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\n\t\t\tThe great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning \u2014 the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time \u2014 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: \u201cDeath is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,\u201d he wrote. Alice James \u2014 William and Henry James\u2019s equally brilliant sister, whose chromosomes confined her to the margins of her time \u2014 knew this: \u201cIt is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,\u201d she wrote as she approached her untimely death.
\nAn epoch before them, while the Western world was grappling intellectually with Montaigne\u2019s 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\u20131719) was attesting to it with his life and articulating with piercing precision the fundaments of the art of living lensed through death.
\nSamurai by Japanese artist Yoshitoshi from his series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1885-1892. (Available as a print and more.)
\nBorn to an uncommonly elderly father who had already outlived the era\u2019s 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 \u2014 or perhaps precisely because of it \u2014 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.
\nAnchoring his teachings, transcribed by one of his disciples under the title Hakagure (public library) \u2014 perhaps best translated as Umbral Leaves \u2014 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:
\nWe all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like\u2026 But\u2026 if by setting one\u2019s 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.
\nHe offers a daily practice, potent and brutal as the birth of galaxies, to translate the cerebral understanding of life into the art of living:
\nMeditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one\u2019s 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\u2026 And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.
\nOur difficulty living and our difficulty dying, Tsunetomo intimates, spring from the same source \u2014 a troubled relationship with time, haunted by our constant self-expatriation from the only thing ours for the keeping: the naked now. Lamenting that \u201ceveryone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else,\u201d he writes:
\nThere is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A person\u2019s 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.
\nArt from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.
\nCenturies later, the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh \u2014 a modern samurai of the human spirit \u2014 would arrive at the same elemental truth in his surprising library epiphany about the meaning of life:
\nTo live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.
\nComplement 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.<\/p>\n