The meaning of dying
LIFE’S FINAL CHAPTER
by Winton Higgins
Life has meaning. That’s a truism. Doesn’t the same hold true for dying – life’s final chapter? What makes this life so precious is precisely its precariousness and its finitude, Martin Hägglund suggests in his book, This life: Secular faith and spiritual freedom.
Everything is burning. Burning with what? With the fire of greed, the fire of hated, the fire of confusion.’
– from the Buddha’s discourse on fire (photo Despina Margolis)
Secular faith urges us to ‘live on’ courageously: to live as long as possible, as freely, responsibly and as intensely as possible – as long as we retain the human capacities of feeling, thinking, and participation in communal life. In common parlance, we’re to lead our lives, not simply ‘live’ them and drift along.
Death comes as an entirely natural dénouement. We need to see our individual lives and deaths in a wider frame, as moments in a multigenerational, love-charged continuum stretching back through our ancestors, and forward through our biological and cultural successors.
Finitude reveals this perspective. It’s the antidote to the primal narcissistic dream of individual immortality, which ends in the nightmare of individualised death seen as a cosmic catastrophe.
In Hägglund’s perspective, we should aim to approach death with the same faith and integrity that has made our lives meaningful, now emphasising our care for those who will survive us. We’re going to leave a formative legacy in the hearts and minds of our biological and cultural successors, in the values we’ve modelled and the causes we’ve promoted in their sight.… ⁂
– excerpt from a dharma talk given to Kookaburra Sangha, Sydney, by Winton Higgins on 21 April 2025. Download the complete talk: The meaning of dying.
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FRESH ON THE SBN WEBSITE
What’s new in May
Here are the four most recent posts on the Secular Buddhist Network website:
1 - Meet SBN’s new board of directors.
2 - Buddhist Coalition for Democracy has joined Amicus Brief in support of Mahmoud Khalil
3 - Brian Victoria writes at length on Zen terror in 1930s Japan
Photo by Mark Duffel on Unsplash
4 - And finally, Ramsey Margolis asks: ‘Why do some people follow dharma teachers who demand obedience?’
A POEM
Listen
Image concept Brian Cleary, visual interpretation via ChatGPT/OpenAI
by Bernard Steeds
advice to self –
and to leaders
in times of crisis
and ordinary times:
you have no answers
not one
stop
& listen
to those who do not speak
to the pauses between words
to the gossip of leaves
to the boughs of trees
to the turn of tide
to the change of wind
to the spaces between droplets
of rain
to the clouds –
they see more
& ask better questions
to the cycles of time
the ancestral energy
the spin of earth
& hum of universe
listen
to those you oppose
and those you own
and those you have contempt for –
you who think your thoughts
& have already done so much
stop
it is time to hear.
– first published on Adda – the online magazine of new writing from around the globe
Bernard Steeds is a New Zealander who has worked as a political journalist, editor, researcher, policy analyst, and communications contractor and manager. A trained teacher of meditation and trauma-sensitive mindfulness, he has travelled extensively and has lived in Catalonia and London, as well as several New Zealand towns and cities. At present he lives in Wellington. ⁂
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