동서양 종교와 철학의 기초: ‘죽음’의 문제를 바라보는 두 눈

Death has been one of the basic objects in philosophy and religion. Why do people feel afraid about death? Maybe it is because they don’t know the situation after death or because they have a wrong idea about it. Someone may think that he/she doesn’t care the situation. But this attitude is wrong. We must understand that our attitude about life is shaped by our knowledge of the situation after death.

A recurrent theme about death in popular thought is the idea that death is mysterious. As we have seen, it is difficult to formulate a satisfactory philosophical analysis of the concept of death. If it is impossible to analyse the concept of death, then it is impossible to explain precisely what we mean when we say that something dies. It might be said therefore that, in virtue of this fact, death is mysterious. Of course, death is not distinctively mysterious - all other unanalysable concepts are equally mysterious in this way.

Reflection on death gives rise to a variety of philosophical questions. One of the deepest of these is a question about the nature of death. Typically, philosophers interpret this question as a call for an analysis or definition of the concept of death. Plato, for example, proposed to define death as the separation of soul from body. However, this definition is not acceptable to those who think that there are no souls. It is also unacceptable to anyone who thinks that plants and lower animals have no souls, but can nonetheless die. Others have defined death simply as the cessation of life. This too is problematic, since an organism that goes into suspended animation ceases to live, but may not actually die.

The eastern philosophers proposed to define death as the nonduality of life and death. Taoists, for example, do not believe in the Wheel of Life of the Buddhists nor in the Heaven or Hell of Christianity. Taoists view existence as glorious. The whole Universe, they teach, is a marvelous, vibrant Unity wherein everything, visible and invisible, pulses with energy and changes. As being develops through the experience of existence, its vessels are swept onwards by the mighty stream of the eternal TAO to other forms of expression and activity. Man does not die; he merely extends into new fields. Taoists teach that the end of a person is the return to the Ultimate Reality.

“Life is uncertain - Death is certain”: This is a well known saying in Buddhism. Knowing very well that death is certain and it is a natural phenomenon that everyone has to face, we should not be afraid of death. Yet, instinctively, all of us fear death because we do not know how to think of its inevitability. We like to cling to our life and body and so develop too much craving and attachment.