Job 21:23 Meaning One Dies in His Full Strength

Mada: Intoxication with health Mada is the giddiness that comes with youth, health, and simply being alive. Full strength feeds it without interruption: bones that do not ache, a household that runs, days that never once threaten, all of which keep dying at a comfortable distance as somebody else's business. This man carries that giddiness the whole way down and never gets the weak hour that might have shaken it loose.

Maraṇassati: Keeping death in view Maraṇassati is holding one's own dying steadily in mind. Death waits for no decline to make an opening for itself, and here it takes a man at his peak, wholly at ease, with plans still on the table and nothing settled. Since strength postpones the appointment by exactly nothing, the practice belongs to the vigorous at least as much as to the failing.

Sukha: Pleasant feeling Sukha is feeling on its pleasant side. Ease and quiet running through an entire life amount to one long stretch of it, propped up by a working body, a full table, and no trouble at the door, and it closes when those props do. Comfort like that reports the weather a man stood in, not the man.

Kammavipāka: The ripening of deeds Vipāka is the fruit a deed eventually bears, on its own schedule and often past this life. Job's friends read a soft death as a receipt for a clean life, and he answers by setting this well fed corpse beside the one that dies in bitterness of soul, both of them lying down together in the dust. Fruit ripens when it is ready, so a deathbed is a poor place to audit anyone.

Santi: Peace Santi is the coolness left when craving stops burning. The quiet at this bedside is the quiet of a house where nothing has yet gone wrong, and it lasts precisely as long as the arrangements hold. A man can be undisturbed to his final breath and still be gripped by wanting the arrangement to continue, while the other quiet stays put when the whole house is taken away.