In Nyorai Zen, life is called the activity of living. And death, we say, is the activity of dying. According to Nyorai Zen, as a temporary, skillful means of thinking, enlightened people have said these activities of living and dying never end, they are eternal.

We are beings who have developed the power of knowing, so we recognize many different activities; for instance, we can say the “activity of good weather,” or “the activity of wind.” But if you really look at this carefully, you see they are all really manifestations of these two activities of living and dying. You can rename these activities the plus activity and the minus activity. We human beings have developed to the extent that we are able to think and to recognize phenomena in this way. We’ve developed to the point where we’re able to think about and acknowledge that which you can’t see - that which you can’t grasp in your hand. That is the standpoint of Nyorai Zen.

So if a ghost happens to appear or if a demon appears, if God appears or if the devil appears, or if you say, “I’m saved by God,” all of these activities are this very activity of living and dying. We don’t recognize in Nyorai Zen any other basic functioning besides this. But when you ask who is doing this recognizing, there is none other than the human being that is doing it.

In Nyorai Zen we say we are born from these two plus and minus functions. Christianity says you are born from God. I guess that’s OK to say, but in Buddhism we say that we are born from the activity of “suchness,” or tatagatha. These two activities of plus and minus are living together and acting together in one room. It’s never the case that they are functioning in two separate worlds. Because they are acting together in the same room, inevitably there will be a place in which they encounter one another. To say it simply, that place of meeting is the complete self.

This complete self has both the plus activity and the minus activity as its content. This is the true person. In this complete state there is no necessity to speak. There is no necessity to push anyone away. This is the manifestation of complete, true love and true compassion. When this complete self splits itself in two, then it becomes plus and minus again. When this separation of the complete self occurs, then in the interval between plus and minus, and living and dying, is the beginning of what we usually call the self.

This is really important. We have to ask: "Is the self born with the complete activities of plus and minus as its content, or not?" What do you think? If the self is born with the complete activities of plus and minus, with the complete activities of living and dying as its content, that would be God, wouldn’t it? If this were the case, it would not be subject to being controlled by living or dying. This is when we can, for the first time, understand what Buddha nature or the activity of the Buddha might mean.

Buddha—or we can say God—has this Buddha nature as its content completely. But in general, that which is born is not born in a complete state. All beings are born incomplete. To the extent that existent things are incomplete, then they must suffer through being controlled by the two activities of living and dying.

Clearly learn this principle while you’re still alive. Learn this principle of practice, of making living and dying completely your content. This is the teaching and perspective of Nyorai Zen.