Content Overview
This section has the following pages:
Although the book, The Zen of Living and Dying, has been divided into four main sections—Death, Dying, Karma, and Rebirth—in reality the life force cannot be divided into categories.
These convenient yet artificial divisions really represent movements or expressions of the one nameless “It”; each is part of a larger whole and at the same time the whole itself.
When life is truly lived and not conceptualized, such mental constructs as life, death, rebirth evaporate.
The basic aim of this book can be summed up in these words: to help the reader learn to live fully with life at every moment and die serenely with death.
Such an affirmative rapport with life and death is possible, however, only if one has discerned that death closes the circle on life just as life prepares the way for death, and that death therefore has a validity and a raison d’être of its own.
Such acceptance, moreover, makes it possible to face death courageously and to wisely take from it what it has to offer: a means to replace a worn-out, pain-racked body with a new one and, foremost, a once-in-a lifetime chance to awaken to the true nature of existence. …
Beings come and beings go, but the flame of life, the generating impulse animating all existences and underlying the whole of creation, neither comes nor goes; it burns eternally, with no beginning, with no end.
Aglow with this enlightened awareness, one can die not like someone being dragged kicking and screaming to the scaffold, but like one about to embark on an enticing adventure.
(Philip Kapleau, The Zen of Living and Dying: A Practical and Spiritual Guide)