Shōji (生死) — Birth and Death | PART ONE

“Because there is Buddha within living and dying, life and death do not exist.” And in response, the following was said, “Because the Buddha did not exist within life and death, He was not infatuated with living and dying.” These words are the very heart of what was said by the two Meditation Masters Kassan and Jōzan. Since they are the words of persons who had realized the Way, we can certainly profit by them, and not in vain.

     Anyone who wishes to be freed from life and death should clarify this principle. Should you seek for Buddha outside of living and dying, you are like the one who pointed his cart north and drove off to the country of Etsu in the south, or like someone who faces south, hoping to see the North Star. It would be your piling up more and more causes of life and death while missing the path to liberation. Simply put, living and dying is what nirvana is, for there is nothing to despise in living and dying, nor anything to be wished for in nirvana.”

The text opens with a glimpse of liberation: “Because there is Buddha within living and dying, life and death do not exist.” If there is awakening here, an awakened one here, not somewhere else, not later, not after something is resolved, then what we call birth and death cannot stand in the way we think they do. The whole structure of before and after, coming into being and passing out of being, longing for one and resisting the other, all of this begins to loosen. Not because we’ve solved it, but because we see what we’re doing. We see that we are weaving a narrative to hide away in.

When we strip away the conceptual overlay, the story we place on top of what is happening, then what we call birth and death is no longer something we stand outside of. We are not moving from one state into another. We are not on a line, going somewhere. There is just this. This does not divide itself in the way we divide it in thought.

Our story of birth and death is compelling. It pulls us in. It feels real and urgent. But it is compelling largely because we’ve created it. We’ve taken what is immediate and turned it into something we can manipulate in thought, something we can control, something we can hold at a distance. We begin to look for refuge there, in some notion of continuity, or in the idea of ending, or in the hope of escape.

If we look directly, we find those ideas never actually meet us where we stand. They never converge here in this moment. What we are calling birth and death exists in thought, but life as it presents itself is not contained by that.

This is the “North Star” trap Dōgen warns us about. When we try to find a holy 'Buddha' by looking away from our own aging, or try to find “Nirvana” by despising our own birth, we are like a traveler pointing their cart North to reach the country of Etsu in the South. We aren't just lost; we are actively using our effort to increase the distance between ourselves and the truth. The irony is that the “North Star” we are looking for is always the very ground beneath the wheels of the cart.

Dōgen brings in Kassan and Jōzan here as people who actually lived this. Kassan was a teacher formed in rigorous practice, not just study, but the kind of training that takes away any idea you can depend on. Jōzan was his successor, seeing through the same eyes directly, not stepping outside of what is.

These were not people thinking about life and death. They were living where birth and death were immediate. Sickness, seasons, and death were not ideas. And practice did not stop. It continued through all of it, without relying on the concepts of “sickness,” “seasons,” or “death.” This is the dharma being transmitted, continuously, to this very moment.

Kassan says, “Because there is Buddha within living and dying, life and death do not exist.” Jōzan says, “Because the Buddha did not exist within life and death, He was not infatuated with living and dying.” These are not two different views. They remove the two places we try to stand and leave us with nothing to grasp.

When there is no place to stand, we meet this life directly. Not as an idea of “birth” and “death,” not as something to resolve, but as the practice-imperative quickening us in this very moment.