Like a grown man among children stands the Buddha towards such fictions. With him death is nothing but living in a new environment. The distaff keeps ceaselessly turning; it is only that a new clump of wool has been placed on it. The discernment that life is of the nature of a process involves of necessity the discernment that life can persist only so long as the active affinities concerned are not overmastered by other affinities. Here again, to be sure, I can interpret death as a phenomenon of accommodation, but equally as well can I so interpret life, for here I am just the beginningless self-accommodating, self-attuning itself. However varied the length of time during which the attuning may last, however it may be prolonged by the use of specific contrivances, to speak of a potential immortality is to do away with the process-like nature of life, to make the never-resting actuality stiffen into a childish counterfeit. With the fact that I am born, the fact of dying is _guaranteed_ me. For beings can only be born if previously they have died; they must buy themselves their birth with their own death. Were we not born, then, to be sure, we need not die either. But to be born and yet not to see in death a necessity grounded in the very nature of life, this demands place alongside that passage in the book of Joshua: “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.” What a different ring has this word of the Master: “That that which has life should not meet with death--such a thing is not!” And yet it is so! We demand life-values at any cost; and, are the udders milked dry, then must death itself make good the lack!