Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute evening session, Ven Margaret McAndrew asks directly: how seriously do we think about dying, compared to how we think about living? She frames Buddhist preparation for death as essential practice — treating death not as an end but as a transition between lives, where how we die shapes the quality of rebirth. The core teaching is the nine-point death meditation (death is certain, its time uncertain, only dharma helps), paired with an explanation of why worldly attachments — the eight worldly dharmas — obstruct peaceful dying. She shows how meditating on impermanence strengthens all dharma training, covers the distinctively Tibetan approach of visualizing the actual death process, and weaves in Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teaching that remembering impermanence is foundational for bodhicitta. For practitioners with some Buddhist background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 59 HDW 1998 10 22.mp3
UUID: 73c35937-f012-4ba3-88a5-167a2f77e161
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-10-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~5,737
Doing this activity tonight with the thought not just of some sort of meaningless activity, not the thought that we engage in worldly activities but this is a dharma activity, a spiritual activity. We have to have some sort of spiritual motivation in order for it to really become a spiritual activity. And so it’s not enough just to be thinking of some sort of benefit in this life, but we need to be thinking about future lives and in particular we need to be thinking about attaining the everlasting state of happiness, liberation. By following the Dharma practice, by following the teachings of Buddha, we can understand how to follow the path to liberation, how to attain liberation, how to bring about liberation in our own mental continuum and to experience this really pure, everlasting happiness. And it’s not enough just to think of attaining this for ourselves only because there are all these other sentient beings, countless sentient beings and we’re actually very closely involved with all of them.
We actually have a very strong connection with all of these beings and so it’s not enough to just ignore their plight and think of ourselves because they have the same needs that we do and like us they need to be rid of suffering and to find this everlasting happiness. So what we need to do is to set our thoughts on attaining enlightenment, following the path of the Mahāyāna teachings and accomplishing the various stages to full Buddhahood which will actually give us the effective means to work for all these others and continually to work for them as the enlightened beings do. In this way we can effectively bring about the happiness of ourselves and others in the most effective way. Tonight the topic is how to die well. Wonder if I’m sorry to really drag you but I wonder if somebody could get me some water because I know that I always run out of voice if I don’t have it.
Yes, well I came in and sort of checked everything too, you know. I kind of did a mental check but I didn’t do it very well. Yeah, well, I don’t know who’s supposed to be doing it. I don’t mind but I feel a bit silly that I didn’t actually spot it myself. So anyway, the topic is how to die well.
So anyway, we have to die so we might as well know how to do it well. So we’re all concerned about how to live well. This is something that all think about or we try to do one way or another, whether we actually think about it in those terms or not. Quite often we don’t necessarily think about how we’re going to go about dying. This is perhaps something that some people might think of but it’s not quite such a usual thing to think of as how we’re going to live well.
If we’re thinking of how we have to live well there’s a lot of things that we have to think about like how we’re going to make our livings, how we’re going to be educated, how we’re going to gain various different kinds of social accomplishments so as to have friends, how we’re going to find a suitable partner and bring up children if we have them. So there’s a lot of things to be thought about. Perhaps it doesn’t occur to a lot of people that there might be anything particular to think about when it comes to dying. Know it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not. We don’t want it to happen.
Thanks Jim. So anyway, we know we’re going to die whether we want to or not and we don’t really like thinking about it. We don’t find that it’s a very pleasant thing to think about because we have various fears associated with the sort of dying and we know that it involves being separated from things that we’re fond of, that we’re attached to, being separated from various people that we’re close to and so on. So there’s a lot of things about dying that we find very unpleasant to think about. On the other hand we might have actually given the matter some thought, thought about it a bit more deeply and come to the conclusion that we do need to prepare ourselves in various ways for dying.
This can involve various sorts of preparation such as thinking about who we’re going to leave our wells to and how we want to be buried and so on. It can also involve such things as mentally preparing ourselves for dying. And this is what we’re particularly concerned with in Buddhism. Many people actually leave this process until they know that they have some sort of life threatening illness and then they think that it’s time that they started to prepare themselves to think about what’s going to happen. So the Buddhist viewpoint is that our whole life needs to be a preparation for dying.
You could say in a way that we’re all terminally ill because we’re all going to die and it’s only a matter of time until we die. We don’t know when that’s going to be but the fact that we’ve been born means that we’re going to die so having been born is a life threatening, not just life threatening but it’s a fatal illness. It’s certain from the moment that we take our first breath that we’re going to have to face this problem of dying. From the Buddhist viewpoint we actually see death as just a part of a continuing process. So it’s not the end of everything but it’s a transitional process between one life and the next life, between being associated with the body of this life and leaving that body and becoming associated with whatever body we’re going to have in our next life.
We have to go through this transitional process and it’s quite a serious process. It’s quite a major change. It’s a very important point in this continuing process, but still it is a continuing process. It’s part of a continuum that keeps on happening and we’ve been doing that again and again. We’ve been through the process many times before, although we don’t remember it.
We’ve got to where we are now and we’re going to go through this process again and we’re going to go to another life. So we need to be preparing for dying while we’re living and also you could say that we’re preparing for our next life while we’re dying. And this dying process is a very crucial point because the manner in which we die has a lot of influence on whether we manage to get a good rebirth. In other words, dying well maximizes our opportunities at the death time. It gives us the best opportunity.
So it’s a bit like going for an exam. If you can get through the exam well, then you can do better. You can either make the best of your present situation or you can perhaps fail to make the best of your possibilities by messing up the exam. Even if you had some reasonable potentialities, you might have to sort of stick back a bit if you mess the exam up. So we don’t want to do that.
We want to look at how we can go into the dying process and go through it well. This is something that we have to be preparing for through the whole of our life. There are also certain things that we have to consider the actual round about the actual time of death. We don’t want to die before we have to. This is taken for granted.
Whether you’re a Buddhist or not a Buddhist, it’s quite reasonable to try to prolong your life. In fact, we have a lot of practices that are designed to help us to live long lives. If we’re living a life where we’re practicing Dharma and accumulating merit and purifying our negative karmas, if we’re living a good life, if we’re living our life fruitfully, then it’s definitely worthwhile to extend it if we can. From the Buddhist viewpoint, even if we’re experiencing various problems and sufferings, this can be a very fruitful life for us because we can be clearing away our negative karmas and building up our potential for future lives. We want to go on living, at least while we have the strength to go on practicing Dharma, while we have the clear understanding and the sufficient physical strength to be doing some sort of fruitful practice, which doesn’t necessarily have to be anything fantastic, but it means mainly just training ourselves in virtue training ourselves out of non virtuous activities of body, speech and mind.
So does anybody have any questions at this point? Yes. Well that’s an interesting question actually and it’s explained in detail really in, well I’ll be going into that in a bit more detail anyway in the later part of the talk, but it’s also explained in a lot of detail in the topic of the twelve links of dependent origination which I talk about sometimes and which are explained sometimes in the Graduated Path texts in the Intermediate Scope section. It has to do with the way karma works and the way the karma ripens for our future lifetimes, which is that even if we have accumulated a lot of good karma, there’s still a possibility of a bad karma arising at death time. But if we die well then it practically guarantees that if we’ve been living a good life and have plenty of good karma, then to die well gives you the opportunity to ripen a good karma and to avoid the sort of chance that a bad karma might pop up in your mind at the death time.
Whereas on the other hand, if you’ve lived a bad life and only thought about changing your ways at death time. It’s a bit late then it’s going to be very difficult, although the situation isn’t totally hopeless. It’s a bit late really. It’s not wise to leave it until the end of the life to prepare for your death. If you’ve lived you don’t know when it’s going to be, for one thing.
Another thing is that the more time you can spend accumulating merit and purifying the better. And if you’ve accumulated a good store of in other words, if you’ve trained yourself well in virtue and out of the grosser kinds of negativities, then it gives you a much greater opportunity of dying well, of having a peaceful mind at death time. The whole thing works together. In other words, the whole karmic pattern will influence what happens to you at death time, but there’s still one particular karma is going to be the one that brings your next rebirth. It’s what’s called a projecting karma.
That’s a technical topic which is explained which you find particularly in relation to the twelve links and also it would be one of the topics which is explained in the Abhidharma teachings. So we’ll also be talking about that from the point of view of the experiences we go through at death time the visions and so on. So anyway, we can’t spend too much time making preparation for death because it’s a very important situation that not only has possibilities for a bad result if we blow it, but it also has the possibility for taking a big step forward at the death time. The positive side of it is that if we’ve prepared well, then it’s not just a question of perhaps going on to a similar situation to what we’ve got now, but it actually gives us an opportunity to take a big step if we can manage to take it. Anyway, we don’t have to think about death as being something terrible.
It can have its drawbacks certainly, but it also gives us opportunities. In relation to that, Lama Zopa Rinpoche said something to me a few years ago. It was just before His Holiness was in Sydney giving the Kālacakra initiation. I was in Melbourne at that time. Lama Zopa Rinpoche was in Melbourne too, at Tārā Institute and I happened to meet him outside the house.
It was one of those nice little moments when you meet your Guru and there’s not a lot of other people around so you can have a few little words of personal chat with him and he asked me how my health was and I said well I’m a lot better than I used to be and he said every time I meet you, because a few years ago I used to be pretty sick, so he said every time I meet you you’re getting better and he said other people get worse and worse but you seem to be getting better and better all the time! I said yes that’s true but I suppose one of these days I’ll have to die. He said that could be another way of getting better. So anyway, we need to meditate on death and impermanence. There are two approaches that we can do.
The first one is the classical sūtra approach, which you probably all learned about already, is also shared with other Buddhist schools and you find similar meditations even in non-Buddhist religions such as Hinduism of reflecting that death is certain. We’re certain to die and we can’t be sure of the time of death. We don’t know when it’s going to happen. It could happen at any time. And the other way that we can meditate on death is by visualizing the experiences that happen to us when we’re dying and particularly the visions that occur during the death process.
This is something that’s special to Tibetan Buddhism. It’s gone into this much more than other Buddhist traditions have done. And so the first approach is meditating on death and impermanence, on the certainty of death and the fact that we have to die at the end of every life we experience, we have to die, we have to die again and again while we’re in Samsāra. This is symbolized by the Lord of Death who’s over there on the wall. You see the wheel there.
He’s holding the wheel of Samsāra in his hands and between his feet and in his jaws and this means that as long as we’re in Samsāra cycling from life to life, we’re in the jaws of the Lord of Death. We have to die again and again. While we’re experiencing these samsaric lifetimes, death is always definite. The coming of death is certain. There was a little joke in the newspaper the other day, some of you might have read it, about Kerry Packer.
You know that he had a near death experience recently and just more recently he’s managed to evade a large amount of taxes. So there’s this saying that there’s only two things in life, that are certain death and taxes. And somebody wrote into the last weekend’s paper saying it looks like the Packer family have managed to recently have managed to avoid both death and taxes recently. So anyway, in spite of Kerry Packer, death is definite. So there are I don’t know about taxes.
That’s a different thing. If you’ve got enough money you can certainly avoid the taxes. Or if got very little money you don’t have to pay them either. I can’t talk because I’m in the non tax bracket. So there are three, until the GST comes in.
Yes, well then we’ll all have to pay tax, won’t we? Every time we go out and buy something. So then there are three main subdivisions to this meditation. We’re taught particularly Well, there are different ways we can meditate on the fact that we have to die, but the main way is meditate on the nine-round death meditation, which most of you have probably already learned about, but it never hurts to go through it again. This is meditating on the three main subdivisions that death is definite and after meditating on that we come to the conclusion that if we’re going to die and taking it with the assumption that we’re not going to finish at death but that we have to go on to a future life, we have to prepare for that and so the conclusion that we reach is that we have to practice Dharma.
And then the second main subdivision is that the time of death is uncertain. We don’t know when it’s going to be but we do know that people can meet with death at any time, that it can happen unexpectedly, that it can happen at any age and it can happen to people in any situation no matter how strong they seem to be, no matter how safe and well protected they seem to be. We can never be certain that the sort of cause death isn’t going to arise in us one way or another. And so the conclusion that’s drawn from that is that we can’t defer our Dharma practice, we have to practice Dharma now. And the third point is that worldly things, things that are only concerned with the welfare of this life, can’t help us at death time.
So we can’t take these things with us and if we’ve become too attached to them it actually acts as an obstacle. It’s an obstruction to dying peacefully because it’s going to cause unpeacefulness, unhappiness in our mind. We’ll experience fear because we’re leaving behind the things that mean so much to us. So it’s going to actually be a factor which will disturb our minds and lead to an unpeaceful death. In actual fact, it not only be taken with us, these things can’t be taken with us, but they’re actually something that can’t help us at all, and actually the reverse.
So the conclusion that comes from that is that not only do we have to practice Dharma now, but we have to practice purely. In other words, trying to avoid the eight worldly dharmas, the state of mind that’s attached attached to the things of this life, whether it’s aversion or attachment. If you remember the eight worldly dharmas, were in pairs of opposites. Hilary is looking for minties again. Anyway, yes.
So I think pleasure and displeasure or pain, yes. I think comfort comes into pleasure. Really the whole eight of them cover everything between them. So pleasure and displeasure, praise and blame, yes, well, yeah, that’s in the sometimes it’s expressed in those terms, particularly in the graduated path teachings. I actually like the Theravadin one which we also come across in some Tibetan texts, which is very clear.
So it’s praise and blame, pleasure and displeasure. Praise and blame, gain and loss, and reputation, good reputation and bad reputation, or fame and notoriety. So basically these cover the whole scope of things. Of course you can then pin down certain sort of more detailed aspects that might be our particular attachments in this lifetime. And we’re attached to all of these things and we’re avert to losing them or to experiencing their opposites.
And if we’re pursuing these things in this life, then that’s not going to help us at all at the death time, so we’re going to just waste our life. So what we have to do is to spend our life meaningfully and that doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to change our external way of life and completely give up everything and go and live in a monastery or go and live in a cave or whatever. What it means is changing our attitude, trying to cut our attachment and clinging to things of this life, seeing them as being empty of lasting meaning and looking for ways of bringing real meaning into our life through spiritual practice. Which is just the opposite of the eight dharmas. So you’ve got the small d dharmas and you’ve got the big d Dharma, basically they’re the opposite to each other, the opposite to Dharma practice is following the eight worldly dharmas or the eight worldly concerns.
The opposite to the eight worldly concerns is practicing Dharma. So the point of doing this meditation is that it helps us with all our Dharma practice. Lama Zopa Rinpoche talked about having a dream once where he asked somebody how to, well he’d been wondering about how to develop bodhicitta and he had a dream where a voice said to him, If you want to practice bodhicitta, you should meditate on death and impermanence. When Lama Zopa has dreams, are particularly significant, particularly if he decides to tell us about them. It’s very interesting that he thought it was particularly interesting that this dream should have come into his mind.
He said that it sounds a bit strange at first, know, if you want to develop bodhicitta then meditate on death and impermanence. But he just went on to point out that if we want to develop any Dharma qualities, we need to meditate on death and impermanence in order to strengthen our practice because it’s this understanding of death and impermanence that gives force to our practice. And Lama Zopa Rinpoche never misses an opportunity to point out the lesson of death and impermanence whenever you’re around him. He’s always pointing it out. For instance, just one time at Tuśita, we were all waiting.
Tuśita, if you’ve been there, Tuśita at Dharmasala, the meditation center is at the top of a hill. In those days, nowadays you can get a four wheel drive sometimes to come up, but in those days the only way to go anywhere was to go down to the there was a very steep road down to the village from the retreat center and you had to walk down because none of the local taxis or whatever could drive up there. And so we used to always have to walk down and one day we were all waiting to say goodbye to Lama Zopa when he was leaving and everybody was waiting to carry his luggage. All the strong people were waiting to carry his bags and things. And we were all lined up and Lama Zopa came out and when he saw us all waiting there for our final blessing, he just gave this little talk on how fortunate we all were that we were still alive and still able to go on our two legs and still able to carry things because the Lord of Death was going to could be coming along at any time.
Yes. Yes. Yes, anyway, the point is that he has got this realization himself and he understands how useful it is, how valuable it is. Sometimes it’s hard for us to see the value of it because you know, it’s kind of caught up in our ordinary everyday activities and we just don’t have that understanding of the value of realizing impermanence and if we did we’d be doing this meditation all the time. I suppose you could say the most prominent reason for doing this practice is to inspire us to do the practice of observing karma.
It’s actually in the Graduated Path teachings, This meditation on death and impermanence comes in the small scope section and it’s followed by meditation on the lower realms. And those two meditations taken together then lead you to the next step which is taking refuge in the Three Jewels of Refuge. You take refuge in the Three Jewels of Refuge in order to help you to gain a higher rebirth, which means doing whatever basic practice is necessary to avoid being born in the lower suffering realms. The advice, The Three Jewels of refuge that Buddha gives us is to observe karma, to particularly avoid actions that harm others and also to purify our negative karmas to accumulate good activities. This is the most basic level of Dharma practice and if we can concentrate at least on doing this practice then we can make real preparation for our future lives.
So the point is that even if we’re going to do this well, we have to remember death and impermanence because if we don’t remember death and impermanence then we won’t be thinking about our future lives. We’ll just be concentrating on the things of this life and if we’re just thinking about the things of this life life we can’t be thinking about the karmic results because these have to be mainly experienced in the future lives and we’re not going to see much particularly we’re not going to see clear karmic results actions in this life. So we’ll find it difficult in that case to avoid being drawn into negative karmas when situations come along that would tend to draw us into negative karmas, then it’s going to be hard to resist that if we don’t have that understanding of impermanence. Our virtues will be weak because even if we perform virtuous actions, we won’t have the thought of dedicating them for the long term results of our future lives, welfare and liberation and enlightenment. We won’t have these thoughts because if we’re just focused on this lifetime, then we won’t think of these things which are long term beyond this lifetime.
As you know, this dedication is very essential in order to bring about the result that we’re wanting to bring about. So any questions? Is it sort of like putting it back to like that? I think that’s a good analogy, yes. Yes, some people Yes.
Yes, maybe there’s some sort of bank In the old days I think you used to have some sort of bank account that you couldn’t get out until Christmas. I don’t know if they still have those. But you could put your money into a special savings account and get it out at Christmas and cash it in. It’s a bit like that, you know. You don’t want to waste it beforehand, you want to cash it in at the right time, for the right purpose.
Also, as I already mentioned, whatever virtuous qualities we’re trying to bring about in our mind, whether it’s bodhicitta, whether it’s patience, whether it’s cutting attachment to objects if we’re attached to, all these good qualities. Whether it’s bringing about realizations, meditation on emptiness or whatever, we’re going to be made stronger in our practice, going to be given more incentive if we meditate on death and impermanence and have a strong realization, a strong feeling for this meditation. You can see that if you’re engaging in meditation practice it’s going to help you from falling into laziness. You can see that meditating on death and impermanence obviously is going to be the biggest remedy for laziness. Whatever other practices we’re trying to do, laziness tends to be an obstacle.
If we can overcome laziness, we’re going to then have much better practice. In actual fact, involved in worldly activities to the detriment of our Dharma practice is one of the forms of laziness. Laziness doesn’t have to mean always sitting around doing nothing. Like the chap in the Life Be In It advertisements a few years ago, you remember those? Norm was always sitting around watching other people doing things on television and his nephew used to get out and do it himself.
In actual fact, from our point of view, it just doesn’t mean that we have to be always sitting around like Norm, but we can be doing all sorts of things like trying to make a fortune or trying to be the most famous person or the most beautiful person or the person with the best social life or whatever. If we’re just doing this with worldly motivations, then it’s a form of laziness because it’s putting aside Dharma practice, it’s taking up time, it’s distracting us from the most meaningful activities. Normally we don’t think that somebody who’s working eighty hours a week trying to make a million dollars is lazy. But from the Dharma point of view this person is lazy. That’s one of the definitions of laziness.
And another kind of laziness is being discouraged, thinking that we can’t do it. So we also have to keep in mind that we have the same capabilities as any other being. We can think that Buddha Śākyamūni was actually in one of his earlier lives, before he became a bodhisattva, he was born in the hell realms. And so we can take heart from that too. That’s not specifically on the subject of death and impermanence, it’s an important thought for overcoming that particular kind of laziness.
So, anyway, there are other advantages to remembering death and impermanence and a very important one is that it actually helps us to remember death and impermanence through our lifetime. Then when the actual time of death comes, we can be calm in our minds. If we haven’t thought about it up until then, then when the time of death actually comes, we won’t have very much time to think about it. The danger is that when the actual death comes to us, when we realize we’re dying, it might be too late to prepare our minds, and when the actual death comes to us we might die in a state of fear and panic through not having prepared our minds. Whereas if we’ve been thinking about this topic all along it’s not going to come as such a shock to us, particularly if we’ve been preparing for the thought that death can happen at any time, that it’s always there with us.
Then even if it happens unexpectedly, it’s not going to be such a shock to us because we won’t be building on the fact that we’re going to live to such and such a time. We won’t be building on the fact that we’re going to live to be eighty or live to enjoy our retirement or whatever. And so we’ll always have this thought in our minds that yes, know, we do live to be eighty we can do such and such and if we do live to enjoy our retirement then we can do such and such. But we’ll keep it in mind that it’s certainly not definite to happen. And it’s better to think that it won’t happen.
Lama Zopa has always said it’s better to think that it won’t happen, than if it does happen. We get a nice surprise anyway. And if it doesn’t, well, we’re not going to get a shock. So, of course, this goes the opposite to the tendency of our minds, the instinctive tendency of our minds, is that even if we know we’re going to die, we somehow don’t accept it. We feel that we’re not going to die.
We somehow feel that we’re going to live forever. We don’t say that in so many words, we say it to ourselves in terms of, oh, I’m not going to die now, I’m not going to die this year, I’m not going to die this decade, I’m going to die sometime in the future, a long time off of course, but the closer you get, the older and older you get, the more you think that it’s sometime way off in the future. And I find myself doing it all the time. When I was young, I would think about being fifty and I’d have the idea, oh, I’ll probably be dead by then anyway. No, I’m well over fifty.
And I have the idea that, well, I’m certainly not going to die in this decade. I’m certainly going to be doing things in my sixties. I’m certainly going to be doing things possibly even in my seventies. Maybe when I’m eighty or more than eighty then I might die and I expect that by the time I get to my late seventies I’ll be thinking about my nineties or living to be a hundred. So this proves that my meditation on impermanence isn’t good at all.
But at least I’m catching myself in that thought and when I find myself myself thinking that way, I can remind myself, oh yes, well, know, may not live until that age. Could even die next year or tomorrow. In actual fact, you have to do a lot of meditation on this topic because it’s a very hard one to really convince ourselves of, because it does go so opposite to what we want to think. It’s sort of self defense in a way that when people don’t believe in future lives and when they think there’s nothing after death, then it’s natural to not want to think about it too much because you do want to go on living. But on the other hand, from the Buddhist point of view, to go on living in saṃsāra is not such a wonderful thing at all.
It could be something awful, a life so awful that we wish that we didn’t have, you know, that we were just finished at the death time. So at least if we finished at the death time we wouldn’t have any future problems to worry about. But as it is, we can either go on to something really wonderful or we could go on to something which could be quite awful. And so it is this really important situation that we have to deal with. Any questions or observations or whatever?
Maybe if people have some stories of their own they’d like to tell. Or realizations. So I actually think that we also have a hard time facing the fact that the ones that we’re very close to, our loved ones, are going to die, or at least that they’re going to die before us sometimes. And this is another thing that this death meditation helps us with, because we don’t just apply it to ourselves, we apply everything. In fact, when we meditate on impermanence, we include the on the fact that