Understanding Death through Buddhism

This is not morbid curiosity of mine, but lately I had a certain train of thought on the subject I wanted to post about before I forget.

A while back, when I was doing a lot sutra study in the old blog, I remember the Buddha would often describe death as the “breaking up of the body”. Take for example a famous sutra in the Pali Canon, the Paccha-bhumika Sutta (SN 42.6), particularly this line:*

“So it is with any man who takes life, steals, indulges in illicit sex; is a liar, one who speaks divisive speech, harsh speech, & idle chatter; is greedy, bears thoughts of ill-will, & holds to wrong views. Even though a great crowd of people, gathering & congregating, would pray, praise, & circumambulate with their hands palm-to-palm over the heart — [saying,] ‘May this man, at the break-up of the body, after death, reappear in a good destination, the heavenly world!’ — still, at the break-up of the body, after death, he would reappear in destitution, a bad destination, the lower realms, hell.

It occurred to me then that one’s life can be described like a book, fresh off the press, with good binding and so on. That binding, the pages, spine and so on are like the Five Aggregates in Buddhism:**

1. Form (physical body)
2. Sensation (sight, smell, touch, taste, sound and even thought
3. Perception of sensation
4. Mental Formation (reaction to sensation)
5. Conscious (thought resulting from the encounter)

Now, if you’ve ever seen a book that is really old, you’ll notice that the pages become brittle, and the glue or thread that holds the binding weakens until it can’t hold the book together any longer. The book breaks down and is no longer usable. In the same, when I thought about it, a person starts out fresh and young, but over time the body becomes weak and frail, their senses dulled, their mind feeble until the whole thing can’t stay together and breaks down similarly. No matter how well you preserve a book, the pages will yellow, break and eventually fall apart because it can’t hold itself together any longer. Same with living beings.

That’s the first part, but in East Asian Buddhism, they extend this teaching further, such as in the famous Heart Sutra, with the line:

是 故 空 中 無 色 無 受 想 行 識

[It is for this reason] that in emptiness there is no form, no sensation, perception [of sensation], volition, and consciousness,

Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Not really, it’s kind of emphasizing something subtle. In earlier Buddhism, the five aggregates were seen as the basic “building blocks” of a living being, but the Mahayana, East Asian Buddhism states that even these building blocks are “empty”, meaning they have no intrinsic existence. Using the analogy of the book, the hard cover and pages in the book came from paper, which in turn came from trees, which in turn came from the soil, sun, water and on and on. The ink was manufactured or also made from plants. The thread for the spine came from maybe cotton plants, and so on. So, even the five aggregates themselves have a contingent and temporary existence. This emphasizes even further this notion of the body breaking up. The paper in the pages breaks down and becomes something else later, as well as the other components of the book. Maybe they’re recycled as another book, maybe as mulch (to grow more plants, and become someone’s food), maybe as kindling and the become ashes. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Here today, something else tomorrow. The existence we have is contingent on various elements, causes and conditions that combined in the right way to give us life, but that life can’t hold itself together forever. Sooner or later, it will lose its integrity and break down. What happens to those components then is up to further causes and conditions, including those we make for ourselves.

In reading the sutra above, I am also reminded of something Rennyo Shonin wrote in the Letter on White Ashes:

Thus our bodies may be radiant with health in the morning, but by evening they may be white ashes. If the right causes and conditions prevail, our two eyes are closed forever, our breathing ceases and our bodies lose the glow of life. Our relatives in great numbers and with great wealth can assemble, but they are powerless to change our situation. Even the rites and rituals of grief and mourning change nothing. All we can do is prepare the body for cremation; all that is left is white ashes.

In view of these facts, does it not make sense to focus on the things we can change? We cannot control the passing away of both young and old alike, but each of us can take refuge in the Buddha of Infinite Life who promises to embrace, without exception, all beings who but recite his Holy Name – Namo Amitabha Buddha. This you can do here and now, freeing yourself of any worries concerning your future life.

Namu Amida Butsu

* – This has always been one of my favorite, concise explanations of death in Buddhism, especially because the point the Buddha is trying to get across is that everyone is responsible for their actions, and that one can’t really help a person after death. In the end, they still have to undergo whatever fate they’ve paved for themselves by their intentions, words and deeds. Of course, in later Mahayana Buddhism, they recognize this, but also add that even the worst beings will eventually come around and become Buddhas (see the Devadatta chapter of the Lotus Sutra).

** – This is called the go un in Japanese Buddhism (五蘊), which in the same order are:

1. 色蘊, shikiun
2. 受蘊, jūn
3. 想蘊, soun
4. 行蘊, gyōun
5. 識蘊, also called shikiun