“The aspect of life and the aspect of death are equally real, and reality is that which appears now as life and now as death. It is both life and death, at the same time is neither life nor death. It is what we have to call the nonduality of life and death” (Nishitani Keiji – Religion and Nothingness).
The teleological conception of the natural world has given way to a mechanistic one
Modern science and technology have completely transformed the ancient view of nature. The natural world has “assumed more and more the features of a world cold and dead, governed by laws of mechanical necessity, completely indifferent to the fact of man… it is a world in which we find ourselves unable to live as man, in which our human mode of being is edged out of the picture or even obliterated.” This, Nishitani explains, is the result of the collapse of the ancient teleological order of the natural world. He writes: “The laws of the natural world used to be regarded as part of the divine order, a visible expression of the providence of God. The order of the natural world and the order of the human world were united in a single great cosmic order. This meant that everything in the universe existed by virtue of being assigned a specific place in the whole. As an order, it was conceived teleologically; and as a cosmic order, it was seen to witness to the existence of God … and beyond that, a ‘divine providence’ … The teleological conception of the natural world gave way to a mechanistic one.” Nishitani then asks: ‘Is it possible for us to regard a natural order so indifferent to our human mode of being as to rub it out, as belonging to a greater divine order? Or is such an indifferent natural order altogether incompatible with the concept of God? Religion has yet to confront science at this fundamental level.”
“Reality itself is two-layered: from the very outset life is at one with death”
What upsets us when faced with this displacement of human-based experience by the abstract conceptual constructs of modernity, can be regarded as an opportunity to become aware of a deeper truth. Nishitani writes: “Up until now, religions have tended to put the emphasis exclusively on the aspect of life. ‘Soul’ has been viewed only for the side of life. Notions of ‘personality’ and ‘spirit’, too, have been based on this aspect of life.” And yet, we must remember that “from the very outset life is at one with death. This means that all living things, just as they are, can be seen under the Form of death.”
late 18th century
One way to internalise this two-layered nature of reality in Buddhism is through “a method of meditation known as the ‘death’s-head contemplation’.” (In its early stages, Christianity may have had something similar.) Japanese artists have often painted this theme by portraying a skull lying in pampas grass,” a theme Nishitani also found in the great poet Basho who introduces one of his haiku with the remark: “In the house of Honma Shume, on the wall of his Noh stage, there hangs a painting: a tableau of skeletons with flutes and hand-drums. Truth to tell, can the face of life be anything other than just this? And that ancient tale about the man who used a skull for a pillow and ended up unable to distinguish dream from reality – that, too, tells us something about life … During the course of his wanderings Basho was obliged on one occasion to pass the night in the wilds. A sudden flash of lightning in the dark showed him that he had taken to bed in a meadow, with the pampas grass alongside his face. The tradition of Buddhist death’s head contemplation and the frequency of the theme in art form must have led him to his poem. But there is also something new here. A living man experiences himself, as living, in the image of the skull on the pampas grass. There is more to be seen here than simply a meadow. It is what is being pointed to in the Zen saying ‘Death’s heads all over the field’. Let the field stand for the Ginza or Broadway: sooner or later the time will come when they will turn to grassy meadows.” And here is Basho’s haiku: “Lightning flashes – Close by my face, The Pampas grass.”
Parallels can be found in Christianity in the words of a disciple of Jesus:“Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” And Jesus said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down [Mark 13:1-2] and in modern western poets such as T S Eliot who wrote in the Wasteland: “Unreal City; Under the brown fog of a winter dawn; A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many; I had not thought death had undone so many.”
Right now, one can see the Ginza or London Bridge, “in all its magnificence, as a field of pampas grass. One can look at it as if it were a double exposure – which is, after all, its real portrait. For in truth, reality itself is two-layered. A hundred years hence, not one of the people now walking the Ginza will be alive, neither the young nor the old, the men nor the women. As the old saying goes, ‘With a single thought, then thousand years. And with ten thousand years, a single thought’… We can look at the living as they walk full of health down the Ginza and see, in double exposure, a picture of the dead. Basho’s lines are also about the Ginza.”
“This kind of double exposure is true vision of reality. Reality itself requires it. In it, spirit, personality, life, and matter all come together and lose their separateness. They appear like the various tomographic plates of a single subject. Each plate belongs to reality, but the basic reality is the superimposition of all the plates into a single whole that admits to being represented layer by layer. It is not as if only one of the representations were true, so that all the others can be reduced to it. Reality eludes all such attempts at reduction.” It is both the fixed, substantial, inanimate “thing” we encounter when dealing with issues in our everyday lives, and the flow of dynamic interpenetrating, seemingly animate phenomena that we experience when we sit in meditation, or simply stop trying to grab what we see, and manipulate the world in order to consolidate our sense of being.
“The aspect of life and the aspect of death are equally real, and reality is that which appears now as life and now as death. It is both life and death, at the same time is neither life nor death. It is what we have to call the non-duality of life and death.”
Source:
Nishitani Keiji – Religion and Nothingness (serialised from 1961 onwards – English translation 1982)