Dogen. In dth there is nothing but dth

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That line — “In death there is nothing but death” — resonates very closely with Dōgen’s way of pointing at reality without ornament.

Dōgen (1200–1253), the Japanese Zen master and founder of the Sōtō school, often challenged people’s tendency to treat life and death as opposites or as stages of a linear journey. In his Shōbōgenzō, he wrote passages like:

• “Life is a position of time, and death is a position of time. They are like winter and spring.”
• “When it is life, there is nothing but life. When it is death, there is nothing but death.”

This isn’t nihilism — it isn’t saying death is “nothingness.” Rather, it’s an attempt to wake us from clinging to one state or fearing another.

When we’re alive, we are fully in the reality of life. When we die, that moment is completely itself — nothing extra, nothing lacking. In Zen terms, each moment is complete, whole, and without remainder.

So, “in death there is nothing but death” can be read as:

• Non-duality — death is not something opposed to life but simply what it is in its time.
• Liberation from clinging — no need to carry life into death or death into life.
• Radical presence — when we live, live fully; when we die, die fully.

Would you like me to pull the exact passages from Shōbōgenzō where Dōgen writes about life and death in this way?