Understanding life and death — free to come and go—free from fear of death. No need to look for worthiness it will arise of itself.’ |
That line from Linji Yixuan (often called Zen Master Rinzai) is pointing at a very specific kind of freedom—one that doesn’t come from controlling life, but from no longer clinging to it.
“Free to come and go” isn’t about literal immortality or indifference; it’s about not being psychologically trapped by fear—especially the fear of death. In Zen, that fear is tied to a rigid sense of “self” that feels like it must be protected at all costs. When that grip loosens, life is still lived fully, but without that constant background anxiety.
The second part—“no need to look for worthiness”—cuts in a different direction. Instead of trying to become worthy through effort, comparison, or approval, Rinzai suggests that worth isn’t something you manufacture. It shows up naturally when you stop measuring yourself against imagined standards. In other words, striving for worthiness can actually obscure it.
Taken together, it’s a kind of inversion of how most people operate:
- Instead of securing yourself against death, you see through the fear.
- Instead of chasing worth, you stop grasping—and something more grounded appears.
It’s not an easy teaching to apply directly. Most people don’t just “decide” to be free of fear. In practice, traditions around Rinzai—like Zen Buddhism—use meditation and direct inquiry (like koans) to chip away at those deeply ingrained habits.
If you sit with that quote for a bit, a useful question might be: what exactly am I trying to secure or prove right now—and what would it feel like to not chase that for a moment?
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