RELIGION or POLITICS ?? How about DEATH....yours...? (Cont'd.)

( As explained in a previous blog, certain passages come directly from the book "Unlocking The Mysteries of Birth and Death" by Daisaku Ikeda, President of Soka Gakkai International.)


Hello my friends, welcome and how are y'all today? Yeah, good ole hump day, the rest of the week will go faster, and if you happen to be a Nichiren Buddhist, also happier. I say this latter with sort of tongue in cheek, because I assume most are not Buddhists .... but will be some day, in this life or another one of your lives in the decades or centuries ahead.

Anyway, I continue with the subject matter of Birth and Death. If you read my last blog, you may feel more at ease about it all, so onward we go.

The thought of death, the inescapable reminder of the finite nature of our existence, weighs heavily on the human heart. However limitless our wealth or power might seem, the reality of our eventual demise cannot be avoided. During our lives, we experience transience as the sufferings of birth ( and day-to-day existence), aging, sickness, and finally death. No human being is exempt from these sources of pain.

It was, in fact, human distress -- in particular the problem of death -- that spawned the formation of religious and philosophical systems. Shakyamuni, the original Buddha, in his accidental encounters with life's sorrows, glimpsed a dead body and was inspired to seek truth.
Plato stated that true philosophers are always engaged in the practice of dying; and Nichiren admonishes us to "first study death, and then study other matter."

Death Seen from a Larger Context

Modern civilization has attempted to ignore death. We have diverted our gaze from this most fundamental of concerns, attempting to drive death into the shadows. For many people, death is the mere absence of life; it is blankness; it is the void.

Life is identified with all that is good: with being, rationality and light. In contrast, death is perceived as evil, as nothingness, and as the dark and irrational. The negative perception of death prevails.

We cannot, however, ignore death. Today, many issues demand a re-examination and re-eval-uation of death's significance. These include questions about brain death and death with dignity, the function of hospices, alternative funerary styles and rites, and research into death and dying by writers such as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

Okay, I'm going to cut it off here because of the seriousness of the topic, the length of the discussion hereby, and will continue in the next blog. I do appreciate everyone who visits here, and I have hopes that somewhere along the way, I will get comments, for or against, to ad spice to the discussions, because I will answer all who take the time to visit.     Cheers.       CJ