What if the day of your death is written?

Dharma Notes

17 May

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

— Oscar Wilde

I invite you to try out a brief thought experiment. Somewhere in my explorations of Christianity, I came across the idea that the ‘day of our death is written’. That God knows when we will die, that our death is predestined. It’s the kind of idea I would normally reject straight away as not only un-Buddhist but unattractive. That is until you think about it more deeply.

So let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s put ourselves in shoes of a traditional Christian living, say, 200 years ago. They believe in God, as their parents and grandparents did, and part of that belief is that the day of their death is written. Not just their death, but that of everyone around them. Can you imagine that?

How would it affect the way you lived? How would it affect the way you faced death, your own, or the death of those you loved?

Here’s how it could be a helpful view; there would be a sense that whatever was happening was meant to be and couldn’t really be any other way. There would be less struggle with the reality of death, no sense that death shouldn’t happen or that we are in some way to blame.

I think not believing in God and having the teaching of conditionality instead can make us veer towards an exaggerated sense of being in control of our own destiny. I looked up the synonyms and antonyms for ‘predestined’ you get, on the one hand, definite, fated and inevitable. On the other hand, you have avoidable, preventable, unlikely.

So while I don’t think the day of my death is written, I’m working on not believing that it is in some way avoidable, preventable or unlikely!