death and nothingness or life after death

[dean haywood]

after speaking to a buddhist friend,who beleaves when you die you become nothing i wandered what others though about this,i believe we move onto another level of existance what are your views

[Susthama]

Great - thanks for starting this thread and opening it up for discussion.

I suppose I've got more questions on this topic than answers, and probably because only those who have died 'know' what will happen. Until we have had an experience of death (and there are several accounts of near death experiences) all we have are ideas or beliefs: some more useful than others.

Rebirth in Amida's Pure Land is what a Pureland Buddhist or Nembutsu practioner believes will happen to them after they die. In the Larger Pureland Sutra (which is available from the main page, in the side-bar on the righthand side) you'll find a story that the Buddha tells Ananda about a monk Dharmakara who became the Buddha of the Western Pureland. And this place is basically a place where there is no suffering - therefore conditions in which one automatically attains enlightenment.

Going back to your friend's comment though, I'm not sure if believing that you become nothing after you die is a Buddhist view.

[Rachel mcHugh]

Hi
I am not sure what i think but I suppose I have always had it in my head that we are reborn and get another chance to live a more spiritual life but we are not necessarily reborn as human but have the opportunity to experience life from a different perspective, I'd quite like to experience being a bird. I also think eventually we get to a stage where we reach enlightenment and are not reborn but are at peace and free from suffering

[dean haywood]

i beleive that after death we are reborn in the pureland on another level of conciousness,that we carry on on a spiritual path towards perfection,note i say towards not to,i dont know if it is ever possible to be perfect.i think the pureland is a place of learning ,wisdom,and compassion free of pain and suffering.i also believe we never stop learning and progress through different levels of wisdom,but until i die i have not really got a clue,

[Joaquim Monteiro]

Dear Dean:


I think that you are posing a question that is very important for contemporary Buddhism and specially for Buddhism in the West, but that has no ready made answer. Today we may find a clear divide among traditional and modernist or demythologized forms of Buddhism, and this happens even in Traditional Buddhist countries in Asia like Thailand and Japan.
For most of traditional Buddhism the continuity of Sansara beyond death implies essentially in an extension of suffering, but this kind of mundane continuity is seem almost as one of the givens of tradition. On the other hand, modernist Buddhists show a very strong tendency to deny every reference to a post morten continuity as a kind of "mythological thought" but this position has a clear difficulty: it makes almost impossible to distinguish Buddhism from the indian
schools of naturalist thought like the Carvaka and the Lokayatta.
I can give you no ready made answer, but it is clear for me that at least in countries like Japan this divide between traditional and modernist understandings is strongly present even in the Pure Land tradition. I have some thoughts about this matter and I would like to express them in the best occasion.



Thak you very much-Namuamidabu.
Joaquim Monteiro. Shaku Shoshin.

[Dharmavidya]

There really is no way to settle this since those who assert that there is no post-mortem continuity are not willing to accept the testimony of those who say that they have experience of previous lives or of near death experience. The pre-conviction is so strong that whatever evidence were brought forward all effort would be put into explaining it away. If one has a modern education one is led to think in such a way. In my own case, I have such experience and I have a modern education and this induces a split that cannot be reconciled. The manner in which one has been taught to think in school and the experience that one has had simply cannot be squared with one another. This dichotomy has been a driving force in my spiritual life throughout this lifetime.

As a Pureland Buddhist, however, one simply accepts that if one hitches oneself onto Amida's pure karmic stream one will at the time of death be transferred to Sukhavati - whatever that may mean. And, if one takes the Sutra at face value it means a realm that is not substantially different from this one except that in that realm the intention of the Buddha prevails.

[Robert McCarthy]

There is a chemical -dmt-that is released both in the womb and at the moment of death through the pineal gland. A book by Rick Strassman titled dmt the spirit molecule discusses the outcomes. The author was associate professor of psychiatry at new mexico university and in 1990 he began the first new research into psychedelic drugs in the us in over 20 years. He was also a decades long practicing zen buddhist.
He administered this drug to many volunteers over a period of some years and questioned all volunteers as peak experience passed. The peak effect occurred at the moment of injection and lasted some ten to twenty minutes. All volunteers reported immediate out of body experiences that were as real as anything they had ever experienced. Many were taken to other worlds, populated worlds that had a lived in reality similar to life on earth- but it was not our planet.Here are some comments the author makes-
- the dmt release at forty nine days after conception marks the entrance of the spirit into the fetus.
- he suggests that dmt affects the brains ability to receive information rather than only generating those perceptions.
- he suggests that dmt can allow our brains to perceive dark matter or parallel universes, realms of existence inhabited by conscioius entities
- the author concluded that dmt acts as a door turning key at the moment of death.
DMT has been used illicitly since the sixties and is the vital active ingredient in ayahusca. In my opinion, such an extravagant chemical is not released to give us an interesting vista on the road to oblivion. The effects quite obviously accord with amidist beliefs

[Kaspalita]

Hi Dean,

At time in the past, I have been someone who believed he was going to Heaven, if he was good enough, someone who thought that he would become nothing, and was happy with that, and someone who thought there's bound to be something, but I don't know what.

I don't know where I stand really - it's a great unknown. And yet, the more I travel through life, the stranger things I encounter and hear about, many of these experiences I can explain scientifically, but some I can't - so for me the question is open ended.

I *do* have a sense that whatever happens at the point of death, all will be well.

In Buddhism of course the idea is something like, the quality of our mind/heart at the moment of death, the quality of our faith, will determine what happens to us....


Robert, I've heard of that before - but if I'm honest, I don't know anything about it, I'll have to do some more reading I think!

Namo Amida Bu

[dean haywood]

thanks for ur thoughts ,it is the great unknown,it doesnt worry me anymore,just something that perhaps one day i will know.

[Robert McCarthy]

kaspalita, if you find the place to look more into this matter of death and dmt please share thoughts with me. i saw death as oblivion, but this was tempered by some growth in buddhist faith. to me this book is the only time a scientific approach pointed out some awareness beyond death, and one that really does accord with pureland belief namo amida bu

[richard meyers]

Not much to add to what has been said, apart from my sense of inhabiting a just universe, which also implies balance and fairness and that we all are ultimately saved, held by whatever there is that does the saving. Amida/Life steps in and saves us, even at the point of death. My sense is that this is so and I have also been helped by viewing prayer from a trans-temporal perspective, in that we can pray for people that have died already, that they may have a 'good death'. This is something that has helped me following sudden bereavement and I believe helped my loved ones that have passed away unexpectedly.
Having said this, of course death is the great unknown, about which we can only intuit what it is really like.

Another source of hope for me is the universality of dying: nothing and noone escapes it. We have been doing it since the beginning. This doesn't mean that I am not afraid of the process - I don't want to suffer. I guess the bodies production of DMT is another clue to how our bodies have learned to cope. I am also intrigued by the idea that DMT may serve as a window into a deeper knowing.

As for what lies beyond our dying - ? My earnest hope is that Love is what awaits each and every one of us. The arms and compassion of the Buddha and a place of beauty very like this one, but minus war, suffering children and vivisection etc..

Namo Amida Bu