What Remains When Everything Breaks Down?
A reflection that passes through pain—without relying on pain to justify itself.
Pain brings everything to a halt.
Your legs go numb from sitting in seiza. Your stomach aches when you're unwell. A woman feels the onset of labor. Sometimes, an injury leads straight into surgery before you can even react.
In those moments, everything stops—thoughts, emotions, even time. Only the sensation of pain remains, swallowing the entire world.
Once, after sitting in seiza, I tried to stand but my legs wouldn’t move. Just pain. No motion. I forced myself up and collapsed, grimacing.
Pain immobilizes you—not just your body, but your feelings, your will, everything. It takes over.
A friend who had gone through childbirth once said:
“At that moment, my body didn’t feel like mine anymore. It just hurt, and I couldn’t do anything.”
A friend about to undergo surgery said just before entering the operating room:
“I was scared. Suddenly… it felt like something was disappearing. I couldn’t do anything—just being carried away.”
We usually engage with the world by “doing something ourselves.” But when pain is real, even that becomes impossible.
Pain dissolves the boundaries of the self.
And in that moment, something was there.
At such a time, I felt something.
When I could do nothing, something seemed to reach me from outside myself.
Maybe it was someone’s voice. A helping hand. The sound of breathing. Or just a presence.
Like a nurse’s quiet humming behind the curtain, or a glass of water someone gently left by my side. Small things, yet they felt like they came from beyond me.
But it was undeniably there. When I could do nothing, something remained.
Later I realized—it wasn’t that I noticed it. I was made to notice.
When the self that could “do something” collapsed, I finally noticed what had already been there.
Pain became the doorway to salvation.
We all want to say we “learned from pain.”
But this isn’t a story of growth through pain.
Pain didn’t help me grow—it broke me.
Yet in that broken place, there was a working that hadn’t abandoned me.
In Buddhist terms, pain may be where self-power collapses—and other-power finds its way in.
Because I was already saved, I came to know it through pain. I wasn’t saved by pain itself.
In pain, I met the “me who had already been cared for.”
I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t try. Couldn’t even speak of faith.
But even then, I hadn’t been abandoned.
It wasn’t that I was noble for choosing to believe. Something had reached the me who couldn’t even notice.
Perhaps that’s what Buddhist “salvation” is. Not something you can explain—just something you encounter.
Arigatai.
Namu Amida Butsu...
📌Note: This is not a religion that glorifies pain
You might be thinking, “So in the end, you were saved because you suffered?” But that’s not quite right.
You may have come across phrases like:
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
“Pain exists to polish the soul.”
“Trials are gifts from God.”
These are all attempts to give pain a meaning. But from the perspective of Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism—
Pain doesn’t need meaning. In fact, trying to assign meaning to it is itself a trap of self-power.
I wasn’t saved because I managed to endure pain or learn from it.
There was a working that had already been saving me—even when I was helpless.
It just so happened that I was made to notice it in the midst of pain.
The moment pain is used as a rite of passage or a prerequisite for awakening,
it ceases to be religion and becomes self-help—or worse, a cult.
The Pure Land path is a tradition that doesn’t require us to “overcome” pain or suffering.
It speaks of a working that embraces us as we are—even when we cannot rise above anything.
It is not reserved for the strong or the faithful.
It is a vow directed toward all beings, unconditionally.
This is what we call the Primal Vow of Amida Buddha.
🧎♂️What This Note Wanted to Say
Pain was not a lesson.
It was a place where I encountered the fact that I had been made to notice.
And in that moment, I came to know: I had already been saved, long before I realized it.
Closing Words
I hope this note might become a small doorway to salvation
for someone who was only ever allowed to keep trying,
or for someone who can no longer try at all.
If you’d like to read the original Japanese version of this essay, you can find it on note:
自分が壊れたとき、そこにあったもの。“痛み”を通じて、【“痛み”に頼らない】話をするnote
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