Jati, jaramarana

Meaning

The eleventh and twelfth links of dependent origination, the end of the chain - and, in part, the very problem Buddhism sets out to solve: having been born, we are subject to ageing and death. The other ten links explain how that comes about.

Birth as a sentence

Ageing-and-death follows on jāti as its condition, and with them come sorrow, lamentation, pain, dejection and despair. The problem, then, is not “bad decisions” or an unlucky turn of events - it begins with the bare fact of birth. Birth turns out to be something like a signature on a contract you cannot even read. And there is a great deal of small print.

Hence the canon views birth without festive sentimentality. In MN 26 the Buddha describes his search this way: being himself subject to birth, ageing and death, he set out to seek the unborn, the unageing and the deathless - Nibbāna.

The five messengers

In MN 130, birth, ageing, sickness, the consequences of unwholesome deeds, and death appear as five “divine messengers” (devadūta).

King Yama asks the one who comes before him: did you not see a helpless infant? an old person? a sick person? a criminal punished for his deeds? a corpse? Did it never occur to you: “I too am subject to this - perhaps I should do something wholesome”?

Reminders of the terms of our contract are sent to everyone, regularly. We are simply used to marking them as spam.

What jāti actually means

In the definition at SN 12.2, jāti is ordinary birth: the appearance of a being in one realm or another, the manifestation of the aggregates and the acquisition of the sense bases. On the classical reading of the chain, this concerns precisely the mechanism of new birth and continued existence in saṃsāra.

There is also a widespread modern psychological reading: the arising of a new identity - “I’m the wronged one,” “I’m successful,” “I’m the one everybody owes.” Each such act can be regarded as a small birth, inevitably followed by the collapse of that construction and the suffering that comes with it. The model works well for watching the mind here and now, but in the suttas jāti is quite literal.

In practice

Recollection of death - maraṇasati - was called by the Buddha a practice “of great fruit and great benefit,” leading to the Deathless. In its full version one sustains the awareness that there may not be time even until the next breath.

You can start more modestly - simply by not turning away from the messengers:

• notice a grey hair without panic and without the anxiety-reducing joke; better still, work with awareness of the sensations in the moment of noticing
• stay with the news of someone’s death slightly longer than is comfortable

The messengers are less there to frighten than to wake. The choice is ours: to be horrified, or to remember that time for what matters is a very limited resource.