..續本文上一頁fering is ignorance, ignorance about the true nature of yourself, of things around you. Since you don”t understand, you are too afraid and fear has brought you a lot of suffering. That is why the offering of non-fear is the best kind of offering you can make to someone.

　　[Bell]

　　We have ideas. We talk about it ,but we may not have a real understanding of the words we use, the ideas we have. In our mind, to die means from some one you suddenly become no one. You cease to be. You cease to exist. That is our understanding. In the same way, we think of birth as our beginning. What does it mean to be born

　　 To be born means from nothing, you suddenly become something. From no one, you suddenly become someone. That is our definition of birth and death. Because of these notions, we have kept our fear in us for too long. The Buddha invites us to bring our fear up and look deeply into the object of our fear: fear of dying, fear of non-being. That is the cream of the Buddha”s teaching. You cannot afford not to learn it because this is the best thing in the teaching of the Buddha.

　　There are many non-Buddhists who have discovered the reality of no-birth and no-death. Let us talk about, for instance, the French scientist Lavoisier. He looked deeply into the nature of things and he declared that nothing is born and nothing can die: “Rien ne se crée, rien ne se perd.” I don”t think that he had studied Buddhist sutras.

　　Suppose we tried to practice with a sheet of paper because a sheet of paper is what we call a thing. Let us practice together like Anathapindika, Shariputra, and Ananda, looking deeply into this sheet of paper. You may think that the sheet of paper has a birthday and will have a day of dying. We may imagine a day when the piece of paper is produced from nothing, it suddenly becomes something, a sheet of paper. Is it possible

　　 When you look into the sheet of paper in this very moment, you don”t have to go back to someday. Just look at it in the present moment. Into the true nature of the paper you see what

　　 You see that the piece of paper is made of non-paper elements. This is a very scientific way of looking, because you don”t accept anything that is not evident.

　　When I touch the sheet of paper, I touch the tree, the forest, because I know that deep inside there is the existence of the trees, the forest. If you return the element tree back to the forest, the sheet of paper cannot be here. Right

　　 I also touch the sunshine. Even at midnight touching the sheet of paper, I touch sunshine. Because sunshine is one element called non-paper elements that has made up the paper. Because without sunshine, no tree can grow. So touching the tree, I touch the sunshine.

　　I touch the cloud. There is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. You don”t have to be a poet to see the cloud in a sheet of paper. Because without a cloud, there would be no rain and no forest can grow. So the cloud is in there. The trees are in there. The sunshine, the minerals from the earth, the earth, time, space, people, insects—everything in the cosmos seem to be existing in this sheet of paper. If you look deeply, you find that everything in the cosmos is present in this moment in the sheet of paper. If you send one of these elements back to its source, the paper would not be there. That is why it is very important to see that a sheet of paper is made of, only of, non-paper elements. Our body is like that also.

　　So is it possible to say that from nothing, something has come into existence

　　 From nothing, can you have something

　　 No. Because before we perceive it as a sheet of paper, it had been sunshine. It had been trees. It had been clouds. The paper hasn”t come from nothing: Rien ne se crée. Nothing has been created. The day you believe to be the birthday of…

《Overcoming the Fear of Death》全文未完，請進入下頁繼續閱讀…