Life and Death

The fixed belief in a division between life and death, is a great misunderstanding. There is no identifiable location from which things are born, or to which they return and so, there is no place to die. Nor is there a human species or self who from out of nowhere becomes conscious. We are of the world.

There are relative, conventional differences between life and death, loss and gain, mind and matter, the animate and inanimate, that are of consequence. The issue is to note that these contrasts are dependently arisen, dependently identified and therefore without their own nature. The understanding of interdependence avoids the extremes that phenomena must either independently exist or not exist at all.

The appreciation that everything reflects everything else, is the undoing of the belief in inherent separateness and along with it, conflict and fear. Under these conditions, the heart opens. There is the recognition that even the autumn leaf is not fundamentally different from the spring leaf. The autumn leaf is life, in a borderless, impermanent flux of causal continuance. It never was itself, and so the appearance of its ultimate death is an illusion.