The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are lucky enough, if we are lucid enough, it may take us less than a lifetime to learn that to deny death is to deny life. Rilke knew this: “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” he wrote. Alice James — William and Henry James’s equally brilliant sister, whose chromosomes confined her to the margins of her time — knew this: “It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,” she wrote as she approached her untimely death.
An epoch before them, while the Western world was grappling intellectually with Montaigne’s unnerving assertion that the subject, the substance, the very purpose of philosophy is to learn to die, the Japanese samurai turned Zen priest Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659–1719) was attesting to it with his life and articulating with piercing precision the fundaments of the art of living lensed through death.
Samurai by Japanese artist Yoshitoshi from his series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1885-1892. (Available as a print and more.)
Born to an uncommonly elderly father who had already outlived the era’s life expectancy twofold, Tsunetomo grew up so sickly that the family doctor deemed him unlikely to live past twenty. And yet despite his precocious proximity to death — or perhaps precisely because of it — he became a samurai. Four centuries before Bruce Lee emerged as the philosopher-fighter of the modern world, Tsunetomo came to see that a true warrior trains both the body and the mind. Sensing that strength springs from sinew and spirit entwined, he apprenticed with a Zen priest and a Confucian scholar, took work as a scribe, fell under the spell of poetry, and eventually became a Buddhist priest and teacher himself.
Anchoring his teachings, transcribed by one of his disciples under the title Hakagure (public library) — perhaps best translated as Umbral Leaves — is the idea that death is the beating heart of bushido, the Way of the warrior, and yet we are wired to turn away from the very thing that makes us strong, constantly caging ourselves in denial. He writes:
We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like… But… if by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.
He offers a daily practice, potent and brutal as the birth of galaxies, to translate the cerebral understanding of life into the art of living:
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease… And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.
Our difficulty living and our difficulty dying, Tsunetomo intimates, spring from the same source — a troubled relationship with time, haunted by our constant self-expatriation from the only thing ours for the keeping: the naked now. Lamenting that “everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else,” he writes:
There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A person’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.
Centuries later, the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh — a modern samurai of the human spirit — would arrive at the same elemental truth in his surprising library epiphany about the meaning of life:
To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.
Complement with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living and Nathaniel Hawthorne on how not to waste your life, then let this poem teach you how to live and how to die.
The Samurai Guide to Dying Every Day – The Marginalian
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