How wonderful life is! It is so good to be born! There are no worthiness in the sort of happiness that leads to those thoughts.
Therefore seek only the happiness that makes you feel "It's okay for me to die here at this moment." Appreciation of living bears only attachments, but acceptance of dying will bear withdrawal from attachments.
Life filled with hope is, far more worse than life filled with despair. Despair bears true modesty and love, but hope only bears struggle, hatred and arrogance.
Death is not something to be described and explained, but a happening to be faced directly.
One time I had a feeling also to the person dying himself, death is to him not a sorrow. Death itself in not even a sorrow. Truly, neither sorrow nor suffering exists there at all.
If there was some single thing to exist there, it is the death of the mind. Upon the border of dying, a person begins to meet the utmost beauty of this world.
That is, true modesty, love, liberation and freedom. If there were no attachment to something at all, it would be the most beautiful, noble moment or the eternal, neither suffering nor sorrow.
Only the death experienced by a person who could die with his left over thoughts truly extinguished completely without a trace, is the true extreme of happiness, I earnestly think so.
If a death of a neighbor or a person himself is sorrowful, that is so only when attachment to something is there. If in peacefulness a person is to fall into death without any left over thoughts, and above all if it happens not only to his body but also to the mind itself, only then there is "everything" of a human being.
We surely must have come to birth only for this death …. the moment of this dying. There is nothing that is as gigantic than death, as beautiful as death, and truthfully as revealing truth as death.
We may not feel repulsed to losing "some part" of oneself. However, losing "you-yourself" is not so optimistic matter.
Many people could not even abandon his opinions, which are all the causes of the quarrel of the world.
How could those people laugh and talk about death lightly as if it is someone else's matter, at the moment of losing him-himself.
When was it, I said to my friend, "If people could experience the border of this death 4 times, when they were still alive, the world would have been something completely different..."
In such a world, no one would meditate or sit down for Zen. Because there is no more true Zen than the death of one-oneself, or the death of his most close neighbor inside whom there is him-himself.
Hence, if so, human beings would not sit down for meditation, but instead would in a sunny place, or in a rainy day, in their rooms enjoy having a true relaxing time.
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The truth that there are nothing to remain, the truth that you cannot carry anything with you, the truth that everything will be meaningless, the truth that all will end as if it is a dream, the fact that you-yourself will be extinguished, at the time of death those matters were supposed to be the beginning and the end of the true Zen.
There could be nothing else that could make you seriously realize something so-called anicca or vanity, than the death of you-yourself, or the death of another person on whom you laid the line, or "the death of something" in which you have invested yourself.
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Why am I preaching to somebody such a sermon which seems to be a futile effort?
I am only hoping that people would enter death in the extreme of happiness, because there is no other moment as beautiful.
That extreme happiness is the absolute relieving quietness itself.
To me, ever since that day, life faded into colorlessness. Everything of this world became a babble, or a play.
If they could experience their own death themselves, and experience that gigantic and beautiful happening, they would with absolute confidence say, no matter what the crowd or religions or Zen temples might say, "Man comes to birth only for the sake of experiencing the moment of death…."
A true Zen master, although supposedly he have died, is a deadman-traveller walking about dragging life uninterestingly. He is not living by himself, but he has been living.
Life only follows after him like a shadow. Looking at other people, death follows after his life like a shadow.
The difference is merely that much, between the people as such and not as such.
I should not have used the sort of words like Zen or dharma or TAO, but from the beginning, should have spoken with the words, "the way, death, relief, relax-ness, quiet happiness"
