Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Thubten Chodron guides students through the nine-point death meditation, a core Buddhist practice designed to reorient life priorities away from distraction and toward genuine spiritual transformation. The meditation has three major themes: death is definite and unavoidable; the time of death is uncertain; and at death, only our mental development accompanies us while all possessions, relationships, and even the body must be left behind. Chodron walks through concrete reflections on each point—how wealth creation breeds attachment and negative karma, how our closest relationships cannot follow us, how the body we cling to will abandon us. The teaching emphasizes that contemplating mortality is not morbid but liberating: it clarifies that only dharma practice and the karma we generate truly matter, encouraging practitioners to cultivate wisdom and compassion rather than pursuing transient pleasures. The meditation concludes with the practical insight that remembering impermanence keeps motivation pure and focus sharp on what actually endures.
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File: 17 GM.mp3
UUID: e7f28fed-0561-40c3-a1c3-0b05f8112621
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~2,013
So we’ve realized that we have a precious human life with many unique opportunities, that this precious human life has great meaning and purpose, but that it’s extremely difficult to receive and very rare. So when we understand this, we feel very fortunate and quite eager to practice and make use of our life. But when we look at how we spend most of our time, we see that it’s involved with the eight worldly concerns. So these eight worldly concerns are one of the biggest impediments in our Dharma practice, especially at the beginning. And the antidote to them is the meditation on impermanence and death.
Because when we consider our own mortality, it helps us set our priorities properly. It helps us live our life in a very clean, clear way. So the purpose of meditating on death isn’t to become depressed or anxious about the fact that we’re going to die, but rather by thinking about it and accepting that it will happen, we can then begin to make preparations for our death. And in that way, death becomes less fearful. In addition, contemplating our mortality gives a lot of meaning and purpose to our life, helps us make wise decisions, spend our time in useful ways.
The nine point death meditation has nine points that are divided into three major groups, each with three points and a conclusion. And so it’s very important when we meditate on this to apply it to our own life and think deeply about it. The first major heading is that our death is definite, and there’s no way to avoid dying, and nothing can prevent it. So everybody who’s born sooner or later must die no matter who they are. So even the most famous people, the richest people, everybody has to die.
So take a moment and reflect on the fact that you will die and also that the people that you love and care about also one day will die. This is just a natural part of being alive and follows directly from being born. It can be helpful here to think of what your loved ones will look like when they’re dead, what you will look like when you’re dead. Just to help the mind to really understand that, yes, it will happen one day. And when the time of our death arrives, there’s no way to extend our lifespan.
Our lifespan is definitely limited. And with each moment, we’re getting closer to our death. So today, we’re closer to death than we were yesterday. With each passing moment, our life is consumed, and we approach death. And even though we may value Dharma practice, our death may come even if we haven’t practiced the Dharma to the extent that we would like.
So many great and famous people lived before. They all died. So many talented people, famous people lived before. They all died. So definitely one day, we will die.
Our loved ones will die. And when we think about that deeply, we begin to feel like we need to practice the Dharma because the Dharma is what will help us to die peacefully. So thinking about death helps us turn our mind to the Dharma, which means turn our mind and have the aspiration to transform it. The second major point is that the time of our death is uncertain. We don’t know when we’re gonna die.
So even though we feel like we’re going to live long, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we will. So in our world, there’s no certainty of lifespan. People die at all different ages. Some people die when they’re old, some when they’re middle aged, some as young adults, some as teenagers. Some people even die as children or even when they’re in the womb before they’ve been able to be born.
So we don’t know when we’re going to die, and there’s no guarantee that we’re going to have a long life. And whenever we do die, for sure, we’ll be in the middle of doing something when death arrives. Some people go on holiday and they never return. Some people leave for work, and they never get there. Some people even go to the store but never come home.
Some people start to sing a song, and they die before it’s over. So there will never be a time when we’ve completed everything, when we feel we’re ready to die. We’ll always be in the middle of doing something, and then death comes. So even though we feel like we’re strong and healthy and we’re going to live for a long time, it actually takes a great deal of effort to stay alive and very little effort to die. So just to maintain our life, we have to do so much to get food.
We have to make sure our body is at the right temperature, that it has shelter and clothing. We have to take care of it when it’s sick. It actually takes quite a bit of effort to keep this body alive. Whereas if we simply did nothing, then death would eventually come from starvation or whatever. So the point is that it’s very easy to die, and we don’t know when that will happen.
In addition, our body is extremely fragile. It seems so strong, but actually very small things can harm it and cause death. Tiny microscopic bacteria or viruses can cause our death. Little pieces of metal, little thorns, all these things can easily cause our death. So the body is fragile.
Takes a lot of energy to keep it alive and no energy at all for it to die. And so we realize that death can come to us at any moment regardless of whether we’re young or old. And so, therefore, it’s important that we practice the Dharma, and it’s important that we practice it now because we don’t know how much time we’ll have. So when the time of death arrives, nothing else can help us except the Dharma. So we spend a lot of time in our life trying to get wealth, trying to get material possessions.
But at the time of death, all of our belongings stay here, and our mind goes on alone to the next rebirth. So none of our possessions can prevent our death. None of them help us to die peacefully. And in addition, during our life, we’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to get them and often generated many negative states of mind in the process of doing so. So sometimes we develop attachment to the things we want or the things we have.
Sometimes we develop anger because we can’t get them. Sometimes we’re jealous because other people have better things. All these emotions, all the actions we do motivated by them put negative imprints on our mind. All these negative imprints are created for the sake of getting the money and material possessions. And yet at the time we die, those very things completely abandon us and are absolutely no use to us.
So we have to think, how can I have a healthy relationship with money and material possessions? We live in a world where, of course, we have these. But how can we relate to them in a healthy way so that our attachment and anger and relationship to them don’t make us create negative karma and don’t make it painful for us to separate from all these things at the time of death. There’s a lot to think about here. So not only are our material possessions and our money of no use at death, Also, our friends and relatives, our dear ones, they can’t come with us either.
So we may love each other very much. We may be very attached to each other. We may share very intimate things and never want to be separated. But at the time of death, we must separate. They stay here.
We go on to our next life. So it makes us reflect that often due to our attachment to friends and relatives, we create a lot of negative actions. We do all sorts of things to protect them. We do all sorts of things to win their approval and their praise and their love. We get upset when the relationships don’t turn out the way we want or when we’re separated from them, when the relationship dissolves, when they don’t do what we want.
So out of our attachment to these people, we create a lot of negative actions that will ripen in unpleasant experiences in the future. And so given that we have to separate from these people definitely at the time of death, of what use is it to be attached to them? Of what use is it to cling to them? We’re not saying that it’s bad to be fond of people or to care for people. That’s not the point.
The point is what happens when we cling on to them with attachment, when we expect them to bring us ultimate happiness, and they’re impermanent and must die. And we too are transient and must die and separate from them. In addition, at the time of death, our body even leaves us. Even our body that we’ve cherished so much, we’ve had it with us since the beginning of this life, never been separated from it. Even this body, the time of death, we have to separate from.
It stays here, gets burned, it gets buried. Our consciousness goes on alone. So so much of our ego identity is based on this body. We identify with being a certain race, a certain nationality, a certain gender, a certain sexual orientation, a certain age. We identify with our physical attractiveness.
We cling on to being attractive. We cling on to being athletic. We cling on to being healthy. So much of our identity is based on this body, but at the time of death, the body just deserts us. So, again, we have to ask ourself, what does it mean to have a healthy relationship with our body?
How can we live peacefully with our body and use it to create good karma instead of creating negative karma because we’re so attached to it. Because out of attachment to this body, we do all sorts of things to protect it and to get things that give it pleasure. These karmic imprints go with us to the future lives causing unpleasant circumstances. And the body that we cherish so much for which we created all these negative actions, it deserts us. It abandons us at death.
So given this fact, how can we have a healthy mental relationship with our body? How can we relate to our body in a healthy way? So when we think about the fact that at death, must separate from our wealth and possessions, from our loved ones, and even from our body, then we come to realize not only must we practice the Dharma, not only must we practice it now, but we must also practice it purely. We must not get distracted by clinging attachment to material things, to people, or to our body because that attachment simply makes us waste our life or create negative actions for the benefit of things that will eventually desert us. So we must practice the Dharma very purely without ulterior motivations to get things for the happiness of this life.
If we practice purely, happiness now will automatically follow. But if we cling on to our present happiness, then our motivation gets polluted. So remembering impermanence and death helps us to keep a very pure motivation and to really focus our energies on what is important, which is transforming our mind, generating wisdom and compassion. Because at the time of death, only that comes with us. Only our mental cultivation, only the karma we’ve created.
None of the things around us in this life come with us at death time.