Showing posts with label life after death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life after death. Show all posts

Saturday, 10 May 2014

Sir Colin Davis and the life after death question

Wonderful interview on BBC4 a few weeks ago with the conductor Sir Colin Davis, not long before he died.


The interviewer asked him about age and death; Davis said he wasn't scared of dying, and the interviewer asked him if he thought there was a life after death.  Davis was, I reckon, getting a bit fed up with such questions, so he looked straight at the interviewer and said "I don't know; maybe you can help us out here."

Lovely moment. It showed the ultimate futility of banging away at this question, and the humility of a great man faced with an unanswerable question.



Similarly, a Zen master (look, don't expect references and footnotes from me, OK? I read it somewhere, maybe Brad Warner) was asked by his student "is there a life after death?"

"I don't know," asnwered the ZM.

"I thought you were a Zen Master," said the disappointed student.

"I am, but not a dead one," he snapped.