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

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ends but I continue, or resume, as another such process. So when Roshi Hakun
Yasutani (b. 1885), the Master who attempted a synthesis of Rinzai and Soto in
Sanbo Kyodan (Fellowship of Three Treasures), says:
'Having once perceived the world of Buddha-nature, we are indifferent to death' (WD
8)
this cannot be fully understood in terms of changes in belief. It is not as though the
Zen doctrines of no-mind and rebirth are consolations for something that remains
fearful. The Buddha-nature is more fundamental than death. The cycle of birth and
death depends upon the Buddha-nature but the Buddha-nature does not depend upon
the cycle of birth and death. Yasutani’s 'perceived' does not mean 'perceived' in any
straightforward empirical sense. Yasutani is referring to the transformation in being
brought about by za-zen and other Zen techniques for awakening. The world is
ordinarily 'perceived' through thought and the five senses. (The mind is a sense in
Buddhism.) But the sensation of oneself as one being amongst others in that world is
no longer adhered to. Rather, that sensation is itself just one sensation amongst
others, one more recurrent episode in this life process. The sensation of self
repeatedly dies and is reborn. Once this is grasped, the cessation of this sensation is
not feared. After all, there are many moments without such a sensation. This is why
there was, all along, in a sense, no-one to die. The 'indifference' to death that
Yasutani speaks of is the absence of fear of death. It is not the presence of an
intellectual attitude but the absence of an emotion. Or, if the emotion arises, that too
is passively acknowledged as only another transient event. It is not felt. Or, if it is felt
(because it is essentially a feeling) there is no feeling of it over and above its being a
feeling and certainly no feeler of the feeling. Like other emotions, it arises and
subsides, is born and dies. It is not to be taken seriously.
Perceiving the Buddha-nature requires a certain de-conditioning or desocialisation.
We have been taught and brought up to fear death. Zen does not so
much reverse this conditioning but exposeS it for what it is: a constellation of belief
and emotion based on authority. Nietzsche also thinks we are conditioned into
regarding death as necessarily an evil, necessarily the greatest evil. If we can begin to
be aware of how we are socialised into fearing death we can begin to lose that fear.
He provides this example:
349
NOT ALL THAT IMPORTANT
When one witnesses a death there regularly arises a thought which, out of a false
sense of decency, one immediately supresses: that the act of dying is not as
significant as it is generally regarded as being, and that the dying man has probably
lost more important things in life than that which he is about to lose. Here the end is
certainly not the goal. (para 349 p. 165)