Buddha Mind Buddha Body by Thich Nhat Hanh

Author:Thich Nhat Hanh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parallax Press
Published: 2010-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

NO BIRTH AND NO DEATH

You are responsible for the triple action (what you think, say, and do) that you produce in every minute of your life. The example of the image of a wave may be helpful. You see the manifestation of a wave, a young person with a lot of energy, a lot of hope, a lot of ambition, and that wave of youthfulness is moving up and up. And when you come to the crest of the wave you begin to go down. And when you go down, you also produce a kind of force. This is a force of two kinds. Force one is the karma energy, force two is the grasping energy. And when you go down as a wave, you also produce force one and force two. That energy is very dynamic, it is the ground of your manifestation in this form, and the manifestation of the environment in this form.

Looking at the level of the sea, you might think that the rising up of the wave is the beginning, the birth of the wave, and the falling down is the ending, the death of the wave. But if we consider the two forces, we know that this energy is not born from nothing. There should be a force that pushes the wave to rise up from the flat sea. And if there is a force before the so-called birth of the wave it means you had been there in the past. You are the continuation of another wave in the past, because there must have been a wave before you that is pushing very strongly and that is why you are born here. So the rising up of the wave is not really the wave’s birthday, it is her continuation day. When the wave dissipates, it does not die. Nothing is lost.

Our understanding of continuation, though, doesn’t contradict the basic Buddhist teaching of impermanence. If you believe that there is a soul that remains the same forever and ever, leaves a body and enters into another body through time and space, you are caught in the idea of a permanent self. The Buddha confirmed that nothing is lost, nothing can be annihilated, but he also said that nothing can remain the same forever.

When we inquire about the words “birth” and “death,” we believe that there is a reality of birth beneath the appearance, a reality of death beneath the appearance. But if we are free from the word “birth.” we have a chance to inquire about the reality of birth. In our mind there is a tendency to think that to be born really means that from nothing you suddenly become something, from no one you suddenly become someone. That is our common notion of birth. You didn’t exist, and suddenly you exist.

Think of a sheet of paper, say the one these words are written on. The sheet of paper is supposed to have a birthday, like us—the day when it took this form in the paper mill.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.