When Antoine Lavoisier declared that nothing is born, nothing dies, he came very close. That is about the law of the conservation of energy. [Thay writes on the board.] Let us imagine, let us draw a line representing time, going from left to right, from the past to the future, and pick up one point and call it B, representing the birth of something, our own birth. Every one of us has a birth certificate. And we believe that we begin to exist only from that moment. Before that, we did not exist. So the segment ending with B represents non-being And the segment beginning from B on, is called being. And to be born means from non-being you pass into being. That is our way of thinking. To be born means from no one, we become someone. That's our way of thinking. From the realm of non-being, you come to the realm of being. And interestingly enough, science is still caught in that notion. Scientists are trying hard to answer the question, how the cosmos has come into being? How from non-being, the cosmos has come into being? That is why there are theories like Big Bang and so on.

We have observed already a cloud. We know that before she expressed herself in the form of a cloud, she had been something else. She has not come from the realm of non-being. It's impossible for something to come into being from non-being. A cloud is a continuation of something, like the water in the ocean, the heat. She has not come from non-being. Her nature is the nature of no-birth. Rien ne se crée—nothing is born. And birth is only a notion. It cannot be applied to reality. Cessation is the removal of the notion of birth.

[Thay writes on the board.] And then when we come to one hundred years later or less, to a point we call death D. The segment B-D represents our lifespan. Remember, the Diamond Sutra suggests that we remove the notion of a lifespan. The Diamond Sutra, a text that is very cherished in the Zen tradition. And the belief to die means from being, from the realm of being, we pass again into the realm of non-being. And that is our notion of death. Death is from something, you suddenly become nothing. From someone, you become no one. And that is the reason for our grief, our despair. As for our cloud, although she is no longer there, visible in the sky, but she has not passed into the realm of non-being. She has become rain and tea. She has become snow. And she can be seen in the rice field, in the wheat field. She continues always. It's impossible for a cloud to die. She can become rain or snow or hail, but she can never become nothing.