Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 37-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew presents the nine-point death meditation, explaining how contemplating our mortality helps us meet everyday losses—unexpected job loss, sudden death of loved ones, terminal illness—without shock or despair. She contrasts this practice with studying emptiness, which is subtle and difficult; death contemplation is direct and transformative. The core teaching unfolds systematically in three major points: death is certain and inescapable, our lifespan is fixed, and it can come at any moment; its timing is completely uncertain—human life spans from days to a hundred years, and ordinary things like food can kill us; and only our Dharma practice helps at death, since wealth, friends, and even our body abandon us then. McAndrew walks through each subdivision with care, then leads a guided meditation to build conviction in these truths.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 D and I 1999 08 05.mp3
UUID: 708eb19b-34f0-475b-8703-59e2d7c8b8a3
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-08-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 37.6 minutes
Words: ~3,125
I think that the the test of how how far you’ve gone is how you handle it at this time. But I think most of us still have to go through these different stages. You know, I have an idea that myself is right now, but I always tell you, I I suspect that I would have anger, a lot of anger. I can’t sort of see myself in that one. So yeah.
Right. Yes. That’s right. Yes. So he had his faith, and he I suppose I mean, I only saw him towards the end when he’d already done his working through, but perhaps for years beforehand, even because he was an old man.
And for old people, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be sick before they start going through this process because they can see the writing on the wall anyway. Quite often, old people can just sort when the time comes, can just sort of let go because they had time to prepare. Yes, but basically he must have had to think things through a lot and come to terms. Mhmm. Yes.
So anyway, my advice would be to get in touch with some of our dying experts, if you know what I mean. Death care support, exactly, yes. Death support experts, because we have a group of people and they recognize that not only the dying people themselves, but the people around them are in need of help and advice and support and so on, and they have experience in the specific sort of situations. Yes. Well, there is a group in Adelaide, and they are becoming a bit more active now.
In fact, I think there was something in the last newsletter about it, was it? Or somewhere else I saw it. Last newsletter, I think. Anyway, so okay. So We’re up to Yes.
No, I’m not up to the points yet, but Yes. I’m just trying to find where Yes. Yes. So I’m up at the top of the page. So, yes.
So anyway, for instance, it can help us with things like if we lose our jobs, we won’t be as shocked as we would be if we hadn’t remembered impermanence because while we’ve got our job, we remember that the job is impermanent and can’t be expected to last. And if we lose somebody dear to us who’s still young and seem to be healthy, then we still have it in mind that death can happen to any of our friends or relatives, no matter how young and healthy they might seem. That element of shock and not understanding is taken away. Quite often people just can’t understand how these things happen. It just doesn’t seem to fit their understanding of how world is, the life is, how life is, but from a Buddhist perspective, these things are very much the way life is, so that it doesn’t seem surprising or shocking.
For instance, if we were to find that we had a terminal disease ourselves, then at least we’d have some sort of mental preparation for it. What, you mean life is a terminal disease? Yes. Yes. Okay.
Exactly. So, I mean, you do think that way all along, that you can never be sure that you haven’t got something or something’s not going to happen to suddenly bring a very sudden stop to your life. Of course, we never really believe it no matter how much we think about it. It’s very hard to really take it on or to really take it seriously. But if you keep on thinking about it, then you have got at least some degree of preparation.
And it definitely does help when these things do come about, because I’ve seen it happen in people’s lives a number of times, some various different combinations of all these different situations. By keeping impermanence in mind, we can be stopped from pinning all of our hopes and expectations onto things that may not last. We’ll see the value of putting Dharma practice first and preparing for future lives and putting this first in our minds over putting all our hopes and expectations on things of this life that really can’t be relied on. So this doesn’t mean that we neglect our friends and families and just meditate all day and spend all our time hanging around Buddha house and some people do this. This is the extreme case, you know, of for most of us, this isn’t the way of life that we’re meant if you can use the word meant in the general sense of what what is the most appropriate thing for us to do.
So for most of us, we’ll be carrying on with our normal lives much as they were before, and our friends and families and so on will be seeing us about as much as they used to and so on. But what we’re talking about is mental attitudes and the motivation with which we do these sort of everyday activities. And yes? Oh, well, I I have finished my sentence essentially. Yes.
I think I would have been saying mantras. But I mean, obviously he had reached beyond that point where he was, I should say, living in the moment. Anyway, point is that we’re So it depends on our mind, what our mind is engaged in. Lost the place again. So, yes.
So, essentially, what we’re trying to do is giving up grasping at the eight worldly dharmas, and that is Dharma practice. Because Dharma practice and the eight worldly dharmas are opposites. And that’s Dharma with a big d. And so we’re opposing the eight worldly dharmas, then we are practicing Dharma. And it’s in our minds that we have to be doing that.
And so if we can remember impermanence, then it will really help us to overcome these eight worldly dharmas in our minds. And except for meditating on emptiness, Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey says there’s no greater antidote to the eight worldly dharmas than meditation on death. Unlike emptiness, it’s so difficult to understand. You know, we have to for for most of us, it’s very difficult for us to remember emptiness all the time, even if we remember the words and think emptiness, emptiness, all these things are empty of inherent existence. It doesn’t it doesn’t really penetrate.
It’s it’s hard enough to to get the idea of impermanence, but that is possible for us. It can work for us. And so so it’s very important for us to to keep this in mind. If we want to gain great realizations like insight into emptiness and bodhicitta and so on, we have to meditate on death in order to overcome the obstacles to our practice that are preventing us from being able to achieve these kinds of realizations, and in order to generate renunciation of saṃsāra. So essentially, renunciation of saṃsāra means renouncing the the worldly concerns.
So this is the results we can gain from meditating on death and impermanence. So then, in order to engage in the nine point death meditation, there are three major divisions, and each of them has three subdivisions. So the three major divisions are that death is certain, its time is uncertain, and that at the time of death, nothing will help us except our Dharma practice. And each of these three main divisions has three subdivisions, it also has a conclusion. So for the first subdivision, death is certain, then, first of all, there’s no possible way to escape death.
Secondly, life has a definite inflexible limit. In other words, we take rebirth with a specific amount of life force or karma for the length of this life, and when that’s all used up then we have to finish. Sometimes our life can be shortened by an interruption to our life by obstacles but once the amount of life force that we gain from our our karma is used up, then we have to die anyway. And thirdly, death comes in a moment and its time is uncertain. Uncertain.
So the second point is that the time of death is uncertain. Uncertain. And that is, first of all, that the our lifespan is of uncertain duration. So it says in some of the stories about human life on this world and so on, which is sort of very different to what we learned from archaeology and so on nowadays. But it said that human beings used to have a fixed lifespan of a thousand years.
Nowadays, we know that we not only don’t have a thousand years, most of us don’t even have a hundred years, but we can’t put any specific length on the human lifespan because it can be any time from the moment of birth onwards. So also, life has, each moment brings us closer to the finality of life. This is still part of that second point because we don’t know what our death is going to be, but we do know that we only have a certain amount of lifespan and we’re getting closer to it all the time. We’re not getting further away from it. So each tick of the clock brings us a moment closer to death.
Thirdly, there are many causes and circumstances that lead to death. Sorry. That that was still part of the first subdivision. Lost. Sorry.
Sorry. I’m still on point one. Death is certain. I’ll read through death is certain again. No possible way to escape death.
Death life has a definite inflexible limit, and death comes in a moment. Okay. So now we’re on to point two, which is its time is uncertain. Sorry. Yes.
I’m losing my place. I I need to put my finger on it. So the duration of our lifespan is uncertain. Right? I’ve been through that.
Secondly, there are many causes and circumstances that lead to death, but few that favor the sustenance of life. And even the necessities of life such as food and clothes and transport and so on can actually turn into the cause of our death. For instance, you can choke on your breakfast. This is not a a joke, actually, because there’s stories of people who’ve choked on their toast or whatever. Yes.
That’s true. And third, third subdivision of the second point, the weakness and, because our body is is they’re actually weak and fragile, so even a small thing such as a thorn could cause infection that could lead to death. So many little things, tiny little, bacteria and viruses can, be the end of our life. And thirdly so that was the third point of the of the second point. The third subdivision of the second point.
And the And then, so I missed the conclusion for the first one. So the first one, death is certain, has the conclusion that we have to practice Dharma. Right, so now the second point has because the time of death is uncertain, the conclusion is that we have to practice Dharma immediately without delay. Now, the third major point is that Dharma is the only means that will help us at the time of death. And the first point, a, is that worldly possessions, like wealth, possessions, money and status and so on, all of these things are of no benefit to us at the time of death.
We’re born with nothing and we die with nothing. We can’t take it with us. Secondly, our relatives and friends can neither prevent our death nor go with us. So we’re born alone, and we have to die alone. Even if we have our relatives all around us, still we have to go off through the death experience into the in between state and the next life by ourselves.
Our relatives can’t accompany us. And no matter how much want life want to prevent our death, no matter how much they wish us to stay with them, still when we have to go, then we have to leave them and be parted and separated from them. And if we’re clinging too strongly to our relatives and to the happiness of being with the people that we’re attached to, then this will only interfere with our being able to go on with death process peacefully. So we need to keep in mind that all of these things are only temporary things that going to have go through this process of parting with our friends. We make our main preparation for our next life in our Dharma practice, rather than getting caught up in attachments and expecting these things to be the essential meaning of our life.
And, of course, as I mentioned before, that doesn’t mean that we have to leave our friends or or that we don’t love them. In fact, we love them more if we’re able to love them from a dharma viewpoint rather than from just self-centered attachment. So it’s this self centered attachment looking for our own happiness that is the the problem here. It’s not the relationship, but it’s the clinging and grasping attitude that comes from this self centered concern for our own temporal happiness, particularly happiness of this life because if we’re thinking of our own happiness but we’re able to shift our viewpoint to future lives, even that releases us from these distractions to our Dharma practice. So the third point is our own body, that we’ve cared for most.
The thing that we’re attached to most is our body and its comfort and well-being and pleasure. And at the time of death, of course, our body’s no use to us at all. It’s only problem and we can’t take it any further. It lets us down. So the conclusion from this main point that only our Dharma practice can help us at the time of death is that we have to practice Dharma purely, not mixed up with worldly concerns.
And if we’re going to meditate on that, we won’t have time to talk about the death visions, but I think I can put that off until next week. And I think I’ll have time to talk about that next week. The experience, the death experience. Well, I won’t really I won’t really have time to go through it in any sort of detail, so I could just mention the the points quickly. But I think I’ll have to explain them next week and go through it a bit more thoroughly because everybody always wants to have a fairly detailed explanation of that.
So, anyway, we’ll do a little meditation on the nine points meditation, the nine-point death meditation. And this is the the main meditation that we do to convince ourselves of the certainty of death and the the uncertainty of the time and of the necessity of doing a pure Dharma practice. So first of all, we contemplate, on the point that death is certain. First of all, there is no possible way to escape death. Nobody has ever, lived forever.
Secondly, our life has a definite fixed limit, and each moment brings us closer, moment by moment, to the end of this life. And thirdly, death can come in a moment, and its time is uncertain, unexpected. And so contemplating on these points, we form the conclusion that, it’s necessary to prepare for the future life by practicing Dharma. Then the second point is that the time of death is uncertain. And the first subdivision is that the, duration of our life span is uncertain.
human life can last for any amount of time from, less than a day up to, over a hundred years. But we don’t know in any given case how long it’s going to be. Secondly, there are many causes and circumstances that can lead to death. Many things that can bring death about, and few that favor the sustenance of life. And even the, these things, the necessities of life may be causes of death also.
And thirdly, because our bodies are not, very strong and invulnerable, but in fact, our bodies are very weak and fragile, susceptible to all sorts of damage and harm. And so from this point that the time of death is uncertain, we draw the conclusion firmly that we need to begin to practice Dharma right now without delay. And then thirdly, the point that nothing will help us at the time of death except our Dharma practice. So first of all, worldly possessions such as wealth, position, money can’t help us at all at the time of death. Secondly, our friends and relatives also can’t help us at this time.
They can’t prevent our death or accompany us. And thirdly, our own body that we’re so attached to is going to be, only a problem to us. It’s going to let us down at this time. And so we form the firm conclusion then that we not only need to practice Dharma and to practice it now, but we need to practice Dharma purely. And so contemplate on these points well, we’ll be like somebody who’s staying, who’s traveling.
They won’t bother about buying a lot of furniture for their room because because they’ll be moving on shortly. In the same way, we won’t be bothered with, with meaningless pursuits. And so, we’ll finish finish at this point, and does anybody have anything to say? Any questions or anything before we finish? Yes, well I should say thank you to my great gurus who taught me about these things.
And I suppose in this particular case, as far as this nine-point death meditation goes, that was one that I first learned from Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey. And of course, from others over in which I’ve had teachings on it in retreats all the time. So, yes, it’s really yes. Well, of course, as you say about practice going out the window, it’s one thing to say the words and it’s another to have some practice, but at least that’s where it all begins, isn’t it? So, anyway, we can dedicate our merits now and finish the session.
Page five. May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to that enlightened state through these skillful actions? May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart that has not arisen arise and grow. May that which has arisen never diminish, but increase more and more. And then his holiness, Dalai Lama’s appear on page ten.
In the land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and good. All powerful Tenzin Gyatso. Please remain until cyclic existence is ended.