Like other phases if life, dying is a natural part of the human process. Yet, for many, there is an insufficient understanding of this phenomenon. We fear death and it is a topic that most of us seek to avoid.
This is because any disc9 of death inexorably makes us reflect back on our lives and makes us ask the questions if life is so fleeting, then why are we here? What purpose?
Once Siddharta gautama, a prince who enjoyed the extravagance of life, encountered the realities of old age and death, he decided to give up his worldly possessions to seek answers to these same questions. Ultimately he discovered the answers and became the buddha the enlightened one. The lessons on life and death that the buddha had uncovered 2500 years ago still reverberate with us today.
The buddha taught that all conditioned things, that is, all things that are affected by cause and effect, share one identical property impermanence. Nothing in this world is permanent and unchanging not even our thoughts and personality. We and everything else, are conditioned to fade and die it is from our failure to realize the reality of impermanence that we develop attachments to material things, living and otherwise.
Amid the specter of death our needs for food, shelter, money, companionship, and a lasting legacy begins to take root. Consequently, if we fail to satisfy these needs, we find that unhappiness, and ultimately, human suffering, arise.
The buddha taught that the cure to suffering is to cultivate our wisdom and compassion in order to lead a life unhindered by attachments and ultimately achieve a freedom from the fear of natural laws of old age, death, and impermanence.
As such death plays an important role in the buddha's teachings the arrival of death is regarded as an occasion of major significance for buddhists for the deceased, it marks the moment when the fruits of his past actions transition his rebirth into a new life for the relatives of the deceased, death is a reminder of the buddha's teachings on impermanence, and an opportunity to assist the deceased person ti advice into a better form of existence is his or her new life therefore the concept to death, in proper Buddhist understanding spurs an individual to lead a proper life. This investigates the phenomena of life and death from Buddhist perspective.