"the place they go is mu"

[vashtii]

So last night me, honoumiko and nardaviel had a huge (and very fun) Twitter argument about the nature of Mu. Which I then wrote up for the DN Wiki, largely based on Libby's summary of Mu.

I figured (a) it might interest some of you gaiz, and (b) you're all smart enough to point out where I've got it wrong—so, haz.

Death Note readers think of Mu as a place, but it turns out to be more of a mental short-circuit, the same sort of result you'd get from dividing by zero. The idea of Mu as a place turns out to be based on a simplistic translation:

English: After they die, the place they go is MU (Nothingness).
Japanese: 死んだ後にいくところ、無である。

The Japanese reads more like "after death, the place they go—it's mu". And in Zen Buddhism, mu is an answer to a question that depends on invalid axioms[1]. If you're asked "have you stopped beating your wife?", you might answer mu, either because you've never beaten your wife, or because you don't have one.

So when the rule states "the place they go—it's mu", it means the question relies on an invalid assumption. They don't go anywhere, because there is nowhere for them to go to. This is why it gets anglicised as "Nothingness", because all that exposition is way too much detail for a notebook rule.

We know Tsugumi Ohba, the author of Death Note, was influenced by Buddhism; this is why the series has 108 chapters. This matches up with various things Ohba says about life after death in HtR13:

For me, one of the premises of the series is that once a person died, they could never come back to life. I really wanted to set a rule that bringing characters back to life is cheating. That's why death equals "nothingness" ... If I had to choose [a theme to express throughout the series], I'd say "Humans will all eventually die and never come back to life, so let's give it our all while we're alive".

death equals "nothingness"—だから、”無”なんです--"so, it's mu"

The number represents the 108 earthly desires in Buddhism.

Comments

[serria.livejournal.com]

I always liked how, although Death Note uses some obvious Christian imagery (though mostly for aesthetic and ironic purposes, imo) its conclusion is distinctly Buddhist.

My first introduction to Mu was in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (if you haven't read it, lovely book) - it also discusses the paradox of Mu. I don't mind the English translation of Nothingness, because technically you can't "go" to Nothingness and in that text I think it's equally paradoxical. But I feel like Western audiences, with Judeo-Christian background, have trouble comprehending or just plain feeling comfortable with that concept, so many prefer to think of "Nothingness" as a place where you just sit being bored out of your mind. Which, to me, destroys the beauty of the MU concept. The place you go is nowhere. You don't go anywhere. You just die.

It doesn't have to be depressing, I don't think. Actually I think it's distinctly meant as "there is no afterlife" - which corresponds with the abundant Christian imagery of "judging" the good from the bad, thus, Heaven and Hell. There is nowhere to go, you just cease to be - depending on how poetic you are, in some schools of Buddhism such a state is the highest enlightenment.

[vashti.livejournal.com]

*Yes*. The way Light's philosophy is so Western, all along, but the very end - the death of the story and his own eventual fate - is Buddhist. The same patchwork syncretist way Japan generally treats religion.

The Nothingness translation makes perfect sense; it's not a bad translation at all. It's just that also calling it Mu confuses people; it makes it sound like a place. I need to read that book.

Interesting that that "there is no afterlife, let's do what we can while we're alive" is certainly something the characters live by...