Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Geshe Pema Tsering opens this 11-minute talk with a thought experiment: imagine the best holiday imaginable — all conditions perfect, but you can be told to leave at any moment. That image drives home the preciousness of human rebirth, grounded in everyday blessings: health, stability, and the inner sense that life holds more than eating and sleeping. He then walks through three Lamrim contemplations on death — its certainty, its unpredictable timing, and, his sharpest focus, what matters when it arrives. Health, family, and wealth are contextually valuable but useless at death; only virtuous karma travels with consciousness. He closes by arguing that daily analytical meditation on these facts — like preparing for anything that lies ahead — is the antidote to the fear that accompanies nearly everyone’s dying, except those with a genuine spiritual path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 Retreat.mp3
UUID: d54021a8-1115-458d-841e-655e69474317
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Retreat Jan (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 11.3 minutes
Words: ~2,246
So really the best way to think of it is like you imagine going on a holiday to the best place in the world. Everything is available to you, but the condition is that they can tell you to leave anytime they like. Now can you imagine? You wouldn’t even want to sleep just in case the next morning they tell you that you have to leave, you’ve got to get up day and night, you’re going have twenty four hours around the clock using everything possible in that holiday. I mean, you get my point here, especially if it’s a really delicious one.
But Buddha is saying we have this very delicious life right now, these unbelievable conditions that are so rare. Have health, and reasonable wealth, and reasonable sanity, and reasonable good environment, and reasonable politics that makes the place reasonably stable, and reasonably nice, totally unpolluted water and things and food. In fact, have an astonishing life if we look in this country, every time I come back to this country, it blows my mind, you know, one of the nicest places on this earth. With all the different things taking into consideration politics, environment, people, so many things, unbelievable! This is all due to our past karma Buddha says, which we’ll talk about.
So therefore something not to be wasted, something to be appreciated and something to be used. So not only that, we’ve got this reasonable health and wealth, reasonable sanity, all the bits in one, all the bits in the right places, you know? The brain is still working. All this is due to our good karma. Not only that, because we have all these conditions, we also are able to access you know, aspirations that we all possess, these aspirations to want to somehow make more of this life.
We kind of feel this is why we’re sitting in this room right now, because we do feel there’s something more to life than merely eating, sleeping and going to the toilet. That’s why we’re here, you know. And we all have these aspirations, and Buddha says we have these aspirations because there is more, because we have this amazing potential. So all these conditions is what this perfect human rebirth is, and we’ve got it. And then when we think about death and impermanence, it increases hugely, and we should not waste this precious thing.
So this is the idea of this, the perfect human rebirth is like this ideal holiday. And it’s like you’ve got it, but it’s our own karma that determines how long it is, not God or Buddha. But using the analogy of the holiday is a good one for the mind, gives you relief, sets you up. That you’ve got this delicious holiday, as long as you’re on condition that you can be told to leave anytime, anytime from the second the moment we arrive. Can you imagine?
You’d be on tenterhooks the whole time, you wouldn’t want to waste a single day, you’d never forget for a moment, would you? That they might have to tell you to leave in a minute, so I better do this, I better do this, I better go there, and I better have this. You wouldn’t just sit back and space out and then have a mental breakdown when they tell you to go. Well, that’s what’s happening to us. It’s like life is forever, as if it’s the truth, although it’s staring us in our face that it’s not true.
We don’t have a clue when we’re going to die, we act as if we are really certain we won’t die today. Even though we then say, I don’t know when I will die, but I definitely won’t die today, or tomorrow, or next week, we say, or even next year. You check how we feel, you know? But what logic do we have to prove it? We have statistics that prove these objective realities, you know?
But objective realities aren’t personal. Plenty of five year olds and ten year olds and twenty year olds and healthy people die all the time. Right now, you look at the logic we use instinctively, we’ve got to analyse it. The logic we use to prove that I’m not a dying person, for example. You check.
Well, one of the logics is that I’m not old. Well, just look at the figures to prove that young people die, you know? Another logical reason we use in our mind instinctively for why I’m not a dying person is that I’m healthy. Well, me, I always think of Princess Diana with her gorgeous thirty six year old aerobic body. She was very healthy.
Dead as a door nail, right? Doesn’t prove health has nothing to do with it. The other one, that’s even the most ephemeral of all, the logical reason we tend to use and why I’m not a dying person, is that I feel good. I mean, I think, Patrick Swayze felt really good that day. He thought it would stop death, didn’t it?
I mean, it’s not meant to be emotional, this stuff, these are facts, you know. So, we’ve got to kind of use whatever reasons we can to kind of jolt our mind from its misconceptions to be in sync with how reality is in order to give us energy to not waste this precious life. We have worked so hard to get. This is the idea, this is the thinking. Now, we hear these words now, and we can probably hear that they are true.
This is not meant to be religious ideas shoved down our throat. We can hear these words are true. But only when we hear them or when we read them do they come to our mind. The rest of the time, the default mode of grasping at permanent me just comes back into full force, doesn’t it? So by meditating about it, in this way and I’m talking in this analytical way, by thinking this through every day, don’t be surprised, you start to make this shift in your mind.
You start to actually get energy to use your life, because you really do know you’re impermanent, and death could come at any time. So don’t waste this precious life. This is what comes from this type of meditating, this type of thinking. So the third way, the third point to contemplate: first is death is definite, second is the time of death is uncertain, the third point is that at the time of death, what’s important? That’s a very good question, you know.
So, of course, Buddhism has its own ideas. So, given the assumption that your consciousness didn’t begin at conception and won’t end at death, first of all, given that. Given that whatever you say, do and think necessarily leaves imprints or seeds in your consciousness that will necessarily ripen as whatever your future experiences are after your mind leaves this body There’s no other determining factor. It’s your karma. Given that all your negative actions of body, speech, mind, the ones that come from, you know, the ego part of us, unhappiness, and anger, and delusion, and depression, and anxiety and all the rest, will necessarily ripen as suffering experiences in the future.
And given that the the virtuous karma, the stuff that’s coming coming from love and kindness and patience and all the rest, that that will ripen as happiness in the future. And finally, given that we don’t want suffering and do want happiness, given these series of assumptions, it is logical, isn’t it? Isn’t it? That at the time of death, the only thing that’s important is the virtuous imprints in your mind from what you have done positive in that life. There is nothing else that’s of any value.
Your body definitely of no use to you, that beautiful body becomes carrion, doesn’t it? Your wealth, your family. In this life, when people ask what the purpose of life is, the majority answer that I observe when I hear it is family and health. Well, it’s clear, at the time of death, your family and your health are useless, at that time, are useless to you, they cannot help. Which is the point of being, you know, what the value of something is, is it useful to you?
Well, at the time of death they are not useful, they are burdens actually, Especially if you’ve been attached to them, that’s the point. Your reputation, how people see you, your house, your possessions, the whole thing that all the things that even if we’re not greedy grasping people, all the things that we assume now are of value, some kind of intrinsic value, is what I’m saying. But they clearly don’t have intrinsic value. There’s obvious family have value, health has, all these things are important, but it’s all kind of they’re all contextual, aren’t they? You’ve to understand, in reference to what are they valuable?
So, in terms of, you know, being happy now, yes, health and family are very important. But in terms of at the time of death, which is this in Buddhist terms, this crucial transition point from this life to another one, right? This is a Buddhist idea. Given this, then at that time, health, health, family, wealth, all the things that we consider of value do not have value. So then, clearly, logically, don’t have intrinsic value.
They are relatively valuable, yes, definite, no problem. But the Buddhist approach is you don’t have to chuck your family out, don’t chuck chuck your health out. You just have to shift your attitude towards it, that’s all. And that is to say, in relation to your family, your wealth, your health, your this, your that, as long as you can create virtue and not create non virtue, then you will have good imprints in your mind that will be the only thing that will be of use at the time of death, because they then will ripen as seeds that when the consciousness leaves this body and goes and and, you know, and I’ll discuss in this transition period between lives and then due to karma finds its new womb, it’ll be a womb that you’re happy with and a life that you’ll be happy with when you come out. Just in the same way you plan for your holiday, just in the same way you plan for everything.
I remember reading in Time magazine recently, maybe a year ago, don’t know, in America. And the man who wrote the introduction, he probably wasn’t a Buddhist but it was a very good point he made, he said that in the West, we’re talking about America, we plan for everything except our death. We plan for our coffin, we plan for what prayers are gonna be said when you’re dead, we plan for even the wake, people for everything, even the concept of the death as if it’s sort of something to do with his life, but not the actual death process itself, not actually where my consciousness will be when it leaves this body, which is what death is all about. We don’t plan for that. Okay, because we say, well, no one knows what’s going to happen, so what’s the point, you know?
But mainly it’s because we would rather live in this ignorance of it because we don’t want to think about it. Because it’s too painful for us. Know? What happens to be the Buddhist approach is it’s very necessary to think about it, as you can see, you know, it’s what’s being stressed. And indeed in Buddhism too, are these very detailed presentations of exactly what happens and how and so on and so forth, which we’ll talk about.
But what we’re talking about here, more than anything, is the attitude towards it to shift the view we have in the mind very deep now that clings to permanent me and lives in this la la land of fantasy that is not helpful to us and is the basis of so much fear, you know? I remember in California there’s a friend who’s a Buddhist who works in the hospice movement and she says it’s an accepted thing and people who work there hear it. She said it’s just a given in the hospice movement that everybody dies with fear. She said, except people who’ve got a spiritual path. And my feeling is that’s because they’re the only people who think about death, that’s all.
Not even because they’re right in what they think, I’m not even saying Buddhism is right. But it’s because if you think about death, if you think about anything, and analyze it, and check it out, you won’t have fear when it comes. It’s just logical, you know. I mean, can you imagine if you never thought about your driving test and never learned to drive, because you say, I’ll handle it when it comes, you say, which is how we talk about death. Or when it just comes, it’ll be okay, you know.
Excuse me, you’ll be a wreck, and you’ll make a mess as well. It’ll be a disaster. So we all know we’ve got a plan for anything that’s going to come in the future if you don’t know yet how to do it. This is logic.