No death, no fear?

[vaneramos]

When I expressed distress about the imminent loss of Mom, a friend gave me a book to read, No Fear, No Death by Thich Nhat Hanh. Essentially it presents the Buddhist argument that being and non-being do not exist, nor do birth and death-that these are only ideas. I perused a few chapters, but couldn't get into it. It doesn't make sense.

The

Comments

[eloquentwthrage]

Buddhism escapes me as well.

If it were just us humans saddened and freaked out by the death of someone close to us, I'd say that perhaps we invented grief. But animals of intelligence quite inferior to our own grieve. They're certainly not passing the idea of grief from generation to generation; it is innate, those feelings of loss. Perhaps it's even genetic, but that still doesn't discount it.

[vaneramos]

That is a fascinating point I hadn't considered before. It has given me a lot to think about.

[artricia]

Yeah, I don't get the whole death does not exist thing either. I was really into Zen in a time in my life when I got by on denial. For me, they went hand in hand. I can't get into it anymore. I like the kind of acceptance you talk about, as well as the idea that whatever you believe has to arise from you and make sense to you; they're the only things that work for me.

[that_dang_otter]

I guess that I'm a sort of super-agnostic, because I suspect that our understanding of time is so narrow and compromised that we don't know what terms like "after" really mean.

It's hard to look at the universe and see it as anything other than extremely, extremely peculiar. I figure that when it comes to matters metaphysical, all bets are off. Nobody has any freaking clue why this all came about.

[bearfinch]

I see no evidence that life and death are unreal.

Agreed. From what I understand (and I have read a few similar books on Buddhism), the idea of non-existence was originally taught as a way to think about life, kind of a way to put in perspective your desires and anxieties and such. It's like the Christian saying "all is vanity, and chasing after wind."

[missprune]

Well as you know from past communications between us, the only evidence that really persuades is one's own experience. But if I had not had my own experiences, I think reading NDE accounts would get me thinking that consciousness isn't limited to a functioning body! I agree that the "no individual really exists" is the tenet of Buddhism that I find silly as well as discouraging...