Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A radio interview with a terminally ill woman who said she had “never thought about death until now” opens this 37-minute talk by Ven Jampa Gendun on why death-awareness is Buddhism’s most essential practice. Gendun argues that honestly confronting mortality is not morbid but life-enhancing, then works through the nine-round death meditation: three roots, each supported by three reasons. The roots are death’s inevitability, the uncertainty of its timing, and the recognition that at the moment of death neither possessions, loved ones, nor even one’s own body can help — only the mind one has cultivated. He draws on Pabongka Rinpoche’s six benefits of keeping death in mind before closing with the Zen paradox that learning to live and preparing to die are one and the same thing.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 H and M of B 1992 07 01.mp3
UUID: 5de1d051-f7d1-44ad-b3f8-3129d3346170
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-07-01
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 36.9 minutes
Words: ~4,762
Looking at the basis of growth, the basis of solving our problems, is our Buddha nature, basic sanity, innate wisdom, love, creative energy. And that we have all of this is the main cause. And we have all the cooperative conditions, external and internal conditions, whereby to develop ourselves, to grow. And we have a chance to grow. But this chance isn’t going to last forever.
It’s definite that we’re going to die. And life has no duration. In the text, leisure and fortune are difficult to find, and life has no duration. So we come up against the very hard cold factor of death, each of our deaths. Recently there was an interview on the radio with a woman who was terminally ill.
Didn’t have very long to live, and she was asked what she regretted most about her life. And she simply said that I had never thought about death until now. Death is not the last taboo at all, but a very modern one. In this area, in this era of demystification, death becomes perverse and more mysterious, more terrible than ever before. We need to have death back again.
Its transcendence puts banalities, emptiness, frustrations, vanities, and some kinds of love in their places. Contemplation terminal issues is not the least morbid but life enhancing. So the reason that we’re considering death is to help us to appreciate life while we still have it, to make use of it, to not waste our lives. And death is something which is something dark and unknown. It’s usually something to be feared.
So fear is fundamentally a basic state of unawareness supported by erroneous beliefs. So we have this an undercurrent of anxiety which permeates our lives. And a great deal of this anxiety is surrounding our death. We have various, as I talked about, various erroneous ideas, wrong conceptions, mistaken beliefs. Our grandiose beliefs about death include I shouldn’t have to die.
I must have one hundred percent guarantee that I won’t die tomorrow. I should be able to control things so I don’t have to die. Death should not be like this for me or my loved ones, and I will not let it happen because it’s unfair and terribly sad. It makes me feel terribly, makes me feel lonely and fearful. So, you know, on our way to developing an awareness of death we have to begin to challenge our grandiose ideas about ourselves and with respect to death.
That is to say, why should the universe somehow single me out for special treatment? Death is unfortunate and it’s terribly sad, but it’s also terribly normal. We have irrational beliefs around death go unchallenged because they go unnoticed, and they go unnoticed because we’re not aware of them, and we’re not aware of them because to a lesser or greater degree we are cowards. We don’t want confront the issue of our mortality, of our death. We want to forget death.
Can’t help but admit that okay someday I’m going to die. But not too soon, we place enough veil between ourselves and our impending death to help us to diffuse the fear around it. That sometime in the vague and distant future, okay, I’m gonna die, but not too soon, not too soon. We try to raise these kinds of veil, screens, to hide this last inescapable possibility, which is that nobody can which nobody can take from us. Which shows us more than anything else that that how much alone we are confronting our death.
How much alone we are with our life in the sense of having to confront death alone. You know, the the fear we have this fear of losing everything. You know, everything that we’ve ever known, all the things that we’ve spent a lifetime gathering together, and the people that we that we love, that we care about, and who care about ourselves. An entire lifetime gone, everything gone. Everything that was familiar, everything which was able to bring us security, which we felt safe with.
And everything that we base a concept about who we are or what we are, or is it that we are at all. You know, our very identity lost, and we we go we not know where. I but to die and to go we not know where, to lie in cold obstruction and to rot, this sense of a warm motion to become a kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit to bathe in the fiery floods or to reside in thrilling regions of thick ribbed ice, to be imprisoned in the viewless wind and blown with restless violence around the pendant world. The essence of cowardice is not to omit one’s fear, to cultivate an unawareness. Each of us at some level has a dread, has an anxiety about death.
We would rather pretend it doesn’t exist or acknowledging its existence. We would rather, let’s not talk about it. You know, you go to a party and start talking about death, you become immensely unpopular. You’d probably never be invited back in. Let’s not talk about it.
Does everybody have to die? Everybody. This is a little girl talking to her grandmother. Little girl says to her, little girl’s name is Kezia. Kezia.
Talking to her grandmother. Does everybody have to die? Everybody. Me? Kezia sounded fearfully incredulous.
Someday my darling. But grandma, Kezia waved her left leg and waggled the toes. They felt sandy. What if I won’t? We’re not asked, Kezya, she said.
It happens to all of us sooner or later. Kezya lay still thinking this over. She didn’t want to die. It meant she would have to leave here, leave everywhere. Forever.
Leave. Leave her grandma. She rolled over quickly. Grandma, she said in a startled voice. Want my pet?
You’re not to die. Kazia was very decided. Ah, Kezia, her grandmother looked up and smiled and shook her head. Don’t let’s talk about it. But you’re not to.
You couldn’t leave me. You couldn’t not be there. This was awful. Promise me you won’t ever do it, grandma. Give Kezia.
The old woman went on knitting. Promise me. Say never. But still her grandma was silent. Kezia rolled off her bed.
She couldn’t bear it any longer, and lightly she leapt off on her grandma’s knees, clasped her hands around the old woman’s throat, and began kissing her under the chin behind the ear and blowing down her neck. Say never, say never, say never, she grasped between kisses, and then again then she began very softly and lightly to tickle her grandma. Kezia, the old woman, dropped her knitting. She swung back into the rocker. She began to tickle Kezia.
Say never, say never, say never, gurgled Kezia while they lay there laughing in each other’s arms. Come, that’s enough my squirrel. That’s enough my wild pony, said old Mrs. Fairfield, setting your cap straight. Pick up my knitting.
Both of them had forgotten what they never was about. So, you know, as I said, the significance of becoming aware of death and the significance or the importance of being mindfulness of death is not just to be conscious of our fears, that we in fact have some dread about death, that we in fact have some anxiety about death nor simply to having become aware of those fears to overcome our fears. Not simply death. The significance of contemplating death is to appreciate our life, to ensure that we do not waste our lives, to ensure that we are not one of those cowards who died many times before their death. And it is the living depth of banality, of vanity, of emptiness, of inauthenticity, a meaningless, purposeless series of hollow events which pass for life, which for most people, passes for life.
You know, a student of Zen went to his master and he said to his Zen teacher, his master, he said, master, how do I prepare for death? Learn to live. How should I learn to live? Prepare yourself for death. So for those who look death squarely in the face, while life is still flowing in their veins, a strong paradox, a strange paradox becomes true, which is that to live gracefully and to die gracefully are one and the same thing.
We will die very much as we live, and we will live very much as we are preparing ourselves for our death. Face and to take control of our death is to take control of our life. To accept our death is to appreciate our life. And to always keep death over our left shoulder, as Don Juan would say, to keep death in our mind’s eye, to be mindful of death, is always to remember how what is uniquely important for us in our life. To be mindful of death is to remember what is uniquely important for us individually in our lives, to keep that in front of one, you know, before one, you know, all of the vicissitudes that life and all the various decisions, all the various situations.
If one could keep that, one would keep what was important in your life before you. Know, though the Buddha said that among all the remembrances or all the mindfulnesses, as I said, that of death was most important, what we are primarily interested in is not death, but life. I’m quoting from a text called the Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. In his masterwork, Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, Pabongka Rinpoche lists six benefits of keeping your mind on death. Your practice becomes really pure, it gains power.
The thought helps you to start practice. They help you to strive hard during your practice. They help bring your practice to a successful conclusion. And in the hour of death, you go with satisfaction, for you know you have spent your life meaningfully. The Rinpoche also lists six problems that come from not keeping your mind on death.
You neglect your religious life, and you spend all your days in thoughts of what to eat to wear, it’s life’s distractions. You consider death occasionally, but always think of it, You consider death occasionally, but always think it will come later and delay your practice. Or you do practice, but for the wrong reasons, with hopes of reputation. You practice without enthusiasm and drop it after a while. You get deeper into this life, your attitude gets worse and life becomes life begins to hurt you.
In a death you naturally feel intense regret for you have wasted all your efforts on this present life. So as a means to confront the notion of death, to become aware of its basic reality, In order to cultivate a mindfulness of death, there is what is within Buddhist meditative tradition, is what is called nine-round death meditation. So there are nine rounds. There’s three sets of three. There are three roots, three reasons giving rise to three determinations.
So the first root is that death is inevitable. And I’m just speaking roughly. Death is inevitable. I mean it’s definite that everyone must die and no matter who it might be, whether it’s a king, president, whether it’s a musician, a saint, philosophers, criminals, poets, ordinary, extraordinary individuals. They all lived their life, they enjoyed, they achieved, they failed, they had all their various successes and pleasures, and then they die.
Everyone must die. Everyone on this earth will probably will be dead one hundred and twenty five years from now. There’s a story of a meditator in Tibet, and he was quite concerned about his death. He asked his teacher, his lama, he said, if you become, you know, when you become aware of the approach of my depth, please let me know. And so one day when he was in his hut, he was out in a desolate area, he received a message and the message said that a person in the village to the east had died.
And the medicators thought, sorry about that, It doesn’t have anything to do with me. He just took no notice of it. And a few days later, a message came. And the message said, a person in the village to the west had died. They meditated, didn’t take any notice of it.
A few days later, another message. A villager to the north had died. A few days later, a villager to the south had died. And then the meditator took no notice of this. And then one day, very soon after that, the meditator became deathly ill, and he called his lama to him, to his deathbed, to his bedside, and he said, you know, I ask you, if my death was approaching, that you let me know, that you help me to be clear.
I ask you to forewarn me of the approach of my death. And the lama said, but I sent you four messages. So you know the everyone has to die. And our lifespan lifespan is continually decreasing. Even if we sit here, the time of our death is that much closer.
You know, seconds become minutes, minutes become hours, hours become days, days become weeks, weeks, months, months, years, and our life keeps on at its petty pace imperceptibly, but still it continues on. You know it’s like we had boarded a train, maybe going from Melbourne to Adelaide. And during the course of that train journey, we have various experiences. You know, we read the newspaper, we eat, we laugh, we have boredom, we look out the window, go to the toilet, even when we sleep. Even during the night, no matter what we’re doing, whether we’re happy or we’re sad during the course of this journey.
Let’s feel the train is moving continually without let up. Even when we sleep, the train is slowly approaching, slowly, and the wheels keep turning without respect until finally it reaches its destination and we have no choice but to get off. And we have to look at how much time do we spend actually developing our mind, actually trying to cultivate love and understanding. In the average day, how many hours do you sleep? How much time do you spend at work?
How much time do you spend eating, socializing? How much time do spend feeling bored, depressed? How much time do you spend to simply being lazy? And finally, how much time do you spend constantly trying to improve your mind, constantly trying to develop understanding, to develop love, benefiting others in some way. So these are the three reasons it’s been supporting this main root of the inevitability of death.
And contemplating upon these three reasons, one comes to the determination that to use our life wisely and meaningfully with some kind of purpose. And the second root is the uncertainty of the time of death. You know, we simply, we don’t know when we’re going to die. human life expectancy is uncertain. Know babies die, fetuses die before they’re even born.
Babies die at birth. They die at the age of three years old or five years old. Teenagers die at the age of thirteen or seventeen. Young adults, twenty one, twenty five, twenty nine, young, what do we call them, middle aged, thirty two, thirty five, thirty eight, thirty nine, forty two, forty four, forty six, forty nine, fifty one, fifty three. There’s no particular age that people don’t die at.
There’s not one age where nobody’s ever died at. People can die at any age. The fact that you’re healthy and young at this moment, there’s no guarantee that you won’t die on your way home tonight. You know, you can ask an insurance salesman. They’ll give you this specific probability.
You you can take out a policy against dying on your way home tonight. There’s a possibility. It’s not an impossibility. You know the vast majority of the people who are going to be dead, say a year from now, didn’t think the thought never occurred to them that they weren’t going to live a long long time today. It simply never occurred to them that they weren’t going to live a long, long time.
human life expectancy is uncertain. We simply don’t know, you know, it’s indefinite. And there are many causes of death. Second reason, many causes of death. You we hear, you know, you can just listen to the news of all the various disasters, earthquakes, landslides, floods, fires, storms, wars, famines, terror.
But these are all possibilities of ways of dying. We feel very safe and secure, nice and warm. Almost feel invulnerable as they were to such types of violent death. But still for us there are heart attacks, there’s cancer, all the various diseases, there’s plane crashes, there’s car crashes, there’s drowning, murder. And then there’s old We’re going to die of something, that’s for sure.
And people die in their sleep, they die going to work, they die coming home from work, they die cooking their meals, they die doing housework, they die in school, they die playing sports, they die watching television, they probably die while listening to dharma talk, while listening to dharma talk. Some people even die in hospitals, know. There’s no place, there’s no time that people don’t die. Any situation is a situation of possibility where death could occur. And then finally the reason human life is very, the human body is very fragile.
Within a minute the body can change from being strong and active to being helplessly weak and full of pain. In one instant at a time, You know a piece of glass, a scrap of metal, a tiny bubble in your bloodstream, tiny bubble there in your bloodstream. A virus which you can’t even see can take your life. So if you were to contemplate these three reasons supporting this one root, the uncertainty at the time of death, one develops a determination that to begin my practice. You know, there’s a saying that the today of my death may occur before the tomorrow of my practice.
And so developing your determination that not only am I going to practice to make my life meaningful, but I’m going to start right away, because I don’t know when I’m going to die. You know, we’re trying to arouse some energy, some enthusiasm to make effort. That’s what all of these are directed towards, to rouse our mind. Then finally the third root, the fact that at the time of death, only the development of our mind is going to be of any benefit. At the time of our death, only the understanding and the love and the positive actions that we’ve created over the course of our life is going to be a benefit to us.
You know, all of your you’re, you know, supported by three reasons. All of your enjoyment, all of your possessions that you’ve you expended all your time and energy to gather together at the time of your death, and none of them can be of benefit to you. You know, whether it be your home, your car, your furniture, your video, all of your various enjoyments that you run after, you know, all of the various pleasures, sex, food, music, alcohol, at at the moment that you’re lying there, and the mind is beginning to slip away from the body, that the connection between body and mind is beginning to weaken and is beginning to break, at that moment none of these possessions, none of these various enjoyments which you’ve spent a lifetime pursuing can be of any help whatsoever. They can’t benefit you at that moment. And even not only can they not help you, but they may in fact hinder you.
They may hinder you from dying peacefully through your attachment to them. The second reason is that even those who love you, your loved ones cannot help you at the moment of your death. No matter how sincerely they wish to help you, no matter how sincerely you may love them, and that at the moment of our death and our going forward, we are totally alone, that they can’t they can’t hold your hand. Even even if there was a grasp hold of your body as your mind is slipping away. The bond between mind and body is breaking.
They they dig their fingernails into your arm trying to keep you from slipping away. They can’t grasp onto your mind. They can’t hold your mind back. And there’s nothing they can do. And even in fact, they may make a peaceful death impossible to their attachment to you and your attachment to them.
And then even your own body, the third reason, cannot help you at the time of these deaths. You know this body, you know, which has been our constant companion during the course of our life, it’s seen us through lots of trouble, through lots of joy. We’ve shared a lot of good times and bad times together. We’ve given it the best of everything. We’ve given it, you know, we washed it and we gave it vitamins.
We kept it clean and put perfume on it. Even this body, which we’ve taken such good care of, which has been our constant companion, is at the time of our death useless. It’s like a it becomes like a slab of meat in a butcher’s shelf, just inert and without life. It’s of no benefit to you. They try all different kinds of treatments.
They try all different kinds of treatment and holy rituals, but your conditions get worse and worse. The doctor starts lying to you, your friends and relatives say all sorts of cheery things to you, your friends, behind your back, they start wrapping up your affairs because everyone can see you’re going to die. Your body starts to lose its warmth. It’s hard to breathe. The nostrils collapse.
The lips curl back, the color starts to drain from your face, all sorts of repulsive signs begin to show inside and outside of you. You think of all the wrong things you did in your life and you wish so badly you had never done them. You can’t quite be sure if you ever really got rid of them all when you confessed or that you really did any truly good deed. Then comes the final pain, the unspeakable searing pain that comes with death. The basic building blocks of your body begin their domino collapse.
You are blinded by catastrophic images, hallucinations of pure terror crowd into your mind and carry you away, and the whole world you have been living blinks out. People take your corpse and wrap it up in a sheet and lay it in some corner. They hang up a curtain to hide it. Somebody lights a smudgy little candle and leaves it there. If you’re one of those reincarnated lamas, they dress you in your fancy ritual robes and try to make you look good.
Right right now, we are running around trying to arrange ourselves a nice house, soft clothes, cozy cozy chairs. But you know the custom there in Tibet. When you die, they’ll tie your arms and legs up against your chest with a leather strap, carry the body far out from town, and throw it naked out on the rocks. Right now, we all go home and try to cook ourselves some delectable dish, but there will come a day when you stand there praying for a little taste of those cakes they offer the spirits of the dead. Right now we have a big name.
They call us doctor, professor, a respected sir, or your reverend. But there will come a day when they look at your body and call you nothing but the stinking corpse. There will come a day when the title they put in front of your name is the late or the guy they used to call. So now when you respect the lamas out there in the audience, look at your ritual robes. Let it come to your thoughts that these are the robes they will dress your remains in after you have expired.
And all the rest of us, when we look at our bed sheets before we go to sleep, should try to remember that these are what they will wrap our stinking corpse in when we die. As Milarepa said, that frightful corpse they talk about, it is the very body you wear, meditator. He means look at your own body now and always see the future corpse. By contemplating these three reasons in terms of nothing that you’re enjoying with your possessions, your loved ones, and even your body cannot help you at the time of your death. And growth becomes a central principle of our life.
That the development of our mind becomes central knowing that in fact at the time of our death that neither our possessions nor our loved ones nor even our body can be of any benefit to us. So these three roots, and these are quite useful to keep in mind. Inevitability of death. It’s definitely going to die. Time of our death is uncertain, and our loved ones, our possessions, even our own body will not be of any benefit at the moment of our death, only to the degree that we have developed our minds.
You know, someone, as I’ve mentioned this before that someone has termed death as a radical change of lifestyle, and that we over the course of our life go through many radical changes in lifestyle. You know, there’s times when our life is turned upside down, as it were. You know, death represents an intermediate state where the old, what has gone before, has come to an end and the new has yet to begin. It’s state of flux and transition. It’s the unknown.
Even during the course of our life, how many of us will enter into that unknown? Will enter into a death with joy, not knowing where we’re going to land. You know, it’s only to the degree that we develop our mind. You know, during the course of our life, and my own experience having gone through various upheavals, through deaths, divorces, and you know your friend can hold your hand. They can speak very nicely to you.
They can support you, which is all quite necessary and useful and worthwhile, I’m sure. But the inn is one’s own self who has to live through the process of the transition. No one else can can go through it with you. And what will give us the courage to enter into these states of transition voluntarily, let alone be dragged into them against our will through death, through divorce or whatever. It is only the confidence that we have of our own inner balance, of our own attitude.
One feels good about oneself. One has confidence that I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I have a sense that I’m going to land on my feet on the other side. So as we face the big death at the end of our life, we’re going to face these small deaths which are continually reoccurring during the course of our life, having some kind of inner certainty in terms of how much we’ve grown and how much we can depend upon our basic sanity to carry us through, that things can go well for ourselves. And I think this will give us a You know, I think this is emphasizing the quality as as it was just mentioned, as we will die very much as we have lived, and we will live very much as we will die. So it can be seen that coping with the dread of death is not just a small thing, a particular technique that makes us feel better about our eventual physical demise, but it really contains the clue to leading an infinitely better life and should therefore be an essential part of our basic education.
Any individual who goes into this question at all is faced sooner or later with a certain choice. Either life is brought to fulfillment or life continues as its functions at present, thereby wasting the potential for the happiness which is not only our birthright, but unbeknownst to us, our real nature.