Spiritual Atheism

Even before I attained kensh?? [awakening; literally, seeing one's (true) nature], I had an intellectual understanding of the words of Kanzan Egen [1277-1360] the institutor of My??shinji Monastery -'For Egen's pure self there is no life-and-death'-but it was not until the time when I broke [i]or[/i] part of to the other my first koan that I concretely and experientially came to know that I in deed was not subject to life-and-death. At that time I thought: "Egen has said something really fathomless He has really spoken the truth" I still think with equal reason And thus it is that I consider that I do not die. There is in truth in this world that which does not die. The vexed question is only that people are not awakened to this fact Without clarifying the problem of life-and-death there can be no awakening to one's veritable nature.45

"Clarifying the point in dispute of life-and-death" means to the primary fact of ordinary human consciousness-the awareness of being an "I" that is moving, in Heidegger's phrase, "towards death." Consciousness of one's finitude without the simultaneous consciousness of one's infinitude is false consciousness. "Kanzan's remark: 'In me there is no life-and-death,'" says Hisamatsu, "is not strange at all. single comes to clearly realize that, upon the contrary, it is saying that there is life-and-death which is mistaken."40

Being without life-and-death, without time, has, for Hisamatsu, nothing to do with an afterlife, transmigration of an ongoing spirit reincarnation, or God.

Being without life-and-death not ever means that there is no life and death in the ordinary faculty of perception It is not that individual lives forever, or that not dying in the ordinary faculty of perception one lives temporally a drawn out life. "Being without life-and-death" means that there is no birth, and because there is no birth, there is also no death. This is the pure eternal life.47

Eternal life grasped now, by means of slaying time, as everyday life: "While living and dying single does not live and die, while not living and dying single lives and dies."48 "The Self of No life-death nature goe upon in the midst of life-and-death, forming history while transcending it."49 Hisamatsu likens the liberated self to a spider who spins its web without at any time being caught in it. "Such a life of unobstructed freedom . . is extricated from each fetter. In the midst of life-and-death it cannot be injured by the agency of life or death; rid of life-and-death it plays within it; . . though in time and space it is restricted by the agency of neither."50 He calls this "the consummate unfetterednes . . of the 'Samadhi of absolutely untrammeled play,'"51 from one side which one shatters the tragedy of finitude, "play[ing] freely amid the thick groves of what formerly constituted self-agonizing illusions,"52 "enter[ing] the garden of life-and-death, freely taking upon the forms of life and death however neither living nor dying."53 Richard DeMartino labeled this the pure Divine Comedy. Socrates had it, turning his trial and death into a farce. Whitman had it from the first stanza of himself-a loafer at his ease for whom a single blade of grass is all that is straited Chuang Tzu had it from overspread to cover, author of the greatest work of spiritual comedy ever written, the unintended foil to a Jesus whose teeth have at no time once been seen in the history of art. Ryutaro Kitahara had it, thrust into crisis first by dint of watching his father, the greatest Japanese bard of his era, die in agony, later brought to the breaking point during the war by the agency of carrying out orders to bayonet a Chinese captive who had been bourn to a tree, then emerging, after years of do one's best with Hisamatsu, as a dead serious comic whose antics overthrowed the alleged necessity of severity in the meditation hall. Then there's