Shōji (生死) — Birth and Death | PART TWO

“At this very time, there is a distinction that frees us, right off, from life and death. It is a mistake to think that we go from being alive to being dead. Being alive is a position at one moment in time: it already has its past and it will have its future. Therefore, within the Buddha Dharma, we say that life is beyond just the act of being born. Death is also a position at one moment in time, and it too has its past and its future. Accordingly, we say that death is beyond the act of just dying.

In the time we call ‘living’, there is nothing except life, and in the time we call ‘dying’, there is nothing except death. Thus, when life comes, it is simply life, and when death comes, it is simply death. When facing up to them, do not say that you want to cling to the one or push away the other. This living and dying is precisely what the treasured life of a Buddha is. If we hate life and want to throw it away, that is just our attempt to throw away the treasured life of Buddha. And if we go no farther than this and clutch onto life and death, this too is our throwing away the treasured life of Buddha by limiting ourselves to the superficial appearance of Buddha. When there is nothing we hate and nothing we cling to, then, for the first time, we enter the Heart of Buddha.”

Dōgen begins: “At this very time, there is a distinction that frees us, right off, from life and death.” He is not introducing something we need to grasp, something subtle or hidden that we have to arrive at. This distinction is not something added, not something we attain later. It is already functioning here, before we begin dividing experience into what we call life and what we call death. The freedom is not somewhere else. It is obscured only by the way we organize what is already present.

We assume that we move from one state into another, that we are born, that we live, and that we will die. This structure feels unquestionable because it is the way thought arranges experience into something continuous and manageable. But Dōgen points directly at this assumption and shows that even what we call “being alive” is not something fixed. It is a position at a moment in time, already carrying what we call past and future in this very present-infinite moment. The same is true of what we call death. So neither life nor death can be what we take them to be, because neither one can be separated to stand by itself.

What we are calling life is not the event of being born, and what we are calling death is not the event of dying. These are markers we apply as a way of stabilizing what is fundamentally unstable. They belong to the narrative we construct in order to make sense of what is happening. But what is actually here is not moving along a line, not transitioning from one fixed state into another. It does not divide itself in the way we divide it.

In the time we call living, there is nothing except life. In the time we call dying, there is nothing except death. Not as opposites held in tension, not as points on a continuum, but as complete in themselves, without reference to something else, already containing everything. The difficulty does not lie in life or death. It lies in the way we position our idea of a self in relation to them.

We want to secure what we call life and avoid what we call death. We try to hold onto one and push away the other, and in doing so we create the very division that we then suffer within. If we reject life, trying to throw it away, we are rejecting the very life of Buddha. If we cling to life and death, trying to secure ourselves within them, we are still reducing what cannot be reduced to something we can manage. In both cases, we are taking what is whole and dividing it according to our preferences.

When Dōgen spoke of pointing the cart North to reach the South, he was describing this exact friction. Our 'preference' is the cart; the 'South' is the peace we crave. But as long as we use our conceptual preferences to drive the cart, we are only speeding away from the Buddha-heart that is already pulsing beneath the wheels. We don't need a better cart or a faster horse; we need to realize there is nowhere to go.

Release is not found in choosing correctly between life and death, nor in understanding them more clearly as ideas. It is found in no longer standing in relation to them at all. When there is nothing we are trying to hold onto and nothing we are trying to avoid, then what we call life is no longer filtered through preference, no longer shaped by fear or grasping. The Heart of Buddha is not something we enter at some later point. It is what is already present and functioning when nothing extra is being added to it. This Heart contains the whole universe, alive and pulsing with our compassionate activity that flows naturally when we step beyond our conceptual grasping.