Our master always asked people visited him to write answers down to three questions.
One of those questions was "how can you be eternally free from death?"
Unexpectedly some of them answered, "the body is dead, but soul is not dead",
so the master gave them the following dharma teaching about this.
"The term 'Death' needs to be taken out of every dictionary.
This is because if you see it from the viewpoint of Truth,
death does not exist but only changes. The idea that death exists is just a delusion.
When we go to the hospital and get a shot,
most of us feel pain before the needle enters our body.
It is the same thing with death.
At the moment of death, we start to lose consciousness
because it's too frightened for us to bear.
If we can be fully mindful of the moment of death till the end
without losing consciousness, then what will happen?
If we can thoroughly be awake at that moment, there is no death.
There is just a change.
Death is just the discontinuance of consciousness.
Death exists because we identify this body with 'I'.
We believe that if this body is dead, we are also dead.
But there is no death, unless we are attached to our body.
If the car we are using is getting old, we scrap it for a new one.
How silly it would be to think of our cars as ourselves. This body is not me.
When a fertilized egg was implanted in a mother's womb, consciousness enters the fertilized egg and starts to make flesh, and we call that our body.
We constantly takes nourishment and builds this body through cell division,
and then eventually we come to mistake this body for 'I' and cling to it.
If so, what is your true self?
If we give back all of this - this body is not me because it is made of food that we've ingested and four elements taken from outside, then what remains?
We just have to find something that is not only formless but mysterious
and neither birth nor death.
But it doesn't mean that we have to take our body away.
It means that although we use our body,
we should be aware of our own self which have no form.
It is like when we conveniently use our car, but we don't identify the car with us.
Identifying the body with 'I' is the very essence of ignorance."
