The great irony of human existence is that our mortality is at the root of our search for meaning – the longing to make this short matter of life into the suffocation of space and time – and yet we spend our lives avoiding the fact that we die. If we are lucky, if we are lucky enough, it may take us less than a lifetime to learn that denying death is denying life. Rilke knew this: “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into full and loving presence with all that is, natural, loving,” he wrote. Alice James – the equally intelligent sister of William and Henry James, whose chromosomes had closed her to the edge of her time – knew this: “It is the most interesting time in life, the only truth when life seems to be life,” she wrote as she approached her unexpected death.
An era before them, while the West was intellectually opposed to Montaigne's assertion that the subject, the essence, the very purpose of philosophy is to study death, the Japanese Samurai transformed the Zen priest. Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659–1719) testified in his life and spoke with piercing precision of the foundations of the art of living and dying.
Born to an eccentric elderly father who was well past his prime, Tsunetomo grew up so ill that the family doctor thought it unlikely that he would live past twenty years. And yet despite his near death – or perhaps because of it – he became a samurai. Four centuries before Bruce Lee emerged as the philosopher-fighter of the modern world, Tsunetomo realized that a true warrior trains both the body and the mind. Realizing that power comes from muscle and spirit, he studied with a Zen priest and a Confucian scholar, took a job as a secretary, wrote poetry, and eventually became a Buddhist priest and teacher himself.
Reinforcing his teachings, written by one of his students under the title Hakagure (public library) — perhaps better translated as Umbral leaves – the idea that death is a beating heart it's a problemthe Way of the warrior, yet we are willing to turn our backs on the very thing that makes us strong, always in denial. You write:
We all want to live. And for the most part we make our mind according to what we like… But… if by setting one's heart every morning and evening, one is able to live as if one's body is already dead, one finds freedom on the Path. His whole life will be blameless, and he will succeed in his calling.
He offers a daily practice, as powerful and brutal as the birth of galaxies, to translate the brain's understanding of life into the art of living:
Meditation on the inevitable death should be done daily. Every day when a person's body and mind are at peace, a person should meditate on being torn by arrows, guns, spears and swords, being carried away by strong waves, being thrown into a big fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a big earthquake, falling off a cliff of a thousand meters without getting sick, a person should think of himself as a dead person every day.
Our difficulties to live and our difficulties to die, Tsunetomo intimates, come from the same source – a troubled relationship with time, plagued by our constant migration to our only last thing: the naked now. Lamenting that “everyone lets the present pass, and looks at it as if it were somewhere else,” he writes:
There is nothing but one present purpose. All human life is a sequence of moments. If one fully understands the present, there is nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live by being true to one short-term goal.
Centuries later, the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh – the modern samurai of the human spirit – would come to the same basic truth in his library epiphany about the meaning of life:
In order to live, we must always die. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.
Fill up on Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living and Nathaniel Hawthorne on how not to waste your life, and let this poem teach you how to live and how to die.
