Last month, I looked to an ancient Asian religion, Jainism, for help in rethinking the debates in the West over when life begins. Jains believe that human beings are embodied jivas, or sentience-imbued—and bequeathing—life forces. I suggested we might take a cue from them and consider the thought that life doesn’t begin at conception, because life never ends. Even without the religious grounding, I argued, we might get past the beginning-of-life debates by observing that life is passed from parents to offspring in an endless chain of existence.

This month, in the second half of a two-part series on Asian thought and life issues, I introduce some questions raised by Japanese thinkers about the definition of death. Unlike the beginning of life, of course, the end of our life does not take place in tandem with a mother’s body. We are born from a womb but die, as it were, into the world, alone. And yet, life might not be as neatly bookended as that. If the beginning of life is more complicated than we might have imagined, then the end of life may be, too.

In Japan, when someone dies, he or she is traditionally kept at home for a kind of wake. In many cases, such as terminal illness, the person dies at home, surrounded by his or her family. There is no doctor present. There are no machines hooked up to the patient rendering vital signs in numbers and visible waves on readout screens. Death does not happen in an instant, accompanied by a dreaded beep indicating a stilled heart, but is a slow withdrawal, a drifting away. There is no moment of death. There is just the realization shared by all present that the person on his or her deathbed is leaving them.

This tradition of death as a process helps explain why, in 1968, the Japanese public was appalled when a medical doctor named Wada Juro performed heart transplant surgery using a heart taken from a drowning victim in Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido . The reason for the outrage was that the drowning victim was brain dead; he was not physically dead. Which is to say, for many people in Japan, he was still alive. Dr. Wada had therefore done something unspeakably monstrous.

This event and the uproar it caused led to a great deal of debate and soul-searching in Japan about what death is. The West tends to equate brain death with full medical and legal death. In Japan, however, this is not necessarily the case. Eventually, laws were passed allowing patients to choose in advance whether the Western definition of brain death would be used to ascertain when they were dead.

I first learned of these debates in 2021 when Tachibana Takashi, a journalist and author of the 1986 book Brain Death (Nō shi), passed away. Tachibana wrote in that book and in many other publications about the subject of death, about cultural differences in how it was defined and understood, and about how people faced their own mortality. He gradually adopted a view of life and death that saw the two as part of one natural order, saying that he no longer feared death. He was often ill in his later years, fighting cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other illnesses. At a certain point, he decided to stop fighting, and to go home and live out his remaining days as peacefully as possible. In lieu of a gravestone, he was buried under a sapling, the growing tree marking his resting place in a universe in which all of us sojourn at most for a century or so, many for much shorter a period of time. By seeing death as part of life, Tachibana was able to think of death as a process, an ongoing change, and not as a sudden and pinpointable event.

Reading Tachibana’s work on the subject changed my thinking about something that seemed to be the most universal of all human experiences: When do we die? Is it when machines say that our brains are no longer functioning enough to keep life processes continuing? Or is there a dignity to human life that goes beyond what our brains seem to be doing according to the machines reading their activity? If Tachibana and many others in Japan are correct, and if brain death is not the equivalent of death as the end of life, then our obligation to all our brothers and sisters, regardless of their physical condition, becomes much weightier. The living are still with us, still here, even after their brains have stopped functioning as before. Death, Tachibana taught me, is much more complex than an instant, and much more entangled with life than I had imagined.

Reading Tachibana’s work reminded me of a heart-wrenching case from the United States a couple decades ago, that of Terri Schiavo. I remembered the debates surrounding the young woman’s life, in which the term “vegetative state” was used to describe her condition. I remembered thinking how cruel it was to refer to a human being as a vegetable, and to reduce human life to the expectations of others. Stephen Hawking, a physicist whose work I have long admired, was profoundly physically disabled. Should the value of his life have been up for debate, too? I wondered. Or is there something to human life that transcends what machines can detect, what doctors can measure, what anyone can see?

If life can be a beginningless journey, then death can be, not a final moment, but an invitation to think about who we are as human beings, where our lives come from, and where we go when, at some point, we die.