The shruks of Nund Rishi bring us face-to-face with an existential encounter with death's imminence. But what work does the recognition of death's imminence do? We have already seen that Nund Rishi's insistence on death's imminence is a call to a dying before death. The call to a dying before death is often also in Nund Rishi a call to becoming Nothing. Let us turn to the first two lines of a shruk taken up by Rahman Rahi in his critical essay on the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi that we also discussed in the previous chapter:

Rahman Rahi turns to the modern theatre stage in an attempt to interpret this shruk. He sets up a play between zū, or zuv (life), and lōbh (greed), which meet their end in the nothingness of death. Zū nēri brōnṭh (the first to leave, or depart, is life) gives us a palpable sense of someone's departure (in this case, zū, or life) before that of someone else (lōbh, or greed). It is, in other words, impossible for human greed to end before the end of life. Lōbh, greed or avaricious desire, has such a tenacious hold over us that it only leaves the stage of existence after life has already departed. What life and desire leave behind is a space of emptiness (shunya), and this play has the form of nothingness (shunya ākār). The idea that everything is empty (śūnyatā, or emptiness) is central to Mahayana Buddhism, which held sway in Kashmir between the third century BCE to about the fifth century CE (the Sanskrit term śūnya also means zero). Such a stance was not seen in the Buddhist tradition as nihilist. Graham Priest identifies the core meaning of the idea of śūnyatā: “Nothing exists in and of itself. Everything that exists does so inasmuch as, and only inasmuch as, it relates to other things.