Zen

Q. What happens to an enlightened person after death? Do they remain in undifferentiated oneness forever and never become an individual again?

A. An individual body is to the true-Self as a wave is to the sea and as wind is to air. What happens to a wave in the sea after its death? What happens to wind after its death? After a wave loses its form, that is, after it dies, the sea, the essence of the wave is still there. We don’t think that the sea dies or is destroyed when a wave disappears. After death, everyone, regardless of whether he or she is enlightened or not, still remains where he or she has been. You should know that the essence of our being is the true-Self, Oneness, and that everything we see and hear, including our individual bodies, is just part of, or the function of the true-Self, just as all waves of all shapes and all sizes are merely part of, or the function of the sea.

The difference between an enlightened person and an unenlightened person is that the former is aware of this fact while the latter is not. The former knows that death is not the end of our being but only a tiny part of the endless change of the everlasting true-Self. So, it is said that to the enlightened there is no death, whilst the unenlightened are haunted by a ghost of death that doesn’t exist.

©Boo Ahm

All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s