Learning to die, learning to live. On the Intensity of the Moment

Learning to die, learning to live. On the Intensity of the Moment

Life and death are like two sides of the same coin. Embodiment and the time between death and birth constitute the course of incarnations.

For the matter-bound consciousness, however, such trains of thought are pure theory; it can only see being and non-being and therefore represses death. But doesn’t this view also diminish the abundance of life? How Zen Buddhism shaped the samurai.

Those who do not know or perceive their finiteness live as if they were eternal. But this is an eternity that mutates into mere duration, crouched under the leaden regiment of time.

Children have a sense of being unlimited, in their self-perception and in relation to time. Self and world flow together and only separate for moments when something desired cannot be achieved. Children live in the moment. What has just been is forgotten. Joy and pain disappear in the attention given to each moment. What is now is new. Time is full, every day feels like an eternity. It doesn’t stay that way, however. The child gets to know things and processes, it develops routines. Its consciousness increasingly withdraws from the immediate moment. The child grows up and makes decisions, it chooses its path in life: the question of whether something – or someone – can help to achieve a goal influences some of the perceptions and closes off consciousness from others. The resulting blank spaces are filled with plans, dreams and fears. So the intensity of childhood and adolescence slowly fades and the objectification of the world begins. At some point, it extends – usually without malicious intent – to people who are supposed to serve certain goals in relationships. Then the fullness of the desireless moment is lost and time has become a delay, a road to the end.

At some point during this development, everyone begins to miss the abundance of experiences of childhood and youth. The realization can dawn that abundance can only be attained in great openness, that we can only really embrace the new moment if we let go of the past as well as our expectations of the future. Our ingrained way of collecting things and experiences and filling our consciousness (and often also our private surroundings) in this way is opposed to this. It is also opposed by our ego, which is the result of all this accumulation. “I am what I have done, what I love, what I still intend to achieve …” The beautiful moments of our lives serve to enrich this inner credit account, they decorate the narrative of ourselves. This is how we usually live, even though we have experienced beauty and fulfilment that can only be achieved by letting go and going with the flow. Practicing this letting go on a small scale is a good way of experiencing ourselves anew in relative freedom from the flow of our own narrative and free from holding on to things (including our own history).

Now we fear and deny death because we want to realize all that is great and eternal in transience, because we have locked ourselves and our highest goals in life in time. We seek permanence. Beauty, strength, wisdom and love should add up to perfection, as proof of success. – Even those who have bid farewell to big ideas in the course of their lives seek to protect and hold on to the relative happiness found in little things.

The key to abundance, however, lies in the death of the ego in each and every moment. If we hold on to our ego, we will continue to tell its story in variations tied to the string of time until there is nothing more to tell. If we can detach ourselves from our ego, then we can die to time and discover a new state of life.

The ego is itself the boundary that closes us off from the deeper life and makes death a mystery and a horror for us. All the more so as in our society old age and death are separated from normal life and we would like to see our life story as an infinite development.

Samurai and Zen Buddhism

In seventeenth-century Japan, there are traces of an approach to life in which the repeated confrontation with the possibility of one’s own death and a spiritual philosophy of the non-ego entered into a synthesis that led to the transcendence of life and death and set a profound cultural impulse. At this time in feudal Japan, the path of the samurai and Zen Buddhism came together in an intensive way. The Zen teacher Takuan Sôhô (1573-1645) wrote several letters to a sword master. These texts describe the art of swordsmanship from a fundamental understanding of the swordsman’s craft and show it as a path to conquering oneself.

Takuan Sôhô presents the art of swordsmanship as a circle: from the unprejudiced beginning of the novice through the complexity of learning to the regained effortlessness of the master. It is made clear that the master has not only outgrown the effort to merge his stance, swordplay and mastery of space into a unity, but that he can and should also become non-intentional in order to merge with the action as well.

One only becomes a master when they stop thinking about themselves, even in a fight for life and death.

Takuan Sôhô writes in this context:

As the beginner knows nothing about either his body posture or the positioning of his sword, neither does his mind stop anywhere within him. If someone strikes him with the sword, he simply counters the attack without having anything in mind.

As he then studies various things and is taught the diverse ways of how to take a stance, the manner of grasping his sword and where to put his mind, his mind stops in many places. Now if he wants to strike an opponent, he is extraordinarily discomforted. Later, as days pass and time piles up, in accordance with his practice, neither the postures of his body nor the ways of grasping the sword are weighed in his mind. His mind simply becomes as it was in the beginning when he knew nothing and had yet to be taught anything at all.[1]

If one puts his mind in the action of the opponent’s body, his mind will be taken by the action of his opponent’s body.
If he puts his mind in his opponent’s sword, his mind will be taken by that sword.
If he puts his mind in thoughts of his opponent’s intention to strike him, his mind will be taken by thoughts of his opponent’s intention to strike him.
If he puts his mind in his own sword, his mind will be taken by his own sword.
If he puts his mind in his own intention of not being struck, his mind will be taken by his intention of not being struck. […]
What this means is that there is no place in which the mind should dwell.[2]

These lines are a centerpiece of the work, which is why its English edition was titled The Unfettered Mind. However, becoming unattached in a life-and-death struggle requires more than a mental exercise. This endeavor is only successful if a person actually overcomes their ego, their anchoring in time and space, and thus their deepest fears of existence, if they dare to die before they die[3]. Dying while alive was a central theme not only for Christian mystics, but also in Zen. Accordingly, the step towards enlightenment was also referred to as a (mental) leap off the cliff. „Die while alive, […] and all will be well“[4] This was a widespread phrase of encouragement in the Zen monasteries of the time.

Is it not frivolous to even assume spirituality in the bloody business of warriors? Can the art of war be used as a tool to overcome the ego? Or to put it another way: can someone who has overcome their ego still raise a sword at all? In the feudal society of the time, everyone had a fixed place from birth. The peasant remained a peasant, the samurai a samurai. Everyone could only fill their place more or less correctly and honorably. In his novel The Death of the Tea Master, the multi-award-winning writer Yasushi Inoue (1907-1991) explores the question of why Sen nô Rikyû (1522-1591), the tea master, was ordered by the then Shôgun[5] Hideyoshi to ritually kill himself and whether Rikyû was ultimately even intent on receiving this order. He shows a group of samurai studying the Zen art of the Way of Tea with the famous tea master and occasionally interrupting their tea gatherings to go into battle. The image that emerges is of a group of people who maintain their meditative state of mind whatever they do. They acquire their willingness to die in the teahouse. The ambivalence that lies in the encounter between the meditative path and the art of war is brought to the fore in the novel: Rikyû was present at the deaths of several samurai. How many went into battle after drinking tea with Master Rikyû? And found death. If you have prepared so many violent deaths, you can’t die on your bed.[6]

Nevertheless, in Zen Buddhism, the situation of the warrior before the decisive battle was also applied to those who were seeking enlightenment. It was seen as a reference to the now, in which alone the leap into the unknown of enlightenment can take place: „A valiant practitioner behaving like a warrior beset by enemies on all sides, can attain enlightenment in an instant, but those who dillydally will take three eons to wake up.[7] Only when spiritual striving acquires this existential quality can it become the foundation of life (and death).

There is no delay: death is coming now. The path cannot be walked tomorrow, but only now.

The samurai gains the intensity of the moment in the awareness that he is experiencing everything (potentially) for the last time, and because of his consent to it. When he consciously places himself in the flow of time without wanting to stop it, he also gains the freshness of the beginning, of the new. It is like an awakening that can actually mean emerging from the flow of time. The samurai’s way of life has often been romanticized and adapted accordingly for popular culture. However, the real reason for facing death and gaining a new life from it – and the help to do so – did exist.[8]

This situation can also be applied to our present-day lives. All challenges, all crises can become turning points in life in which people accept the end of the old, and therefore also of their old existence. A life path in which a fundamental dissatisfaction with the small, reasonably secure bourgeois existence sets in can also herald the end of temporality: When something within a person wants to burst the shell that has become too tight and they consent, even courageously accept the unknown new, it can happen. Such an end is an awakening when the consciousness of the Other, which lives in the depths of one’s own being (also a topos in Zen, e.g. in D.T. Suzuki) begins to emerge: it unites life and death and thereby transcends both.

In good Zen tradition, Takuan Sôhô wrote the character for dream, yume, as a death poem – and died.


[1]  Takuan Sôhô: The Unfettered Mind. Writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master. Trans. by William Scott Wilson, Tôkyô New York London 1986, p. 23

[2]     p. 29

[3]     As Angelus Silesius (1624-1677) said: „Die ere thou diest—dying, then thou diest not: Die not—perchance then, dying, thou shalt die and rot. “

[4]     In: John Stevens: Three Zen Masters. Tôkyô, New York, London 1993, p. 66

[5]     A Samurai of high rank who who was in charge of government affairs in the emperor’s place

[6]     Yasushi Inoue: Der Tod des Teemeisters. Frankfurt am Main 2007, Seite 148. Please look up the English book!

[7]     One of Hakuins teachings, in: John Stevens: Three Zen Masters. Tôkyô, New York, London 1993, p. 77

[8]     This spiritual background cannot be compared with the motivation of suicide bombers. It is not about the intoxicating presence before the act, nor any promises about what awaits after death. Rather, it is about enduring the infinite possibilities of the now and coming to terms with them, whatever they may bring.

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Date: November 19, 2024
Author: Angela Paap (Germany)
Photo: katana-Marc Bach auf Pixabay CC0

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