“Death is an illusion”: A Philosophical Exploration
What does Asian philosophy say about the nature of who we are?
Last summer, Netflix added a beloved animated series to its repertoire- Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender. The show is heavily inspired by Asian culture, and although it’s technically a show for kids (or at least that’s what it was intended to be) it contains a deep spiritual dimension to it- one that incorporates ancient Asian philosophy and spirituality.
In an episode titled “The Swamp”, the main characters meet Huu, an enlightened waterbending master who imparts some wisdom onto them. Of this wisdom, one particular part caught my attention, and it is when Huu says
In the swamp we see visions of people we’ve lost, people we loved, folks we think are gone. But the swamp tells us they’re not. We’re still connected to them. Time is an illusion, and so is death.
As I don’t really understand the complexity behind the physics of time, I’ll stick to examining Huu’s latter claim- that death is an illusion. This is a claim that I originally heard of from different formulations of what one might call “New Age Spirituality”. However, it’s also a claim with roots in Buddhist and Daoist philosophy, two schools of spirituality that are deeply embedded within Avatar: The Last Airbender.
The “arguments” that these Asian philosophies make for the case that death is an illusion are based on a certain kind of perspective of the self- in other words, they construct an idea of personal identity that’s different from the ones we typically have here in the West.
For example, some Western formulations of identity may claim that I am identical to my body, my soul, my mind, or some combinations of the three. Typically, the human body is in some way tied to our notions of who we are, so we view the biological dissolution of it as the death of oneself or of part of oneself.
How Buddhism constructs the “self”
In Buddhism, there is a different conception of personal identity. For the Buddha, there are five parts that come together to make up the human person. These parts include physical form, feelings, perceptions, volitions, and consciousness. Analyzing these different parts, the Buddha concluded that they are impermanent and always in flux, and thus that they are all unreliable bases for identity.
According to him, there’s nothing within our experience that we can point to and say “this is mine”, or “this is who I am”, as the parts that make us up are changing on a moment to moment basis. This is something that one can see during meditation, a fundamental aspect to Buddhist practice. One may see that, for example, thoughts, emotions, and feelings come and go, many times on their own.
From a biological perspective, our bodies also change at the cellular level from moment to moment- millions of cells are constantly dying and reproducing outside of our control. From the Buddha’s point of view, it doesn’t make sense to identify with or to claim something as “mine” if it’s impermanent and not within one’s complete control.
In the Samyutta Nikāya, an early Buddhist text, we find a king asking the Buddha if there is anyone who’s free from aging and death. The Buddha tells him:
…no one who is born is free from aging and death. Even those affluent khattiyas…because they have been born, are not free from aging and death. Even those affluent brahmins…are not free from aging and death. Even those monks who are arahants…(who) are completely liberated through final knowledge: even for them this body is subject to breaking up, subject to being laid down.
Here we see that the Buddha describes people such as khattiyas and brahmins (members of the warrior class and religious folk, respectively) as being subject to death. The Buddha makes a subtle distinction, however, when it comes to describing enlightened monks. Instead of saying that that they’re subject to death, he says their bodies are subject to decay and dissolution.
The Buddha describes them differently because, in the Buddhist view, people who become enlightened don’t identify with the different parts that comprise them. In other words, they’re free from the sense of “mine” and “me” when it comes to their bodies- they don’t see the breaking up of their bodies as the death of an “I”.
A Daoist perspective of death
In Daoist philosophy, we find a different kind of view of identity and its relation to death. There’s a story about the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi that describes this perspective:
Zhuangzi’s wife died. When Huizi went to convey his condolences, he found Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. “You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old,” said Huizi. “It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing — this is going too far, isn’t it?” Zhuangzi said, “You’re wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn’t grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there’s been another change and she’s dead. It’s just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter. Now she’s going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don’t understand anything about fate. So I stopped.
For Zhuangzi, our human existence is just one of the many forms that we take in our journey of constant transformation. It’s important to mention that this isn’t the idea of reincarnation or rebirth, at least in the literal sense. In fact, Zhuangzi’s view can be likened to our understanding of thermodynamics- energy is recycled and, in a way, takes various forms within the life cycles in an ecosystem.
The stuff that is us has always been a part of the universe and will continue to be a part of it, going through constant transformation. In this sense, one can say that death may be an illusion, as our human identities are not all there is to us- from a more cosmic perspective, our human form is one of many forms that make up what Zhuangzi called the Dao.
Rethinking Death
Both philosophical traditions introduce a potentially radical way of viewing death. According to Buddhism, enlightenment partly consists of no longer identifying with the different parts of one’s experience, including one’s body. So, to someone who’s enlightened, the death of the body isn’t seen as the death of oneself. For Zhuangzi, we are much more than our human selves (a self that is constantly changing form), so death can be seen as just another change that we must go through.
