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Also.....Karma

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Posted by Glenn on September 18, 2001 11:46:01 UTC


No one could scape death.Death is envitable.In Buddhist cosmology, all phenomena are transient; all systems continually pass through repeated cycles of formation, continuance, decline, and disintegration. For humans, transience is experienced as birth, illness, aging, and death, the sources of pain that inspired Shakyamuni to seek truth. Death is the ever-present reminder of the finite nature of existence. Plato wrote that true philosophers are always engaged with death, and Nichiren warned us to study death before we study other matters.

As humans sought to conquer the fear of death by finding ways to partake of the eternal, they brought religion into the whole of human history. In modern scientific times, however, death has been seen as evil and irrational, and life as good and rational. Rather than overcoming death through faith, people tried to ignore it. But during this climactic period in modern civilization, what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls the "century of megadeath," we have begun to reexamine the meaning and nature of death. The current interest in brain death, funerary styles, and research by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and others all indicate a renewed sense that death is more than the absence of life. It is part of a larger, more essential whole that we experience as individuals and express as culture.

One way to understand life's essential eternity is in the Buddhist idea of an intrinsic (Dharma) nature within phenomenal reality, including life and death. Depending on and responding to environmental conditions, it alternates in cycles between emergence and latency. The Lotus Sutra teaches that the purpose of existence -- the eternal cycles of life and death -- is "to be happy and at ease." With faith, we can experience inner change and have joy in death as well as in life.

However, there are many people who live in trajic death. Some people die in unknown accident or death that suffers them. In buddhist viewpoint, this is part of one's life KARMA or destiny.

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