A. The Heart Sutra says, “There is neither birth nor death, nor is there the exhaustion of them.” This means that just as everything is empty, so birth and death are also empty and illusionary. In the same way that the universe is neither alive nor dead although its change is limitless and everlasting, nothing, including ourselves, ever perishes in essence as part of the true-Self even though everything turns into another form visible, or invisible in the middle of endless eternal change.
When we see ourselves as human beings, we have birth and death, but when seeing ourselves as part of the true-Self, we have neither of them. So, the meaning of ‘We are not born into the world’ in Buddhism is to realise that the essence of our being is free from birth and death.
©Boo Ahm
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway
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