The Candle and the Weight of Watching

Under general anaesthesia three hours pass on the clock, and none in experience. No river of time flowed by itself, carrying an unconscious passenger. On waking, the familiar self is put together again: fully functional, and nowhere to be found as a standing spectator. The continuity was not a thing that persisted through the sleep. It was designated, on waking, across the gap in experience.

This is the first thing the death chapter asks the reader to see. The fear of death is not only a fear of pain, or of leaving people behind, though those are real. It is the fear that a particular experience, the taste of this afternoon and the light in this room, will be lost, and lost to someone who has been holding it. The fear presupposes two things: that experience is a possession, and that a possessor stands behind it who can be deprived. Remove the possessor and the second half of the fear has no subject. Remove the possession and the first half has no object.

Dōgen gives the image of firewood and ash. Firewood turns to ash, and ash does not turn back into firewood. Even so, Dōgen says, ash is not to be seen as what comes after, and firewood as what came before. Each abides fully in its own position. Life does not become death, as winter does not become spring. The image removes the sense of a sequence in which one thing is lost to make way for the next.

The dread of death, in its most common form, presupposes that the vividness of experience was inherent, and that it will be taken away with the self. Remove the presupposition and the dread loses its object. The view does not promise that anything of the person continues as the person. It does not claim a carrier after all. It does not make the loss of someone we love painless. What it removes is one particular dread: the image of an experience that is held, a holder who is taken away, and a holding left unfinished.

In its place the view offers a different relation to the present. Because nothing is being held, nothing is deferred. The value of this moment does not depend on how many moments come after it, since no moment was ever a container for the rest. Attention need not hurry toward a future it cannot have, or cling backward to a past it cannot keep. The luminosity of this appearance, its clarity, its colour and the sound in the next room, is available now, including to the one who is dying. That availability was never conditional on a long life.

The candle gives exactly as much light as before. Nothing is taken from it by going out, and the room is not darker for the flame's giving. What changes is the weight with which it is watched.

For the person who thought they had a self to lose, the burning down was a countdown to catastrophe. Once the self is seen as designated, the same burning is watched differently. It is not a loss suffered by a holder. It is the fact of appearance, undivided, lit and passing. The light was never something the candle owned, so its dimming does not subtract from anyone.

The view asks nothing of the dying about what comes after. It asks them to see that the thing they were holding was never a thing, and that what remains, the vividness of this moment, has never needed a bearer to be complete.

Toward Part III

The logic of substance keeps returning, and it returns through the three candidates for a ground: the Given, energy, and potentiality. Each has been shown to be a designation that works but cannot stand on its own. Continuity, too, was shown to need no carrier. What remains is the question of how the mind divides appearance in the first place, and what the analysis of that division can and cannot do. Part III takes up the eight extremes and the two modes of seeing.