For Buddhism, the dualism between life and death exemplifies a more general problem, dualistic thinking. We differentiate between success and failure, etc., because we want one and not the other, but their interdependence means grasping one also maintains the other: thus our fear of failure equals our hope for success. In the same fashion, there is no life without death and -- what we are more likely to overlook -- no death without life. So the problem is not death but life-and-death. If we can realize that there is no ego-self which is alive now, the problem of life-and-death is solved. When there is no one who has life, there is no reason to fear death. If the ego-self is an ongoing project whereby consciousness tries to grab hold of itself by objectifying itself, unmediated experience 'of' the Unborn is the final shipwreck of that project. The ego-self forecloses on its greatest anxiety by letting-go and dying right now.

　　 Needless to say, this cannot save the body from aging and rotting; then how does it solve our problem? Because the Buddhist approach implies that death is not our deepest fear and immortality not our deepest hope, for they too are symptoms representing something else. Even death-terror represses something, since that terror is preferable to facing one's lack of being now: death-fear allows us to project the problem into the future. In that way we avoid facing what we are (or are not) right now. This implies that our ultimate hunger is ontological: it will be satisfied by nothing less than becoming real, which in the nondualist terms of Mahayana Buddhism can occur only by real-izing that I am one with -- nothing other than -- the whole universe; and that is possible if the sense-of-self is not what I really am.

　　 Why do we need to keep projecting ourselves indefinitely into the future, unless something is felt to be lacking now? The obvious answer is that we are afraid of losing something then we have now; but many have argued that if life is not something we have but something we are, there's nothing to fear because we shall not be around to notice (what) we're missing. As Epicurus (1951: 122) stoically asserted, 'the most horrible of all evils, death, is nothing to us, for when we exist, death is not present; but when death is present, then we are not.' The basic problem is that our grasping at the future rejects the present; we reach for what could be because we feel something lacking in what is. Brown (1959: 277) summarizes the matter brilliantly: time is 'a schema for the expiation of guilt', which in my Buddhist terms becomes: time originates from our sense of lack and our attempts to fill in that lack.

　　 The Buddhist perspective suggests that if nothing is lacking now, then immortality loses its compulsion as the way to resolve lack, and whether we survive physical death is no longer the main point. Our most troublesome repression is not life-repressing-death but sense-of-self repressing its suspected nothingness. The solution is to 'forget' oneself and let-go, to become nothing. Meditation is learning how to 'die' by becoming absorbed into one's meditation. It is an exercise in de-reflection: consciousness unlearns trying to grasp itself. Enlightenment occurs when the usually-automatized reflexivity of consciousness ceases, which is experienced as a letting-go and falling into the void. 'Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is not really void, but the realm of the real Dharma' (Huang-po, in Blofeld 1958: 41). When my consciousness stops trying to catch its own tail, I become nothing, and discover that I am everything -- or, more precisely, that I can be anything.

A Schema for the Expiation of Guilt
The distraction of human life to the war against death ... results in death's dominion over life. The war against death takes the form of a preoccupation with the past and with the future, and the present tense, the tense of life, is lost. (Brown 1959: 284)

　　 It can hardly be coincidental that Being and Time inverts the relations just considered among death, self, guilt and time. Since Heidegger offers a mirror-image of the perspective presented above, it is not surprising he draws opposite conclusions. [2]

　　 Being and Time doesn't discuss the unconscious, yet references to 'forgetfulness of Being' make it clear that Heidegger too is concerned with something like repression. Again, the key repression is death: awareness of our finitude can open the door to authentic existence. For Heidegger, death is even more important as a means to disclose the nature of Being, whose horizon is temporality. This section will briefly retrace the double route (inauthentic and authentic) that Heidegger travels from death to the self constituted by care, itself grounded in time, to show why his authenticity is not authentic enough. Both his alternatives are preoccupied with the future because they are reactions to the inevitable possibility of death. To see how time might be experienced without the shadow of death, we must turn to other alternatives such as the Buddhist deconstruction of time.