This morning at 3 am I opened an email with a mondo question about a movie called either Do or Let Die (which I couldn’t find online, and might have been confused with Live and Let Die) or A Time to Die (a 1991 film with ex-porn star Traci Lords). I assume, though, that the movie in question is actually the latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die.
The question went something like this:
“After watching the movie, it occurred to me yet again that all literature illustrates that all life is conditioned and impermanent and that human suffering is caused by our denial of this truth.
“We deny it because we love, which is desire, and don’t want to suffer the loss of what we love. Because of this desire, because of love, we perpetuate all suffering. Should we not love? Can we not love? Are we doomed to love?
“Can that love make us cause the suffering and death of the delusional perpetrators of suffering as a solution?
“Can we stop the cycle of violence and suffering?
“What should a practitioner do when faced with the loss of country, friends, neighbors, and loved ones under these circumstances?
“What is the correct action?”
I’ll begin by saying I grew up on James Bond movies and books. It would not be too much to say that they had a very formative influence on me and my view of the world, for better or worse. I think No Time to Die may be the best.
The film begins as Death comes stalking over an icy terrain in the form of a killer wearing a mask from the Japanese Noh stage. Warped by his personal suffering, the villain behind the mask is bent on Karmic Revenge. He is the archetypal teenage shooter. Because his bad complexion has scarred him, he wants to mow down all the guys, like Bond, who get the girls. And the girls too. In other words, he is out to destroy the whole world. He is the face of the poison Anger, in spite of the serene mask he wears.
Meanwhile, Bond is chilling in Jamaica, fishing and living the life in retirement, detached from involvement with world affairs. Until he is recruited to return to active duty to stop the villain who threatens to destroy the world. We should know, however, that it is useless to stop Death or Karma. Only for so long can even Bond put off Death — or the End of the World.
Here at the outset Bond embodies the Buddhist dilemma in a nutshell. Do I try to achieve nirvana for myself in this life through nonattachment, purifying my practice, like the arhats and lohans of old, by dwelling in ku? Or do I enter the fray of shiki, of samsara, of the shit, and try to help all beings through engagement in the affairs of this world, trying to transform the suffering of others? The Peace of Buddha, or the Determination of Daruma?
Yes — and yes.
But we must first learn to think of the challenge in this way: Life is a game that we can’t win; we can only put off losing. As the ending of Oedipus Rex tells us, “Now as we watch and await the final hour, count no one happy till they die, free of suffering at last.” Bond has put off losing to Death through numerous books and films, until now.
We can’t choose not to die. We can’t say, “I have no time for that. This is no time for me to die.” What we can do is to choose to act honorably, or not, as long as we live. We can choose to act as wisely as possible, or not. We can put all our training and expertise to work to “stop the cycle of violence and suffering,” but we have to know in advance that this is ultimately impossible.
The question in the email implies that there is a way out of suffering in this life and that we, as practitioners, should be able to avoid suffering, if not for ourselves then for others. If only we could find “the correct action.”
One assumption seems to be that we might avoid suffering by not loving (which seems to be confused with desire, but desire is only one form of love, the love of attachment and clinging). And early James Bond movies certainly gave the impression that the way to nonattachment was by becoming a cold-hearted spy in the house of love (to borrow the title of an Anais Nin novel).
The question about suffering seems to refer to the Four Noble Truths. But what does the Heart Sutra say about the Four Noble Truths? It says that these are Four Noble Illusions. Go back to Mushotoku Mind, Chapter Ten, which I entitled “The Four Noble Truths That Are Not.” There is no suffering, no cause of suffering, no path to lead from suffering. In ku there are none of these; there is only mushotoku, the attainment of no attainment.
Suffering, in other words, is caused not by love but by being attached to shiki, to an outcome, an attainment, desire, passion. And as we know, passion means suffering.
Like so many other people, I have been suffering recently because of the actions of a few people in a courtroom, dressed in black robes like priests, who have decided that we no longer have certain rights. When the questioner asks about “losing a country,” that’s what comes to mind for me. Not as a physical refugee, although that is terrible, but by losing the idea of a country, which is after all what a country is, at least that’s what this country is. Not founded on land or borders or blood, and not on some divine right, nor on race, but on a noble idea of freedom and equality: the great experiment. But like Bond, we are only able to enjoy a brief respite from fighting the injustices before reentering the fray because there is always someone in a white mask or a black robe who wants to take revenge on the world.
But to return to the question: “Should we not love? Can we not love? Are we doomed to love?”
The beautiful thing about this Bond movie is that it shows that Bond is human. He is not immortal. “Just a boring family man,” said one disappointed and cynical viewer. Bond is no Superman. He has no pretensions of becoming a buddha. “Too stupid to become Buddha,” wrote Dogen in a poem that Deshimaru quotes, “I only desire to become a true bodhisattva / And help all beings cross to the other shore.” Isn’t that better than becoming Buddha? Perhaps all bodhisattvas are just boring family men and women — because their heroism is pointless — or perhaps better to say “winless” — since we are all engaged in a losing struggle with the inevitability of suffering.
As my Tai Chi instructor always said, “Just begin by relaxing into the recognition that you have already lost.”
Are we doomed to love? Let’s hope so. Love isn’t our doom; it is our salvation. Or rather: it is both our doom and our salvation. That doesn’t mean it makes us immortal, though. Immortals don’t love.
Perhaps it is true that “all literature illustrates that our lives are conditional and impermanent,” but it does not follow that it is “our denial of this fact that causes suffering.” Suffering causes suffering. Life causes suffering. There is no way out of suffering. There are only ways to deal with suffering or, as the sutra says, to “transform” suffering.
Literature makes distinctions between different genres, which are really our different reactions to the reality of our lives. Tragedy weeps over life’s impermanence. Comedy laughs at our impermanence. Tragicomedy tries to show that our lives are a mixture of laughter and tears, and sometimes a spasm of the two combined.
No Time to Die gets the tragicomic cocktail just about right — for an action movie. (The real genre of the action movie, the spy movie, is of course romance, but there are different flavors of romance.) The slippery Bond is finally cornered, and being human, he is proved to be no superman but mortal after all (even boring family Superman had a mortal weakness, love or nostalgia for his home planet in the form of Kryptonite). Bond accepts that mortality and his fate. He acts honorably, which is all we can do. That’s a tragic motif, of course, but the redemption is worth it, as in the tragedy of Christ whose sacrifice is comic in the end because it redeems not only his own suffering but that of the rest of the world forever and ever amen. It’s the supreme Christian myth, isn’t it. A divine comedy disguised as a human tragedy.
The question in the email seems to want to avoid the inevitability of failure, of suffering, of death. As though “as practitioners” we can suss out some “correct action” that will cheat suffering, cheat death. As practitioners, which means “as humans,” we can only do what we can do. Little as it is.
We sometimes think our practice is about improving ourselves, improving our actions, improving the world — even though I have tried over and over again to discourage this way of thinking about our practice. Our practice, as passed down to us through Kodo Sawaki and Taisen Deshimaru and Robert Livingston, is to align ourselves with the cosmos, and the cosmos is pretty clear that it doesn’t care. That is not to say that we should not care about our actions, but we should not trick ourselves into believing that there is a right and wrong answer, a right and a wrong action on a cosmic level. On the contrary. This is why we must take responsibility for our human actions so that we can create the meaning that is not inherent in the universe by discovering how to act with compassion within its carelessness.
If that means dying for love, like Bond, so be it. We should all be so lucky.
But let me end by letting Deshimaru have the last word. Here’s what he says in Chapter Ten of Mushotoku Mind about how to deal with suffering:
“In the end it is enough to forget yourself, to forget your ego, and all the sufferings in the world disappear of their own accord. You must begin by sitting peacefully, legs crossed and head straight, and let the whole painful story of humanity flow into your consciousness, without intervening, without being frightened and trying to flee. Just as the Buddha did.”
After zazen, you can go back to saving the world.
— Richard Collins
Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time to Die (2021).