Say who everyone is as you go along - Faculty of Philosophy ...

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calligraphy, painting, gardening, the tea ceremony and flower arrangement. Much of
what one thinks of as paradigmatically Japanese in culture is Zen.
The influence of Zen in Japan waned in the 16th and 17th centuries but
nevertheless spread to Korea and Vietnam. There was a renaissance in Japanese Zen
under the great Master Hakuin (1686—1769).
BEYOND DEATH AND SUFFERING
Both Nietzsche and the Zen Buddhists hold that the most fearful force confronting
any person is their own death, and both offer teachings according to which the fear of
death may be overcome. Neither Nietzsche's Übermensch nor the Zen Buddhist in
Satori fears death. Each has a power and an understanding which, although allegedly
non-metaphysical, allow death to be faced and undergone with equanimity.
Facing Death
The fear of death is not overcome by belief in a metaphysically transcendent afterlife.
For example, Nietzsche repudiates, and the Zen Buddhists do not endorse, any reality
similar to the Judeo-Christian heaven or hell. Rather they advocate a profound selftransformation
in what it is to be human. A human being has to become the kind of
being for whom death is not disturbing. This transformation is not essentially brought
about by the acquisition of new beliefs but by living in a different way. By the
practice of the kind of meditation called za-zen, and by ceasing to be subject to 'herd
morality’ or 'slave morality' a person becomes the kind of being who is not afraid to
die. Nevertheless, fear of death is defused by the acquisition of two central insights.
One concerns rebirth, the other concerns the self.
It is an entailment of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return and the Zen doctrine
of rebirth that any human being has been born and has died innumerable times before
this life. We face innumerable births and deaths in lives to come. Both doctrines
admit of both a metaphysical and a non-metaphysical interpretation, or both a literal
and metaphorical reading.
Read metaphorically, Nietzsche is saying that one should have the strength to
live one's life as if one could bear for it to be repeated in every detail an infinite
number of times in the future. One would then live with a life-affirming energy and
an authenticity of commitment which would make living thoroughly worthwhile. The
French atheistic existentialist novelist and playwright, Albert Camus, says at the start
of his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942):
‘There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Deciding
whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in
philosophy. All other questions follow from that.’