Life and death are what every life needs to face, and death is the least valued in the process of life. Life is better understood than death. Especially for human beings, when a newborn baby first arrives in this world, the family will celebrate it and help him celebrate his birthday every year. As for the part of death, we tend to ignore it because we are afraid to face it or are afraid to see it, and we are afraid to talk about it.

In fact, it is more the problem of death than the problem of life. In the mother's womb, there is always a mother to take care of her. From the moment we were born, we had many friends and relatives who accompanied us as we grew up. Although people come into the world alone, as long as they learn to interact with people, they can not be lonely. And death is very lonely for us, no matter how much family, friendship, power, money and other worldly blessings we have, we can't take it away when we die, and it loses its meaning, and everyone must face death alone. No matter how much people fear death, when the time comes, they have to face it. Therefore, we need to learn to face death even more. As Buddhists, our greatest lesson is to learn to use our hard-won bodies to accumulate more good fortune and wisdom, so that we can not let ourselves die helplessly, but can wisely choose the way to face death.

Assuming that they are not religious and ignorant of death, most people will have a lot of fear of death. Many people think that life ends after death, as if a fire has been extinguished or water has evaporated, leaving nothing. In fact, this is not the case, life still goes on after death. Since life will continue, or assume that it will continue, how do we deal with another state of life that we don't know about, such as bardo?

Based on my long-term experience of doing end-of-life care in a religious way, I have found that many people, regardless of whether they have faith or not when they are alive, when they are facing death, they will see beings from hell or hungry ghosts appear in front of them, and they will feel very frightened. At this time, the dying person will regret that in this life, even though he has had enough time to accumulate good karma to avoid the fear at this time, he did not do it, so that he feels very frightened when he has to face it.

For people like us who have faith, this question is easier to understand and accept, because we believe in the existence of reincarnation, and we also believe that life in this life is short, and we will face life and death at any time. From another point of view, life and death are the beginning and end of a process, just like waking up from a deep sleep every morning, the previous day's life has passed away, and the day is the beginning of a new life, which is also a kind of life and death. In the process of the continuation of a thing, the end of the previous stage can be called "death", and the generation of a new stage after it can be called "life". Life and death can occur in a very short period of time. For example, when thinking about things, maybe you go from one, two, or three details to the end, but maybe in the middle of thinking about a detail, the thought is interrupted. This process can go on for seconds, minutes, or even a long time. In the operation of these thoughts, there are ephemeral births and deaths.

In the course of the life cycle day after day, we do repetitive things every day and say a lot of repetitive words. These repetitive actions, words, or ways of doing things have become more and more familiar as they reincarnate again and again every day. What continues in this way is what Buddhism calls habits, or the continuation of karma. What is more frightening is that in the process of birth and death of the mind, many different kinds of good and evil karma are created, and these karma will affect our future lives.

It's like a seed buried in the soil, and when it is moistened by soil, sunlight, water, fertilizer, etc., it will grow slowly. From the time the seed is planted in the soil, the seedlings grow, to the flowering and fruiting, it is actually the same plant that has been changing over time. The same is true of our lives, and the process of change is like a cicada shedding its shell, and it may look completely different when we are young than we did when we were old, but certain traits will be carried over, including habitual thinking and movements. All the good and evil thoughts and actions accumulated by inertia will become the source or seed of good fortune and wisdom in the next life. Therefore, when the mind is "generated", it becomes important how to make it a seed that can bring more wisdom and bring more blessings, that is, how to sow the right concepts.

The moment a thought arises, it begins to sow seeds in consciousness. Even in the mother's womb, prenatal education is equally important, because the fetus receives all information by consciousness, whether it is external words or the mother's thoughts, these good and evil messages will have an impact on the fetus's consciousness. Therefore, many mothers like to listen to beautiful and positive voices when they are pregnant, and do not like negative words such as bad words and hurtful words. After birth, this kind of positive thinking will continue to be instilled, from parents to school teachers, as well as social ethics and morality, including religious education, all teach us how to establish correct concepts.

For example, the bodhicitta taught by Buddhism, which allows us to learn the mindset of being responsible for all sentient beings, is also a way to sow seeds in the mind. To meet this kind of opportunity, there must be enough blessings. Suppose we should be compassionate to rats and other animals every day, that we should treat all living beings as equals, and that treating all living beings as precious as our own lives, even if we talk about them for a lifetime, they will not be able to agree with them, because their blessings have not yet reached this level.

Among the beings of the six realms, only human beings can truly think about "where I come from" and "what is the meaning of life", and also have the ability to make life better. This is important because if you don't think about the meaning of life and why you are here all your life, you will be like any other animal. But in fact, how many people really understand life? Fortunately, we can rely on the study of Buddhism to understand the purpose of being born in this world.

The first thing to know about this issue is that it is rare to be full. The reason why human beings are rare is because they understand the difference between humans and other animals. If you give a reason or lecture to sentient beings such as cats and dogs, they may not be able to understand it, and not being able to understand it does not mean that they are not smarter than humans. Many animals have some abilities that are much stronger than humans, such as the ability to spread their wings and fly in the sky, and the ability to swim tens of thousands of kilometers in the sea, which are lacking in humans. However, the biggest difference between humans and other animals is that they have the intelligence to think at multiple levels, they can think about the future and the past, that is, they have the ability to reflect.

Not only is our life not eternal, but it is also short. The ancients said that "life is rare for seventy years", and how many people can live to be seventy years old? And there are many difficulties to face in life, how many can die? When any little life is born, the way to express health is to cry and cry, not with a smile, which means that when you are in the womb, you feel that this world is a place of suffering, and you are ready to face pain when you come to this world. Therefore, when the Buddha talked about the Four Noble Truths of "Suffering Gathering and Destroying the Path", the first thing he talked about was suffering. The Buddha spoke about "suffering" three times in a row when he first preached the Dharma before he began to preach the Dharma. There is a lot of suffering in our lives, and to understand why there is suffering, we need to look for its source.

The alternation of life and death, said that the big is the interlacing of the beginning and end of life, and the small point, in fact, every minute and second is an evolution of life and death. Having a beginning and an end is a law in itself, and we tend to make radical distinctions and trade-offs, clinging only to life and ignoring death. A lot of the troubles and sufferings in samsara are actually caused by our own attachment to taking things out of context. Failing to respect the normalcy of things intellectually is a reversal. The Diamond Sutra says, "The mind was unattainable in the past, the mind is unattainable in the present, and the mind is unattainable in the future." If we can truly understand the meaning of the three minds that are unattainable, then there will be no difference between life and death.