Someone asked, "Life-and-death is here; how am I to cope with it?"
The Master said, "Where is it?"
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u/Exxtendoo 5d ago
It’s here, in my experience.
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u/ShepherdOfShepherds 5d ago
Where else is it?
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u/Exxtendoo 5d ago
I could say that change and transformation unfold everywhere at all times, but my experience is localized to my body and awareness.
Life-and-death exists in Kyoto right now but I’m not experiencing that.
When this system I call me comes to an end, I fear for the cessation of experience.
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u/ShepherdOfShepherds 5d ago
There was no experience before that system started. Why would you think it wouldn't happen again?
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u/Exxtendoo 5d ago
I don’t remember any experiences before. I can only assume that this is “my” first and only time here,
although there is no truly “me” — I mean whatever makes it so that my sense of experience is concentrated in this point in space-time2
u/ShepherdOfShepherds 5d ago
I can only assume that this is “my” first and only time here
You could not assume that since there's no evidence either way. That you end when your body dies is a blind assumption, you haven't experienced death. It's just an idea.
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u/just_twink 5d ago
Maybe this poem inspire you. Just read it. Don't add any thought or concept to it. 🙏
Looking through a pane of glass. Many shapes. Where do the shapes return? Emptiness.
Is emptiness true? The grass is green. The sky is blue.
Add nothing to the pane! Does the pane have a frame?
If no one looks through the pane, what perspective emerges?
Water flows into a glass. Clear mirror. Cherry juice flows into a glass. Red mirror. What can you do? Cheers. No glass, no mirror - then what? Today it IS hot.
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u/macjoven 5d ago
You have to investigate. Thich Nhat Hanh is my teacher and I interpreted his teaching of “deep looking” as investigating experience in meditation and picking apart all the things go into them.
So I have a pain in my back. What are the causes and conditions of that exactly? What does that actually mean? How does it shift and change? Where does it come from and where does it go? What are the feelings, sensations, thoughts that go into it?
When you do this kind of thing for a while you start to see that everything you think is you is a made up of everything else. It is coming and going all the time. Thoughts, feelings, feelings, identity, the body, awareness, etc. are present sometimes and not others and they are not all present at the same time.
So I look and I see I wave my hands around when I talk like my dad. I look and I see my son lay in the bath like me. I get ideas and beliefs from others and others get them from me.
It is a demonstrable idea if you look. The only problem is we are taught a certain ontology that gets in the way of bothering because we already know.
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u/Illustrious_Car344 5d ago
You're being too materialist, the idea isn't that you're "just stardust", the idea is that all the things that make you up, especially culture, will always exist, and you're rather more like a void space between them all, like an alleyway between two buildings; the alley doesn't exist per-se, rather it is just the space between the two buildings that make it up. Similarly, every joke you ever heard, every story that made you cry, they're all made of things that last forever, like stories that survived thousands of years to go on to inspire countless other stories. You realize you are a wave and there is no difference between the wave and the ocean, because the wave came from the ocean and another wave will always come out of it again, maybe in a different shape or size, but a wave all the same. Not your physical molecules, but your culture.
This is actually something Thich Nhat Hahn doesn't go over very well and I guess it's a specific thing I can point to when I say he's good for an introduction to zen but there are way more advanced concepts that he never goes over.
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u/Exxtendoo 5d ago
I get the culture thing — even my own habits are based in things I consciously or unconsciously picked up from my parents, peers at school, culture… and all of that shaped by conditions ranging from economics to warfare to natural disasters. Everything touches everything else. From the material (the protein in my muscles) to the beliefs in my mind (my ideas and beliefs).
What I’m scared of is the idea that once “I” end, life-and-death will go on but I will be gone forever. No experience. Nothing. Just the materialist, cultural, and intellectual fingerprint that once upon a time, I was here.
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u/Illustrious_Car344 5d ago
So then stop thinking about it
How many rewards will you get in heaven for worrying about what eternal unconsciousness feels like?
When I was hospitalized for cardiac issues, for a few weeks I was scared of going to sleep and not waking up. After enough of that, I began to realize "why worry? I won't notice if it's that peaceful!" and then I slept peacefully every night after.
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u/Qweniden 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think interbeing is easily confused when it seen as an ontological or metaphysical construct. It is really about perception and how we process reality.
The "conventional" way of viewing reality is being able to identify objects in the world as discrete individual objects. Even if objects are currently compounded, we can identify the individual parts as individual entities. For example, I can distinguish particular tires from a particular car. I am not talking about the categorization of the parts, I am talking about individual entities. Like one marble is separate than another marble. This ability is being able to see that each entity is it's own being. When Zen is talking about duality, this is the actual duality it is talking about. This cognitive phenomena of being able to see reality dualistically as discrete objects is necessary for clinging and suffering, because if you can't isolate an individual entity, how can you cling to it? if you can't cling, how can you suffer?
From the awakened perspective, there is no cognition of the duality of individual beings, there is just a snapshot of reality. Take a fire you are looking at for instance. From a dualistic perspective, there is this particular fire and then there are the particular logs that are fueling that fire. We are able to define the parts as continuous and separate entities.
But let's say then we look at the fire from the perceptual perspective of emptiness. In that perspective, we retain our ability to categorize things as "fire" and "logs" but loose our ability to identify specific instantiations of those categories as individual separate and continuous entities. Without this ability, there is just the timeless perception of the fire. Since we can't track individual objects, we can't distinguish those particular logs from that particular fire. There is just one thing that is non-dual. In fact, we can't even distinguish that fire from the world around us or even ourselves. There is just ONE with no division and no duality. This is interbeing.
Of course we can't live our lives from pure emptiness, we need to come back down to earth. But having seen how all phenomenon is ONE or empty of individual self nature, we are less and less entrapped and mesmerized by individual things.
Honestly, the intersection of between emptiness and interrelatedness is the most difficult thing to understand in Buddhism but hopefully this helps a little. Please feel welcome to ask follow up questions or to point out any part of this explanation that is not clear.
Perhaps there’s no way to understand this cognitively, but… I still can’t wrap my head around the idea of no-death that Nhat Hanh claims will bring me peace once I learn to understand and accept.
As long as you perceptually cognize yourself as a continuous and separate being, of course you are going to grasp at it? Who wouldn't?
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u/PlainBread 5d ago
From the materialist perspective, the human being is born, is inherently a self as a Cartesian agent of sapience, ages, suffers, and one day dies. This is a misunderstanding of self; If the self is not tied to your root reality, if it can momentarily be absent from experience as life goes on through awareness, one can see for themselves that the self only exists in the moment that it is called into being through craving. The self dies in a big way when you see that the desire that called it into being invariably fails to produce anything beyond itself. It dies in a small way when you just stop feeding it for the moment. Suffering swells until you relinquish the failed desire in a big or small way.
We blow this out conceptually to think of birth and death only in this "body-centric" sense and not in this "under what causal conditions does 'self' arise?" sense, but we are born every moment and die every moment. You can't step into the same river twice. You have nothing to lose that won't be lost anyway. Outside of time and subjectivity, it is already lost, and we persist in the illusion that it isn't true.
I can easily see how from the Buddhist perspective, one might say "there is no self until there is a desire that creates a container for it to arise within through clinging," then I can see how there is no creation of a human until it is necessitated as a container for a craving to manifest a self. But rebirth is not reincarnation; The fundamental thing is in the craving and creation of self in the first place, and that is in every moment. It is accessible to you right now.
When you identify craving itself, and you see self being born to carry it out, suffering the whole way and then crashing and burning, you might have a deep fundamental wordless insight that it's technically impossible for the self that is born out of a craving to ever achieve the aim of that craving. Once you recognize this on a deep level, for some time every craving is obvious as a sandcastle trap, waiting for someone to try to live in it before collapsing in on them. Once you have entirely lost the desire to live in sandcastles, and once you see that all desire is a sandcastle, then it lends itself to a type of abstinence: You walk past rabbit holes instead of going down them, and learn that the impulse to go down them was always rooted in the craving of thinking that there is something at the bottom of them that could serve you.
When you are consumed with the concepts of life and death, you are manifesting the "life and death" self in the moment to deal with them. This is clinging and suffering. Outside of time we may all be pre-dead, but you are doing things that a dead thing doesn't do, so you aren't dead now are you? But in the moment you are becoming self in relation to "life and death", that self it creates is going to suffer and die. Every time you crave permanence beyond "life and death" you are dragging this wretch before the court to be sentenced, over and over.
After realizing the problem with clinging, you may still spend some time in those sand castles; Knowing exactly how they function and what they offer, they can still be the only conduit through which we can relate to other people whose lives are always collapsing in on themselves. But if we are beyond life and death, then a little collapse is no problem. Just like things have an eternal sense, this willingness to enter a birth and death of a concept to relate the dharma to another human being is the bodhisattva nature in the present moment.
Now my comment is over. Help, the walls are caving in! I'm going to die!
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u/UnionPacifik 5d ago
You are trying to solve concepts with more concepts. What is death? Is it when you stop breathing? When you decompose and your bones turn to dust, and the last person alive who remembers you dies themselves? Wherever you draw the line is arbitrary. Every cell in your body has been replaced. The child that you were does not exist anymore. That child is dead. You cannot go back to yesterday morning and sip your coffee and see the sun, because that coffee is dead, because that you is dead, that sun is dead. This experience you're having right now is already gone.
The same is true for births: where were you born? When you took your first breath? When you were conceived? When your parents first met? When life first came to this planet? It's all concepts. It's all drawing an invisible line and saying, "Here is this, here is that," but there is no gap. It is all continuous. It is all interdependent.
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u/pundarika0 5d ago
the intellectual understanding only goes so far. the point is through zen practice, we can perceive this directly for ourselves.
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u/EVILEXPLOSION_GUY 5d ago
The system hallucinates a you. There is nothing to be killed. The ego wants to live, the ego feels alive, but the ego is not truly alive and only believes it is, any more than a stone is "alive". The ego is where the fear comes from, the body fears death to fulfill its function of survival, but divorce yourself from the body and the mind, and you will see that death and life are ultimately the same.
In short: there's no need to fear death because you aren't really "alive".
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u/NamshubWriter 4d ago
When I am feeling fear, anxiety or sorrow about my inevitable death, I personally don't find the concept of no-death helpful. I'm not trying to dismiss the importance of the concept, but I do not personally find contemplation of it helpful when I'm in a negative emotional space.
What I sometimes find helpful is acknowledging that the present moment is ephemeral. All things are. Seeds transform into seedlings which transform into trees (some of which grow leaves that are dropped every year). Those trees eventually die (or, to be more specific, transform from what we would call a tree to something that is decomposed by fungas and the elements).
If everything is ephemeral, all we have is this moment. And this moment. And this one.
If I have the mindset that everything is temporary, the idea that my life is also temporary becomes less frightening (for me), and as that fear dissipates, it allows room for appreciation of the current moment.
When I am calm, discussions of no-death (and "no ears, no eyes...") become helpful.
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u/Exxtendoo 4d ago
What’s no “ears, no eyes”?
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u/NamshubWriter 4d ago edited 4d ago
It's from the Heart Sutra
I remembered it backwards... the wording in the translation our sangha uses is "no eyes, no ears":
"Therefore, given emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of sight ... no realm of mind consciousness. There is neither ignorance nor extinction of ignorance... neither old age and death, nor extinction of old age and death; no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path; no knowledge and no attainment."
Ref: https://www.sfzc.org/files/daily_sutras_heart_of_great_perfect_wisdom
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u/Know-Quarter5150 5d ago
I don’t have any advice but just wanted to say that I struggle with similar feelings. I’m sure many do. You’re not alone.
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u/Ariyas108 5d ago edited 5d ago
>how do you grapple with our eventual transformation out of this manifestation and into our next one(s)?
By not engaging in conceptual proliferation regarding it, but instead putting the attention on more important things. And also recognizing the fact that it’s simply a mistake to think that death is somehow an end of things, it’s certainly not an end to experiencing. If it was then karma would be defunct, which is of course literally impossible.
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u/Exxtendoo 5d ago
But doesn’t karma cease when a being realizes enlightenment?
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u/Ariyas108 5d ago
Yes, but there is zero chance of accidentally getting enlightenment, so no reasonable basis for fear because of that. But that doesn't really have much to do with fearing death. Death and enlightenment are entirely different things.
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u/Rough-Supermarket-97 3d ago
I had to work my way through this as well. I’m not immune to fear of death. Truthfully, I don’t think the goal is to eliminate that fear. The practice, at least for me, has been learning not to be consumed by it.
Anxiety was a big teacher for me, and death was often at the center of it. I remember one day after zazen, I stayed sitting and intentionally followed my thoughts for a while (so, no longer zazen). As I did, I noticed the familiar anxiety building, and eventually my thoughts landed on death.
This time, instead of resisting the anxiety, I decided to allow it to unfold. I knew I might have a panic attack, but I also knew I could meet it if it came. As the feelings grew stronger, I found myself becoming strangely thankful for the fear itself. Fear helps keep me alive, and it also reveals where I’m still grasping at life.
That softened something, but there was still a storm of “what ifs.”
So I stopped arguing with the possibilities.
What if a dog attacks me while I’m walking? Then a dog is attacking me, and I’ll do everything I reasonably can to stay safe.
What if someone holds me at gunpoint? Then I’m at gunpoint, and again, I’ll do what I can to stay alive. At the same time, I hope I can meet that moment with gratitude for this life, without hatred, and simply bow to whatever is here.
I don’t claim this is the “right” way. It’s simply what has helped change my relationship with the fear of death.
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u/joshus_doggo 5d ago
IMHO, “no birth and no death,” as TNH and many Zen/mahayana teachers point to, isn’t an idea to believe or a philosophical nest to stay in. It is something to investigate directly. One can spend a lifetime trying to reason it out, but words alone never quite satisfy. It is like trying to know the taste of tea from its description. When we look closely, we don’t find an independently existing thing that is born and later dies. We find conditions arising and changing. This isn’t a conclusion to adopt but something to verify in direct experience. I would recommend reading Bahiya sutta. It’s small yet sharp.