A pertinent Question 

Sometimes the question is posed whether the Buddha lives after death or whether He does not live after death. To answer either way is wrong, because Buddha does not exist, either to live after death or to not live after death. 


The Bodhisatta conquered death, by gaining freedom from the “delusion of being,” by waking up from the dream of “being in the world.” “His” greatness lies, according to Buddhist thinking, in His realization that “He did not exist,” in the first place, either to live forever, or to die for ever. 


This explains the fallibility of the infallible Pope when he said: “The Christians have the hope of ‘eternal life in Heaven’ after death, while the Buddhists are beyond hope because they want ‘eternal death in Nirvana’ after death.” 


This to the Buddhist is not only a fallacy, it is also a blasphemy. A Buddhist might in return compassionately state that the hope of the Pope when seen from a Buddhist point of view appears to be only an escape from the reality of “death and suffering,” into a fantasy of “eternal life and eternal happiness in Heaven,” which certainly cannot be proved until death. 
The Bodhisatta became a Buddha, by awakening to the reality of “impersonality” (anatta). He conquered death, not by dying, to be never reborn, as the Pope mistakenly thinks, but by “ceasing to be” here and now. He conquered death, not by eliminating rebirth, but by eliminating “being” or existence. The elimination of “being” is not the cessation of life, which is “death.” It is cessation of the “delusion of existence.” He eliminated “being” not through death, but through the process of “depersonalization” of what had being personalized. He did so with the thoughts: “this is not mine,” “this is not me,” “this is not myself.” This conquest of death is very beautifully expressed in the last words of the Buddha: 
                
                           
                          “My final word to you, my disciples:
                            All that is constructed is subject to destruction.
                            Tread the path in sanity.” 


These last words of the Buddha, sum up His message to the world. The death of the body itself should remind us that the delusion of “self” one creates is subject to destruction. The futility of constructing a “self in the world” has been clearly expressed. Clinging to this evanescent construct is insanity. To walk out of this delusion is sanity. Our task therefore is to stop being insane. It should also remind us that the task of stopping the construction must be accomplished without delay before death can come to interrupt the task. This urgency is what Buddhists should recall on this Vesak day, “struggle on as if your head is on fire.”
This message of the Buddha is the message of freedom from the delusion of “being,” which results in the freedom from death, or immortality. The Buddha achieved this immortality and taught this as the way of salvation to the world. The world, for the most part, preferred to ignore this message, in favor of the “delusion of being,” and the pseudo-immortality of the fantastic dream world.