Different Religions have defined cycle of Life and Death
differently.
According to
Communist View,
Life and death are a pair of a cyclical phase, such
as day and night or summer and winter.
Life and death are each other's
companion. Life and death are not two
factors in opposition.
They are two
aspects of same reality, arrested moments out of the flux of the universal
mutations of everything into everything. Man is no exception; "he goes
back into the great weaving machine, thus all beings issue from the Loom and
return to the Loom.
Death is
natural, and men ought neither to fear nor to desire it.
According to Biological View,
"To live is to function" and "that is
all there is in living."
But
who or what is the subject who lives because it functions?
Is
death the irreversible loss of function of the whole organism that is of every
one of its component parts?
Or
is it the irreversible loss of function of the organism as a whole, that is as
a meaningful and independent biological unit?
To
perceive the difference between the two questions is to understand many modern
controversies about death.
The described dichotomy is clearly
part of a much wider one. Civilizations fall apart yet their component
societies live on. Societies disintegrate but their citizens survive. Individuals
die while their cells, perversely still metabolize. Cells can be disrupted yet the enzymes they
release may, for a while, remain active. Such problems would not arise if
nature were tidier. In nearly all circumstances human death is a process rather
than an event.
A quiet, "classical" death provides
perhaps the best illustration of death as a process.
Several minutes after the heart has
stopped beating, a mini-electrocardiogram may be recorded, for signals from
within the cardiac cavity. Three hours later, the pupils still respond to Pilocarpine
drops by contracting, and muscles repeatedly tapped may still mechanically
shorten. A viable skin graft may be obtained from the deceased 24 hours after
the heart has stopped, a viable bone graft 48 hours later, and a viable
arterial graft as late as 72 hours after the onset of irreversible cardiac
stoppage. Cells clearly differ widely in their ability to withstand the
deprivation of oxygen supply that follows arrest of the circulation. Similar
problems arise, but on a vastly larger scale, when the brain is dead but the
heart are kept going artificially. Under such circumstances, it can be argued,
the organism as a whole may be deemed dead, although the majority of its cells
are still alive.
According to Indian View:
The Song of Creation”
From the Rig Veda
Then there was not non-existent nor existent:
there was no realm of air, no sky
beyond it.
What covered in, and where? and what
gave shelter?
was water there, unfathomed depth of
water?
Death was not then,
nor was there aught immortal:
no sign was there, the
day's and night's divider.
That one thing,
breathless, breathed by its own nature
apart from it was
nothing whatsoever.
Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness,
this All was undiscriminated chaos.
Among the
collected hymns of the Rigveda, the The Song of Creation”
From the Rig Veda
Then there was not non-existent nor existent:
there was no realm of air, no sky
beyond it.
What covered in, and where? and what
gave shelter?
was water there, unfathomed depth of
water?
Death was not then,
nor was there aught immortal:
no sign was there, the
day's and night's divider.
That one thing,
breathless, breathed by its own nature
apart from it was
nothing whatsoever.
Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness,
As in Rig Veda "Song of Creation."
"Death was not there," it states, "nor was there aught
immortal." The world was a total void, except for "one thing,
breathless, yet breathed by its own nature." This is the first recorded
insight into the importance of respiration to potential life. Inhaling air in
breath is the source of life without which death is imminent.
The Upanishad record the quest for a coordinating
principle that might underlie such diverse functions of the individual as
speech, hearing, and intellect. An essential attribute of the living was their
ability to breathe. Their prana "breath" is so vital that on its
cessation the body and its faculties is lifeless and still. The concept of the soul is central to an
understanding of most practices related to death. Just as we rid off the
clothes when they are torn and used up, so is our body and the soul leaves it
to enter into a new one. It is immortal and so the cycle of life goes on.
Human Soul is that God particle in our body that
survives after death and it transmigrates to a new life or is released from the
bonds of existence. While in the early Vedic texts it occurred mostly as a
reflexive pronoun oneself, in the later Upanishads it came more and more to the
fore as a philosophic topic. It made other organs and faculties function and
for which indeed they function and it underlies all the activities of a person,
as Brahman the absolute underlies the workings of the Universe.
Of the various systems darshans, the Samkhya Yoga
and the orthodox school of Vedanta particularly concerned themselves
with the emancipation of the Soul, though the interpretation varied in
accordance with each system's general worldviews.
According to Buddhism,
Buddha based his entire teaching on the fact of
human suffering. Existence is painful. The conditions that make an individual
are precisely those that also give rise to suffering. Individuality implies
limitation; limitation gives rise to desire; and, inevitably, desire causes
suffering, since what is desired is transitory, changing, and perishing. It is
the impermanence of the object of craving that causes disappointment and
sorrow. The Buddha departed from the main lines of traditional Indian thought
in not asserting an essential or ultimate reality in things. Moreover, contrary
to the theories of the Upanishads, the Buddha did not want to assume the
existence of the soul as a metaphysical substance, but he admitted the
existence of the self as the subject of action in a practical and moral sense.
Life is a stream of becoming, a series of manifestations and extinctions. The
concept of the individual ego is a popular delusion; the objects with which
people identify themselves--fortune, social position, family, body, and even
mind--are not their true selves. There is nothing permanent, and, if only the
permanent deserved to be called the self, or atman, then nothing is self. There
can be no individuality without a putting together of components. This is
becoming different, and there can be no way of becoming different without a
dissolution, a passing away.
To make clear the concept of no-self (anatman),
Buddhists set forth the theory of the five aggregates or constituents of human
existence: (1) corporeality or physical forms (rupa), (2) feelings or
sensations (vedana), (3) ideations (sañña), (4) mental formations or
dispositions (sankhara), and (5) consciousness (viññana). Human existence is
only a composite of the five aggregates, none of which is the self or soul. A
person is in a process of continuous change, with no fixed underlying entity.
According to Islamic View,
Questions concerning the meaning of life and the
nature of the soul are dealt with in both the Qur'an and the Hadith. The Qur'an
records that, when asked about these matters by local leaders of the Jewish
faith, the Prophet answered that "the spirit cometh by command of
God" and that "only a little knowledge was communicated to man"
(17:85). Humanity was created from "potter's clay, from mud molded into
shape" into which Allah has "breathed his spirit"
A vital spirit or soul is within each human being.
It is associated, if not actually identified, with individuality and also with
the seat of rational consciousness. Death is repeatedly compared with sleep,
which is at times described as "the little death." God takes away people's
souls "during their sleep" and "upon their death." He
"retains those against whom he has decreed death, but returns the others
to their bodies for an appointed term" (39:42-43). During death, the soul
"rises into the throat" (56:83) before leaving the body. These are
interesting passages in the light of modern medical knowledge. The study of
sleep has identified the episodic occurrence of short periods during which the
limbs are totally flaccid and without reflexes, as would be the limbs of the recently
dead. Modern neurophysiology, moreover, stresses the role of structures in the
upper part of the brain stem in the maintenance of the waking state. Lesions
just a little higher cause excessively long episodes of sleep. Irreversible
damage at these sites is part of the modern concept of death. Finally, various
types of breathing disturbance are characteristic of brain-stem lesions and
could have been attributed, in former times, to occurrences in the throat.
Nothing in these passages outrages the insights of modern neurology. The
absence of any cardiological dimension is striking.
According to Jainism,
Jainism made paramount the mendicant life of
meditation and spiritual exercises dependent upon the fulfillment of vows of
poverty. The functions of the priesthood were sublimated in a process of
self-salvation, centered around the purpose of the deliverance of a suffering
humanity from the cycles of rebirth.
An ultimate distinction between "living
substance" or jiva and a-jiva, the doctrine of anek-antavaha, or
non-absolutism, the doctrine of naya, the thesis that there are many partial
perspectives from which reality can be determined, none of which is, taken by
itself, wholly true, but each of which is partially so, and the doctrine of karma, a substance, rather than a process, that
links all phenomena in a chain of cause and effect.
As a consequence of their metaphysical liberalism,
it developed a unique theory of seven-valued logic, according to which the
three primary truth values are "true," "false," and
"indefinite," and the other four values are "true and
false," "true and indefinite," "false and indefinite,"
and "true, false, and indefinite."
According to Christianity,
Death is at the very core of the Christian religion.
Not only is the Cross to be found in cemeteries and places of worship alike,
but the premise of the religion is that, by their own action, humans have
forfeited immortality. Through abuse of the freedom granted
in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve not only sinned and fell from grace, but
they also transmitted sin to their descendants: the sins of the fathers are
visited on the children. And
as "the wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23), death became the universal
fate. "Therefore
as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death
spread to all men" (Rom. 5:12).
Christian theologians spent the best part of two
millennia sorting out these implications and devising ways out of the dire
prognosis implicit in the concept of original sin. The main salvation was to be
baptism into the death of Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:3-4).Among early Christians
delay in the promised Second Coming of Christ led to an increasing
preoccupation with what happened to the dead as they awaited the resurrection
and the Last Judgment. One view was that there would be an immediate individual
judgment and that instant justice would follow: the deceased would be
dispatched forthwith to hell or paradise. This notion demeaned the impact of
the great prophecy of a collective mass resurrection, followed by a public mass
trial on a gigantic scale. Moreover, it deprived the dead of any chance of a
postmortem expiation of their misdeeds. The Roman Catholic notion of purgatory
sought to resolve the problem; regulated torture would expiate some of the sins
of those not totally beyond redemption. The view was that the dead just slept,
pending the mass resurrection. But as the sleep might last for millennia, it
was felt that the heavenly gratification of the just was being arbitrarily, and
somewhat unfairly, deferred. As for the wicked, they were obtaining an
unwarranted respite. The Carthaginian theologian Tertullian, one of the Church
Fathers, outlined the possibility of still further adjustments. In his Adversus
Marcionem, written about 207, he described "a special concept that may be
called Abraham's bosom for receiving the soul of all people." Although not
celestial, it was "above the lower regions and would provide refreshment
to the souls of the just until the consummation of all things in the great
resurrection." The Byzantine Church formally endorsed the concept, which
inspired some most interesting art in both eastern and western Europe.
In the Final Analysis,
Human Soul is that God particle in our body that
survives after death and it transmigrates to a new life or is released from
bonds of existence. While in the early Vedic texts it occurred mostly as a
reflexive pronoun oneself, in the later Upanishads it came more and more to the
fore as a philosophic topic. It made other organs and faculties function and
for which indeed they function and it underlies all the activities of a person,
as Brahman the absolute underlies the workings of the Universe.
Of the various systems darshans, the Samkhya Yoga and the orthodox school of Vedanta
particularly concerned themselves with the emancipation of the Soul, though the
interpretation varied in accordance with each system's general worldviews.
“The Song of Creation”
From the Rig Veda
Then there was not non-existent nor existent:
there was no realm of air, no sky
beyond it.
What covered in, and where? and what
gave shelter?
was water there, unfathomed depth of
water?
Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal:
