Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Jeffrey Hopkins introduces Buddhist perspectives on death, the intermediate state, and rebirth, grounding the teaching in a practical framework for living well. Rather than aiming to frighten listeners into religious practice, Hopkins explains how understanding the detailed stages of dying can reduce our denial of mortality and reshape how we live. He walks through the eight psychological and physical stages of death as presented in classical Tibetan Buddhist texts, beginning with the sensation of the body sinking and the appearance of mirages, progressing through stages where consciousness undergoes perceptual shifts as different elements dissolve in sequence. He contextualizes the Buddhist view within a broader humanistic appeal for compassion and social kindness, arguing that religious traditions offer practical techniques for training the mind that can benefit anyone, regardless of faith. Hopkins draws on personal anecdotes from studying Tibetan Buddhism and examples from hospital settings to make the teaching tangible. Suitable for newcomers and serious practitioners alike who wish to explore Buddhist approaches to mortality and their psychological implications for life now.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 Death, IS and R no date.mp3
UUID: dfcccb19-7d36-4658-8e3a-70cc6f544bc5
Teacher: Jeffrey Hopkins
Collection: Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth (Jeffrey Hopkins)
Date: 1983 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,583
In his tours in the United States in seventy-nine, Canada in eighty, United States again in eighty-one, then last year in Southeast Asia and in Australia. And during his tours, he spends maybe about half of his time setting forth a view on human rights, on the validation of human rights. This is based on the theory that everyone has a sense of I, of self, of personhood, and that there is a valid factor in that. It’s valid that we think I, think self. And on the basis of that, want happiness and do not want suffering.
And this wish for happiness and wish to avoid suffering is valid. It’s not a mistaken consciousness. It’s valid. It’s valid both in oneself and in others. And the mere fact that one validly wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering, he posits as the basis of human rights.
It’s very interesting. Nothing more than that. But the mere validity of the fact that we validly want happiness and don’t want suffering. This is the basis of human rights, and just as it’s valid in oneself, so it’s valid in others. And so one has to respect, understand the validity of other persons’ wishes for happiness and their not wanting suffering.
Now he usually says that whenever he goes anywhere, he feels as if he knows the people he’s talking to to a great extent already and thus can talk to them like brothers and sisters or best of friends in that he remains within the constant feeling or understanding that just like himself, just as he wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering, or just as I want happiness and don’t want suffering, so everyone here has this same basic feeling. There’s an immediate recognition with everyone. There’s an immediate closeness with everyone. There’s something very important about all of us that each of us knows about each other, something extremely important. So as he puts it, even though there are great differences between himself and his usual audiences, especially in the West. He’s from the East, they’re from the West.
He’s one culture, people have another culture. Even in terms of geography of course, coming from Tibet, it’s very different than say Australia, America, wherever, Canada. There’s something so central and so important that is similar among all humans that one can have a sense of closeness no matter where one is. So often in modern society, we’re bothered by alienation and so forth, but that’s something created by our own minds. We know something very intimate about everyone. So he makes this appeal going around the world, not just to Buddhists, not just to believers in religion, but to believers and non-believers as being applicable to anyone.
And with this sort of motivation, seeking to help human society, he made the statement somewhere that society is kindness. And being his—he was speaking in English, and being his translator I was trying to think of some other way to say it. Perhaps add in some grammar, add in a particle, add in a preposition, add in something. But I couldn’t think of anything to add in that really is what he meant. That the very fabric of society is based on kindness. Without kindness, it’s impossible to have a well-working society.
Thus, he makes an appeal to communist governments, communist states, democratic states, socialist states, and so forth that the human feelings of kindness, love, and compassion are extremely important to society. And that no matter what kind of government it is, even if it’s communist, that government should recognize that any system that promotes these human feelings, basic recognition of the rights of other humans, that promotes kindness, that promotes love, that promotes compassion is a system that’s promoting the society and should be used even for that purpose. Thus specifically, the various religious systems of the world have something to contribute to modern society. It’s almost as if many societies in the world nowadays are trying an experiment to see if society can live without kindness, whether it be the communist version or whether it be the type of capitalistic version that sometimes we find in America, people experimenting with putting themselves first as if the social experiment of today is to see if society can work if you put yourself first. And in those places where the experiment is being carried on most strongly, it doesn’t appear to be succeeding.
That indeed, because society is kindness, because the very basis of society is love, compassion, and kindness, the putting of oneself first makes society impossible. Or at least putting oneself first without consideration of others, without kindness, love, compassion. So then, given the importance of these social attitudes, he sees a purpose in religious systems, and then a purpose in religious systems and societies studying each other’s systems. Not for the sake of say becoming Buddhist, or for the Buddhists to become Christian or Christians to become Buddhist, but so that techniques that have been developed in one culture, if they are helpful to particular people in another culture, they can be adopted.
They can be adopted even within maintaining one’s own system. In other words, we can learn from each other. No one’s system being so full that it’s impossible to pick up some technique that would be helpful in the practice of one’s own system. Thus, whether one is a believer or not, there is something that anyone can gain from studying the various religious traditions. So thus in this time of better communication and so forth, and in a time of, well, great nuclear weapons and experiments with putting oneself first even at the expense of others, it’s an important time to see the value of compassion, love, and kindness, and see the various ways the various cultures have developed to train in these and to implement that which seems suitable.
Thus, it’s with this sort of motivation that he travels around the world talking about various Buddhist systems, learning and exchanging learning from other systems. So maybe with some of the same motivation, attempting to mimic some of that, I am happy to come here, talk a little bit about Buddhist views on death within the context not of seeking anyone to become a Buddhist, but that this very interesting presentation about the stages of death, which I feel should be subjected to investigation, inquiry, to see. I think we can verify or falsify a good part of this teaching just by looking into the process of death, either by way of people who have partially died and remained alive to talk about it, or by speaking with medical personnel about what happens in the hospital. In any case, it’s extremely helpful to, it seems, to become mindful that one oneself is going to die, particularly mindful if this presentation of the stages of death is anywhere near correct to have an idea of what actually happens at death. Then one will not have the sense that death is something far in the distance that, you know, you just don’t have the faintest idea what’s going to happen, and thus it’s very difficult to think about.
If you have a clear idea of possible stages that one would pass through, then it’s possible to think about death. This reorients how one lives. So looking on my music stand here. This book, Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism, I found amongst the effects of one of my lamas who had died while I was overseas in nineteen seventy-two. I began studying Buddhism.
I’ve got to get settled here. I can’t move around. Everything makes noise. So I’ll make some noise, then I’ll get over it. I started studying Buddhism in nineteen sixty-three in the States in a center in New Jersey of all places, the flatlands, the industrial flatlands of New Jersey.
So it’s actually not in an industrial area, but pretty much a swamp area that had been turned over to White Russians who had escaped the communists. And then when Kalmyk Mongolians—these are Mongolians who were left behind, Kalmyk, from various Mongolian sweeps through Asia to Europe. So Mongolians, even in Europe, in the area where the Volga River empties into the Caspian Sea, this particular teacher came from there. He, like many other Mongolian young persons, had come from way over there down to Lhasa, Tibet. So Mongolians all the way from over in Europe to Outer Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Siberia even, were sending their young men usually to Lhasa in Tibet to study Buddhist doctrine, much like Rome is for the Catholic Church.
People coming from a huge area to study, sometimes to stay there for the rest of their life, usually to stay twenty years or so getting their degree. It takes usually twenty, twenty-five, thirty years to get the degree and then return home or to assume an important position in a monastery, one of these monastic universities in Lhasa. In any case, these people couldn’t return to their homes because gradually the communists came in and took over each of the areas and then also had to leave Tibet for the same reason. The particular monk that I studied with had come to India in order to escape the communist takeover in Tibet. Others came out during the Second World War and were resettled by the American government in New Jersey.
And of course, they weren’t given the best land. They were given some swampy type land, and they were put where the White Russians were because they were in these areas of what is now Russia. Anyway, that’s where I started studying back in nineteen sixty-three. And about nineteen sixty-eight, this Tibetan lama who was abbot of one of the great tantric institutions in Lhasa came to that monastery. That was about when I was leaving.
I came back for a visit around Christmas time and just found his teaching to be astoundingly clear, well-reasoned, and so forth. And eventually, we invited him out to Wisconsin, and I spent a year and a half studying with him, texts on the philosophy of various schools of Tibetan Buddhism, and then particularly on how to meditate on emptiness. And this is resulting now finally in this very long book that I’ve written on meditation on emptiness. Some people feel—when I took it in to be Xeroxed the first time, it was some eleven hundred and fifty pages, the woman laughed and laughed. She said, Oh, the title is Meditation on Emptiness and it’s so long.
She was thinking that emptiness meant some sort of non-functionality or nihilism, so how long would it take you to talk about nihilism? Whereas emptiness doesn’t at all refer to nihilism. It refers to the absence of a certain type of over-concretized existence. A false even appearance of phenomena to say our eye consciousness, nothing to do with conceptuality at this point, but a false appearance on the level of raw sensation to which we assent, and then we build our lives around this assent to the false appearance. The false appearance not being the appearance of the object, but being an appearance that is fused with the object that makes the object far more solid or concretized than it actually is.
For instance, that—what do you call this? Music stand. Music stand. That music stand over there, we have a sense, you know, if somebody says, where’s that—well, where’s the third black music stand? If you count that as one, this is two, that’s three.
Right? Well, when you count it, look. This is one, two, three. Right? Those two are brown.
When you point one, two, three, what’s at the end of your finger? There’s something that covers from—you know, when you go two, something that covers from here to here. Three, something that covers from there to there. And if you take just that consciousness that’s paying attention, you know, to that music stand when you say three, there’s something covering from there to there. Well, when you look for something that covers from there to there, it’s very hard to find any such thing.
You know? Is this the music stand, the top? Is this part of the—what do you call it? Shaft, maybe? The music stand?
No. Is this the music stand? No. Is this—now I can play. Is this the music stand?
No. Is this the music stand? No. Is this the music—there is some music stand, but there’s no music stand like that one that’s at the end of the finger. So there are a lot of reasonings and meditations set forth in order to realize the absence of this sort of concretized existence that’s called emptiness.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a music stand. Obviously, there is. One can put one’s book on it and so forth. It is functional. It does validly exist.
So in any case, I was studying with him about emptiness. A good deal of it, good part of the time, and about selflessness, emptiness, the various Buddhist schools. And he kept telling me about a book he had among his things about tantra, about the four systems of tantra. And so he died while I was away in nineteen seventy-two. Actually, I was in Germany on my way to India studying with one of his students.
And so after spending a year in India, I came back and went through his things to find that particular book. Well, I found this one also. Found the other one and this one by the same author, and I read this and it was so helpful to me, personally helpful, was a clear, quite technical presentation of the stages of death that I very much wanted to translate it. What we have here in this book is a translation with some commentary added in. It’s not made very accessible.
It’s difficult to read. The style is somewhat wooden. It might be good to write another book that was just starting out from the very beginning, putting it in more colloquial English. So this will be the basis of this weekend seminar. This text on mainly on the stages of death and on the period in between the two lifetimes and then on taking rebirth, but mainly on death.
Oftentimes in religious systems, there are presentations of death and what’s going to happen in the afterlife, and one gets tired of them because it’s as if the person is trying to frighten you, trying to make you frightened of death so that you will do something now, perhaps to join a certain group, perhaps to donate a certain amount of your income every year, and so you become suspicious. And you figure this person is just trying to make me frightened of death. But actually in the Buddhist way, we are the ones who are making ourselves frightened of death already without anyone telling us anything about death, and that we’re becoming so attached to our style of life, our friends, our house, our possessions, and so forth, that we’re making the conditions such that when we start to die, we will be frightened out of our minds. Now, we’re the ones who are causing the fright. So I say in Buddhism, I don’t mean it in contrast to some other religion, but there is this explanation that can be found in Buddhism that we’re the ones who are making ourselves afraid of death.
Living our lives in such a way that even though we know we’re going to die, we sort of pretend that we’re not going to die. You know? We don’t feel I might die today. I might die tomorrow. Making plans as if we’re going to live today, making plans as if we’re going to live tomorrow and tomorrow.
And, you know, when the next tomorrow comes, well, certainly I’m not going to die tomorrow. So it goes on. I’m not going to die. I’m not going to die. I’m not going to die.
Even though if you’re asked, will you ever die? It’s like, of course. Don’t ask me such a foolish question. So, one of the advantages, as I was saying earlier, of reflecting on a system that presents in detail the process of death is that it becomes imaginable if you so choose to imagine it and become aware of it. We make places for people to die in, hospitals, and we send them there.
We’re going to send ourselves there. When the time comes, it’s sort of like the ultimate segregation. We know dying—obviously there aren’t dying people, you know, people openly dying in this room. We’re all getting older, you know, we segregate them off and we all know that we will join that group of segregated people in not too long. And then everything changes.
All the rules change. And it’s sort of like, well, when that happens, I’ll face it. I’ll be in that class of weird beings then, you know, sort of like going to sleep and having a strange dream. You really can’t prepare for it. So I’ll just be in that class of beings at that time, and you know, at that time maybe I’ll come up with something.
Although you know you won’t. So, rather than that, it’s sort of like retirement. I don’t know what it’s like in Australia. In the States, it’s as if the only worthwhile thing to do is to make money. If you’re not making more money, more and more and more and more, and then, you know, when you go into work and they say, well now you’re too old, you can’t work for us anymore, you don’t feel that way, but you’ve got to leave.
There’s no way. You have to get off. Do you call it a merry-go-round? Get off the merry-go-round. And if you try to get back on, they say, look, you know, you shouldn’t be here.
It’s like when you go to school, you’re in a school say for four or five years, and if you try to come back to go to one of the classes, what are you doing here? You know, you’re kicked out more or less by time. And you don’t have any idea of what to do with that time. You’ve been beguiled by the notion that economic productivity is the only thing worthwhile. It happens to a lot of people in the States.
A lot of people, their lives just fall apart when they can’t go to work. And yet, you know, if I think of it now, in a relatively short period of time, I’m going to be in that—it’s gonna be me, not somebody else. Not those segregated group over there, but it’s me that’s going to, you know—I won’t be able to go to my office anymore. Somebody else will be there. If I hung around the university, they’d go, what are you doing here?
Oh, good to see you. But then—so perhaps by getting a clear idea of the very end of this lifetime, we’ll maybe even be able to think about such dire things as retirement. Make it easier. Certainly makes it easier to think about death. For me, it makes it much easier to think about somebody else’s death too.
So to understand—so let’s see. By understanding about death and becoming mindful that one will die, it is said that one then restructures one’s life in such a way that you’re not afraid of death. Thus, by becoming concerned or by understanding the process of death and becoming concerned about it, one restructures one’s life in such a way that one will not fear, say retirement, and then later death. Or, of course, since the young often die sooner than the older and since the healthy often die sooner than the sick. It often happens that way.
We’re not just talking about old age and dying after retirement, but dying at any time. So the purpose of becoming mindful of death is then to relieve oneself of the fright that would be caused or that is caused by our over-attachment to the present situation. That attachment making it difficult for us when we die. Right? It makes it difficult for the people around us.
How many—I had an old friend who sort of—well, he was very nice to me in my childhood, and I must have been around twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, somewhere in there when he died. And he died in the midst of a great deal of illness in the hospital and so forth. And his wife’s feeling was, that bummer. He died on me. Now what am I going to do? So there’s the attachment of the people who are going to stay alive longer to you, and there’s your attachment to them, and you’re lying there in, you know, your bed, be nice to be at home, but probably be at the hospital.
And they come in and weep over you, you know, and tears falling down on your chest and grasping your hand and you get more attachment. So then you cultivate even more attachment near the time of death. Relatives come in and hang over you, maybe they, you know, they’re talking back and forth, maybe some of them are getting angry and saying, well, why did you do this? Why didn’t you take care of yourself? You know, you could have gone on a sugar-free diet a long time ago and you didn’t.
You know, the person’s a day away from death. What use is it? They scold you. Then you get angry. So if you knew about the process of death and the various stages that you’d be going through, and you know, maybe educate the people who are around you, then they wouldn’t be generating these difficult states for you when you’re dying, or if somebody else is dying, you wouldn’t go in and help them to become desirous and hateful near the time of death, but help them to die a bit more quietly.
So a lot of advantages. Now the presentation of how one dies is in several parts really that are separable. One is the description of the psychological experience, psychological and physical experience from the point of view of the person who’s dying. In other words, what you experience. And the other is a like physiology really, a tantric physiology that attempts to explain why these mental and physical events are happening.
It could be that part of it is right. You know, certainly the part on the psychological experience would have to be right. And the attempt to explain physiologically why this is happening, might not be quite right. I’m not suggesting it isn’t, but there are various possibilities. I don’t see how the system could be verified to any extent.
I don’t see how it could be possible. It’d be wrong on the psychological stages, but right on the physiological processes, because the physiological explanation is for the sake of explaining the psychological steps. So perhaps first, maybe it’d be helpful to go through the psychological steps, make it a bit clearer right at the beginning. Sort of—I’m looking at this text on page thirty-five, the stages of death. There are—which is also set out in chart form.
How about just read down the chart, page sixteen. There are eight stages, and a number of things happen simultaneously during each stage. Fairly simultaneously. It’s a rough approximation. So one would be passing through eight periods.
It’s in the fourth period that the breath stops. So at least back before people talked about brain death, you would be considered to be dead at stage four, whereas in this system there are still four stages to go and possibly at a minimum really three days still. At a minimum, it can—let’s see, maybe let’s put it this way, a maximum three days. Minimum even faster if you are worn out by disease, if your constituents are consumed by disease. So it could be quite quick, but generally speaking it’s roughly three days still. Brain death, I don’t know where it comes in this.
If anybody here has any ideas as we’re going through it, please speak up. I want to, you know, it’d be fascinating. Hear about it. So in the first phase, your body becomes very thin. While in old age your body becomes thin, and that doesn’t, you know, we’re all in the process of death to a certain extent from the time you’re conceived, you’re moving closer to death, but we’re talking about this sort of process of death, we’re talking about a pronounced type of thinness that comes to the body and your limbs become loose.
My father walks this way and he’s been walking this way for a few years, so it can’t be the pronounced form of this just prior to death. But it’s, you know, if your legs were—it’s the joints don’t have the tension that they would normally have, so you’re like so. And you have the sense that your body is sinking under the earth. Now this is when the death process is really beginning. My mother has a diaphragmatic hernia, and at least twice she has said she started to die.
She’s had the impression that a mountain of concrete is pressing down on her chest. Now she’s not being poetic and striking a metaphor, you know, that the pressure was so hard in her chest that it was like a mountain of concrete pressing on her chest. Rather, from the point of view of her own experience, a mountain of concrete was on her chest. Alright? It’s said this can be like, even if you just have sheets on the bed, that the sheets turn into mud, foot thick, couple feet thick, and they’re pressing down on you.
So at this stage, one has this—this can be checked out in hospitals easy enough. This particular lama in fact apparently died this way. He was sitting up. They propped him up against his headboard and he kept trying to push himself up. You could tell he felt he was sinking.
Now of course it’s not going to do any good to tell him, look old boy, you’re not sinking. You know, I mean, take that out of your mind. When you’re this far along, that’s what you’re experiencing. And so you know, if you can still talk, you might ask to be cranked up in bed, say if you’re in a hospital bed, or to have the blanket taken off. If the sheet itself can become that heavy, then of course you might want to get rid of that also.
And so part of recognizing that this may happen is not to become afraid of it. Oh, I’m dying. That’s the first stage. So all of this occurring at the same time, your limbs becoming smaller, that was already said. Your body becomes weak and powerless.
Your sight becomes unclear and dark. That would mean your visual sight. Mentally, you see, to see this mass of mud or so forth, you could certainly—you’d have the sense of seeing. You cannot open or close the eyes. The luster of your body diminishes. You know, we all have a sense of vibrancy, of, you know, seeming alive, of a certain tone.
What would another word be? Tone? That tone goes away. The relatives come in and say, oh, he’s not like it, you know, or she’s not like what she was before. She must be going.
And one’s strength is consumed. So all of this happening relatively the same time. And then visually, you have a sense of the appearance of mirages. Do you have mirages on the—you must. You have very hot summers.
Right? And out in the desert, probably even on the highway. Yeah. Highway mirages are interesting. That sort of perception.
I don’t know what it would be like for the nurses and people visiting you in the hospital, but they might feel, oh, you know, they’re having hallucinations or something because it looks as if you’re looking at something. So that’s the first level, and it’s identified usually by the appearance of mirages or the sinking. Then in the second cycle—well, let’s see. Back to the first cycle. In the first cycle, the explanation, the physiological explanation, which is hard to understand, is that the earth element is dissolving.
Now the earth element means hard things. Bone, fingernail, hair, skin, and wherever any of the elements is in this old-fashioned system, earth, water, fire, and air or wind, all of the other elements are too. Wherever there’s earth, there’s water. Wherever there’s water, there’s fire. Wherever there’s fire, there’s wind.
Now fire means—earth means hardness. Water means cohesion, holding together. Fire means temperature, heat, not necessarily burning. And wind is this light and moving energy. Maybe energy.
I don’t know. Energy is probably a cross between fire and wind. So I don’t know if we can make up a one-to-one correspondence with vocabulary that we’d be more familiar with. Air is the air or wind. The definition is that which is light and moving.
It’s said to be wind or air that allows us to extend and contract the arms, legs, that allows us to talk, you know, this sort of movement, spit, swallow. The lower part of the body—defecate, urinate, menstruate, these sorts of activities. And there are secondary winds that operate with the sense consciousnesses. In the Buddhist way, there isn’t just one consciousness, but eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness, body consciousness, and mental consciousness. And the consciousnesses operate or ride on wind.
Wind runs them. What runs the consciousness? For instance, if you’re looking to this side of the room and you switch to that side of the room, there’s a sense of movement and, for instance, you can be looking at an object, say a painting, and be extremely absorbed in it, or you can be looking at an object and mainly your feeling is here. Even though your eyes are looking in that direction, there isn’t the sense of being caught out in the object. Or if you switch from visually paying attention to something to paying attention to something with your ear, there’s like a movement.
If you meditate, you get a clear sense of the mind withdrawing. Like if you meditate internally, trying to concentrate on some place in the body, you can feel the mind be pulled out to various places. You know? Or you’re meditating on the golden body of the Buddha or meditating on the cross in front of you. Then the mind goes off over there, and you can feel it, some sort of movement. Well, that’s the wind or air that’s associated with the mind.
Maybe energy. Okay. Now these winds are associated with the elements, earth, water, fire, wind, that serve as a basis of consciousness. For instance, if you shoot someone, right, a bullet enters some important place so then the body can no longer serve as a basis of consciousness. Consciousness has to leave.
If you don’t believe in consciousness leaving, then you’d have to say consciousness has to cease. You’d say the body can no longer support consciousness. So, dying, it is said that the winds that are associated with these various elements in the body are no longer able to serve as a basis of consciousness. And because say the wind associated with the earth element is no longer able to serve as a basis of consciousness, the capacity of the water element to serve as a basis of consciousness, the wind that’s associated with the water element to serve as a basis of consciousness becomes more enhanced. And so your type of cognition changes.
Now maybe this could, you know, if you thought of various areas of the brain, no longer receiving, I don’t know, blood, oxygen—I’m not a scientist or anything. Excuse my crude analogies. Anyway, no longer being able to function to serve as a basis of consciousness and various areas of the brain or levels of it ceasing to function that way, and other areas becoming dominant due to which you would have a change in perception. That’s change in consciousness. A fellow was telling me that there were areas, I believe, in the visual cortex, something like that, that as they cease functioning, one sees different—has different visual sensations that are quite like what’s put forth here.
I didn’t know whether to believe him. It’s a little bit of nothing. He had come to a lecture that the Dalai Lama was giving in Wisconsin. Actually, the police started watching. Anyway, so I’m just bringing this up because if somebody’s heard about this, I’d like to—if you have any information in this regard.