A Note on (Dogen’s) Living-Dying

Dogen refused to consider life and death as separate from one another or as engaged in any type of warfare.  In other words, he would not have been sympathetic with there being within the human eros, a drive to life and ever more life, and thanatos, a death-drive.  This psychological picture, no matter how much it incorporates dying into living, does not fuse them enough; there is still that moment or those characteristics of dying that are distinct from those of living.  Dogen saw it otherwise: living-dying is for him completely fused, that is, it is impossible to separate the components of the alloy.  Indeed, they are not fused, for to fuse is to bring together two or more things: they are not at all.  Living-dying, instead, is one thing, one movement.  There is no life, in other words, and there is no death; only a linguistic or other fixation keeps us seeing the two as separate.  Everything is leveled down to its purity: living-dying.  Fear and paranoia over death, as much as the striving to maintain and further oneself in life, is neither completely mistaken nor completely true.  Not completely mistaken, because it still happens, and what happens must have its time to happen.  This time to happen is living-dying as one road, no matter the seeming of turning drastically from life to death or vice-versa.  Not completely true, because living-dying is the whole of what happens and each thing’s happening as it does happens.  We see that nothing happens alone, that the road to death is the road to life, that the road to life is the road to death.  There is one road, its spiraling turns make up still one road.