The primary and ardent desire of everyone not to taste death can only be satisfied in a twofold way.
( 1 ) Either death is not a necessity of nature ;
( 2 ) death is not what we take it to be.
To the Buddha, as to every rational person,it was clear that death is an unavoidable necessity of nature. The flux of all matter is to be seen in change ; the most radical change when our material organism disintegrates is called 'death'. Consequently, if we are to avoid the assumption that man's deep - seated longing for immortality has no prospect of fulfilment, then we are left with only one way out of the difficulty, that death fundamentally does not touch us at all. The Buddha's investigations were in this direction ; the problem of overcoming death not by theological shortcuts but on the basis of a logical-positivist (and indeed psychocybernatically thought out) Meta-Thanatology (Science of Dying) . But what must death be, if it is not to touch us ? There can be no doubt that what death destroys cannot be our inner essence ; it only destroys something which we can do without. Only in this way can our absolute annihilation in death be excluded on principle . For death signifies destruction of that which has already declined, as is clearly demonstrated by corpses which disintegrate into their inorganic elements. If, therefore , death embraced our true inner essence, it would inevitably destroy us wholly .
We can speak of immortality only so long as, something in man does not change even in death. All religions speak of 'something ' immortal in man which they call a soul . . . .What then do we understand by the inner essence of a thing ? It is that through the abolition of which the thing itself is abolished ; it is that which ultimately endows the thing with its reality ; it is the kernel, the essence of the thing. The opposite of this is what is ' inessential ' to a thing, and is constituted by its ancillary qualities, which may even be absent without affecting the thing in its ontological reality. In this sense everything in the world has an inner essence. Man too has an inner essence, which from time immemorial has been called the Self. With the word ' I ' everyone means that in which he is ultimately boundup . . . .
The word ' I ' as the declaration of one's own actuality represents the most selfevident thing that can be imagined. Shankara says : ' We cannot demonstrate the Self to anyone (through proofs ) . For it is that which employs all the means of proof, such as perception etc. in order to demonstrate a thing that is not known . . . . the Self is the basis (asraya) for the activity of proving , and thus is established even before the activity of proving . . . we can dispute a thing that comes to us ( from with out ) but
not the thing that is our own inner nature.For whoever disputes it simpl y questions his o n true nature.'
Descartes expresses the same when he says : ' That it is I who think, doubt, understand and will is so evident that it cannot be made clearer b y anything else . . .
The most naive and natural man or the most thoughtful philosopher, with the materialist or spiritualist, with the individualist or the pantheist ' they all ask themselves : A m 'I ' mortal or immortal ? a question whose solution follows from that into which one now puts his ' I ' and thus how one answers the other question : in what does this 'I' really consist ? From time out of mind man's faculty of reason has produced the most varied answers to this question of immortalty but without reaching any agreement.
Why is this so ? As we have just said, the question about the immortality of our ' I ' coincides with that concerning the nature of our ' I ' . Everyone has an answer ready ; there is no lack of definitions for our ' I ' ; but they all amount to tautological assertions which do not satisfy those who make them.
Schopenhauer was once arrested for walking in a park at a prohibited hour. The attendant asked him : ' Who are you ? '
Schopenhauer replied : ' Ah , my dear fellow , if only I knew the answer to the question " Who am I ? ".
The major premise of the psycho-cybernetic syllogism of the Buddha is : That which I see arise and pass away in consequence of this, its transitoriness, cannot be the ' I ' ; my real Self. If my cashbox is stolen from me, the loss causes me suffering, but this theft has not removed anything of my ' I ' , of my Essence. My Self cannot possibly be that which I see disappear and then know as having disappeared.
As an old man I deplore the fact that I no longer have the strong bod y which I had as a youth. I thus complain about something which for a long time has ceased to exist. Consequently to the major premise
already laid, down we can add the minor premise : I see my body in its whole range and size incessantly arise and pass away ( and so cause me suffering) in consequence of this, its transitoriness, the body is not my real ' I ' or the Self.
We must recognise these premises as a datum of such immediate certainty that it is rooted directly in intuitive cognition. It cannot be ' demonstrated ' any more than the axioms of mathematics ; in other words, it cannot be reduced to elements of intuitive perception which are even more immediate.
Like the axioms of mathematics it does not even need to be demonstrated, for it speaks for itself, it is right without more ado. Accordingly , the Buddha does not demonstrate it further, but always gives it out as something self - evident which is unhesitatingly accepted as such b y all his hearers ; indeed this is done regularly in the following form of question and answer : ' But , mendicants, can we really say of
what is transient, sorrowful and subject to constant change ; " This belongs to me, this is I, this is my Self ? " '
' Certainly not, Lord '
Thus this major premise is axiomatically certain. It does not contain any positive characteristic of our real ' I ' or the Self. It has only a negative characteristic, so that with it we do not get to know anything
about the real nature of our ' I ' but are only able to say in what our Essence does not consist. Yet even in this negative version the major premise leads to a significant and logical conclusion. The main point is that the datum assumes nothing that is not expressly stated, and contains nothing which would not be accepted as self - evident by everyone , even by the anti-metaphysical neo-positivists .
Belief in the immortality of our body is absurd and no one asserts it and in no case does that body outlast death, for it disintegrates in death and perishes entirely. This plain truth is brought home to us by every corpse , by every cemetery, but above all by every crematorium with its ashes. Indeed as one of the Jataka stories puts it, there is no spot which does not contain the dust of the dead ; or as Voltaire says : Le globe ne contient que des cadavres (the globe contains only corpses ) .
What principle or part of our personality is it which is supposed not to be subject to death ? One may say that it is the mind. But what is understood by this word ? Mind is synonymous with thought ; and this again consists of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and imagining. According to degree it is resolved into feeling, perceiving and imagining ; to begin with, we feel something, we then perceive what is felt , and turn it over in our minds. These different manifestations of consciousness are therefore summarized under the concept ' mind ' . . . Everything mental is also dependant on and conditioned by the material sense organs of our body including the brain. A mental activity without sense organs or w i t h a seriously damaged brain is just as impossible as digestion without a stomach.
I n short, thought - consciousness or mind is the product of physiological processes of our body in general, and of the functions of sense organs in particular. The so called astral body is not touched by the destruction of the grossly material body but because this astral body consists of matter, albeit of the finest kind/ it, like all matter, is transient. The essence of matter consists in change, and so the astral body too must perish ......
Our body consists of materials from the, external world which are reduced to definite, chemical substances. This reduction or assimilation proceeds in such a way that used up materials are constantly eliminated and fresh ones introduced with the result that after a certain time all parts of it have b y then been replaced. I m a y deplore this constant change of the body, as soon as it becomes one for the worse ; as an old man I deplore the fact that I no longer have the strong body which I had as a youth . I thus complain about something which for a long time has ceased to exist. Consequently to the major premise we can add the minor premise : I see my body in its whole range and size incessantly arise and pass away in consequence of this, its transitoriness, the body is not my real ' I ' or the Self.
Something about which a man can complain after it has passed away cannot be his Self. How could it be his real ' I ' for the Self still observes an ego deploring the loss of a youthful body . If it had been ' I ' who had declined and disappeared, then I could not complain now.But if the destruction of the body ' I ' had as a child and then as a man did not also take me away, then naturally the destruction of the body ' I ' shall have as an old man will not take me away. If during my lifetime I have learnt how to control my
thoughts completely then I may feel confident of gaining insight into immortality even at the hour of death ( how in my ontological essence I am as little diminished by it as I have been by daily excretions . ) The body is only an apparatus with which we project sensations, perceptions and ideas ; and with
these mental activities the whole of personality. The body along with all mental functions may disappear but I myself as the real Self or Atman am in no way affected.The end of my body and the consciousness attached to it will not be m y end. Consequently as I can see how not only my body, but also all mental states, all thoughts, arise and pass away and are transitory, neither the body nor the mind is m y "real ' I ' or Self.
My Self or Essence, therefore, does not perish with my body and mind at death.
Note:
This article was published as it is in
" The Mountain Path" Vol 7 No. 4 Oct 1970" and written by DR. P. J. SAHER.
About Dr. P. J. Saher:
Dr. P. J. Saher, a Parsi doctor living at Muenster in West Germany, is
President of the Internationale Gesellschaft fur Religionsphilosophie
und Geistesgeschichte. He is also a close friend of the Altbuddhistische
Gemeinde of Utting am Ammersee, which has become The Mountain Path
agent for
Germany and Austria.
Note : The only objective of sharing this article is to compile the
thoughts and work of Dr. P.J. Saher at one place for benefit of his
followers.
