Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven. Margaret McAndrew opens with the reality of impermanence—both the obvious ways we age and lose what we cherish, and the subtle, moment-by-moment changes imperceptible to ordinary awareness. She then turns to the Tibetan Buddhist understanding of the death process itself, walking through the stages of physical dissolution and the inner visions that accompany dying: the mirage, the smoke, the sparks, culminating in the clear light vision where the mind encounters emptiness. She discusses the bardo state and rebirth, then offers practical guidance on preparing to die well—clearing worldly concerns, surrounding yourself with calm support, maintaining dharma practice, and how to help others at death.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 60 HDW 1998 10 22.mp3
UUID: ee3b03df-a30b-4883-af71-3bf803776d3e
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: ~5,284
Phenomena are impermanent. The whole universe that we live in is going to come to an end. That this world is constantly changing. This world is actually going to come to an end one day, that all around us we see constant change. So there’s subtle impermanence and gross impermanence.
Meditators who can enter into deep meditative concentration can be aware of subtle impermanence. They can actually see, they can slow down the observation process and actually observe the subtle impermanence, the change in their bodies and minds. I think it’s not so much that it slows down, but their observation makes it seem to slow down, their very deep pointed observation makes it seem to slow down. And they can become very aware of this process of the cells in the body, the mental moments changing many times in the space of a second. This is something that we can’t see.
We can see we know we can work out logically that this subtle impermanence exists because we can see the change happening on the gross level. We can see our bodies ageing, we can see changes in the environment, we can see things happening around us, we can see a lot of things are different now to the way we were when we were children. We can see how we’ve grown from being a baby to being mature adult to some of us are starting to show signs of aging. And we know that these things, we can see that a piece of machinery, a car or something that was a few years ago was a brand spanking new car, is becoming a bit of an old rust bucket, and things like this. These things all show the gross impermanence, which is just the cumulative effect of the subtle impermanence that we can’t see happening.
So, for instance, you know, I can see if I look at this book now, I can’t see anything happening with it. It doesn’t look as if it’s changing at all. But over the course of years, I’ve had this book for about twenty odd years and it’s looking quite different now to what it looked like when I first got it, because of this process. And this is particularly relevant to our bodies and the fact that we’re going to die. And we can see it with the people around us, we’re all going to die.
We’re going to experience this gross impermanence leading to our bodies changing, eventually either due to some sort of slow process or perhaps due to a quick or even a traumatically sudden sort of accident or something, we’re going to have to leave this body. And also, we can expect if we haven’t done so already, in the future if we keep on living, we’re certainly going to lose things that are dear to us and people that are dear to us, and also other beings like our pets that we can be very, very fond of. So if we don’t think about these things, we tend to cling to these things, whether it’s an inanimate object such as our jobs, our reputation, our situation in life, these are all things that we can be attached to, our beauty and so on. Our health, also the people in our lives and so on. We have to expect that these things will change and particularly when we lose the ones who are dear to us.
If we’re prepared for this by meditating, then it’s not going to be such a shock for us. Of course we’re going to experience the grief, but it won’t be such a shock and it’ll be easier to do the psychological adjustment. Whereas people who don’t think in this way, who haven’t prepared, are going to find it more difficult to come to terms with the fact that perhaps somebody that they expected to spend the rest of their life together with isn’t going to be there in the future in this lifetime. And so on. So in actual fact this meditation can really help us a lot with these things that we experience in life.
I think yes. Yes. I think it is in a sense, in that we have this self image, and every time something like this happens, we lose that self image. And in that sense, it’s a sort of death. It’s a death to a particular image we have of ourselves as being a person who is in this a particular situation.
The situation changes. So in a way you’re a new person. For instance, you’re, to take a big situation, if your spouse dies, then instead of yourself as a married woman, then you start thinking of yourself as a widow. Or even if you’re divorced, then instead of thinking of yourself as being a married woman or a married man, then you would have to think of yourself as being a divorced person, and a person on your own instead of having a partner and so on. All these things can be big changes in your life.
And even little things like losing your looks as you get old, you know, you just sort of it happens slowly. It says in the teachings when we meditate on suffering of old age, if it happened overnight we’d die of shock! But as it is, just look in the mirror and one day you see one grey hair, and then the next year there’s half a dozen, and then the year after that you’re sort of half grey, and then you see a little wrinkle coming, and it gets more and more and it can still be quite shocking because you don’t realise how much you’re changing and then you look at yourself in the mirror and you think, where are those chubby cheeks that used to be this face? You know, who’s this person? Yes, so we all sort of in our own minds, we’re all Dorian Gray’s.
So, think I always sort of, when I was young, I sort of always imagined that I’d really sort of be my, how do say, sort of be most of myself when I was about forty. I never sort of felt that I’d found my niche in my youth, so I sort of looked forward to being about forty because I thought when I’m about forty I’ll sort of be the person I’m going to be. And then I never thought about the fact that I would have to get past even being in my fifties. So, anyway, so yes, I think that that’s that’s true. We always kind of think that we’re going to that we’ll be able to somehow stop the clock or something.
So anyway, when we meditate on these things Actually very advanced practitioners can meditate on these things and have a very full realization of impermanence. For them, whatever happens, it’s not going to be shock for them. It’s not going to upset them because they’re just expecting something like this to happen. It’s said that if you really have realization of impermanence I think I’ve come across this saying, I’m not sure where it came from, but somebody told me that Buddha said in one scripture somewhere that, to the monks, that if they, think that they’re going to live until the next day, their meditation of impermanence isn’t very good and I can’t remember exactly what came after that, but something like if they think they’re going to live for another hour or something, it’s not very good. But if they think when they’re putting a mouthful of food in their mouth that they’re not going to even live to finish chewing it, then they’ve got really good then their meditation on impermanence is just right.
And so, I feel sure that with Lama Zopa Rinpoche like this, that he has this very strong realization of impermanence. And he talked about many years ago, Doctor Nick managed to get an introduction for him to be taken on a visit to the morgue, which normally isn’t permitted unless you’re in the medical profession. So he managed to take Lama Zopa Rinpoche through the morgue and Lama Zopa seemed to find it the most fascinating experience. He talked about seeing things like bodiless heads sitting around in jars and this kind of thing. And then he said when he came out onto the street again, all he could see was collections of bones walking around in the street.
He just saw skeletons everywhere. Meditating on that way, meditating on seeing other people as skeletons and seeing yourself as a skeleton and so on can be another way of meditating on impermanence. So, these things, anyway, they help prepare our minds. And even if we can’t yet achieve that sort of full realization of impermanence, we can get a stronger feeling for it and it can help us a lot. And the other approach to meditation on impermanence and death that we can use is one that’s particularly associated with Tibetan Buddhism and the explanation about what happens during death that you find in Tibetan Buddhism, and that is contemplating on the events of the death process and particularly the visions that we experience during the death process.
Excuse me. So these explanations come from the Tantra side of practice and they have an important application in the generation stage Tantric practice of Mahāmudrā Yoga. So, in the classical presentation of the teachings of the Graduated Path, this explanation of the visions of death time wasn’t given in the Graduated Path teachings, but the Lamas have been finding it helpful, particularly in teaching Westerners to give us some meditation based on this explanation of the visions of death time, and to integrate it with our Graduated Path practice of meditating on death. And Lama Yeshe, Lama Zopa in particular used to tell us to do this. And in this book, Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave an explanation of the death process.
And it’s something that a lot of people feel very drawn to. A lot of people in our society are really looking for more knowledge about death, which is something that has been ignored pretty much in our society, particularly in recent centuries, and particularly in this century. And so we can use our imagination to visualise these different events and to gain a feeling for the process, to imagine actually going through the process and to get a feeling for reality of death, and what happens at death. Also we can familiarise ourselves with the experience that we can expect to have at death time. And this is actually one important aspect of the Tantric practice, that we should actually familiarize ourselves with this process.
We’re also taught in the Tantric Meditation to bring in various other experiences into the process that we’re trying to achieve to bring it into the path to enlightenment. So that’s an explanation that comes along with the Tantric practice and I can’t actually explain that, but to explain the death process itself and what we can expect to happen and to familiarize ourselves with those visions is something that is going to be very useful for us. And then if we go on to receive higher Yoga Tantra, highest Yoga Tantra initiation, and do these kinds of practice, then it can also be something that is going to make it easier for you to be already familiar with a part of that practice, it will make it much less complicated to learn those practices when we come to them. These practices aren’t explained in the lower tantras such as Kriyā tantra and so on, so if you take Kriyā Tantra initiation and receive explanations on that practice, you won’t be receiving this explanation on the visions of the death It’s something that comes from the highest Yoga Tantra explanations. It’s something that whether we have the initiation or not, we’re going to experience these actual visions at the death time.
It’s explained as being part of the natural death. Somebody who has the initiation and has the training can then use these visions in their practice. Now I’m referring to the visions that precede the Bardo state. In actual fact, if you can use these visions well enough, won’t have to experience the Bardo state. It’s hard to use the Bardo state because once you’ve got into the Bardo state, you don’t have that much control.
You have a lot more opportunity for control during the death process itself. Yes, there’s a number of different texts and actually I thought I’d brought over a reading list, but I seem to have left it over on my desk. But anyway, I can get that later, that’s no problem. There’s quite a number of different books which have some materials, so I’ve got an explanation of it here. So I was considering doing photocopies, but I thought that probably quite a lot of you might have this sort of already.
But we can easily do some photocopies afterwards, after this session, for those who want them. This is quite a good little text actually, it’s called Spiritual Help for Buddhists at Death Time and it’s by Pende Hawter. It’s just a brief summary of the the main points for somebody who is working with a Buddhist, helping another Buddhist to with their with their death, helping them at their death time, with their dying. So anyway, it’s associated with the four elements and with the five chakras and the different delusions associated with them. Actually I might read from this one because it’s got more details.
But there’s a lot of things that are experienced which we wouldn’t actually observe, but which are just technical explanations of what we experience. But the main things we’re going to experience is the failure of various aspects of the body, various different organs becoming weaker and so on, and one by one ceasing. This is during a slow process of death. In a fast process it happens in the same way but very rapidly. Assuming that it can take place over a period of time, perhaps over several days, then we would be going through these different experiences with plenty of time to observe them.
So it’s said that actually before we die, we have, at the time of death, as we’re dying, we experience a karmic vision. And this is very much associated with the karma ripening that’s going to bring about our future life’s rebirth. Lama Zopa Rinpoche says: At death the person who has created much demeritorious karma suffers with an evil signal as the result of his evil actions. A very frightening physical situation occurs because of fearsome visions coming at that time. Dying with an indifferent mind, neither meritorious nor demeritorious, one experiences neither pleasure nor suffering.
And then, that’s Then at the At the time of death, the mind is separating from the body and the evil creator has the vision of going from light into dark. He’s particularly emphasizing bad karma here, because we’re leading up to the meditation on the suffering realms. There’s actually the other case, which is the person who’s created good karma can have a vision of some sort of pleasant experience, such as being surrounded by flowers, or seeing beautiful palaces awaiting them or something like that. A person who’s had bad karma can have some sort of bad fearful vision associated with the kind of karma they’ve created. So, for instance, one was overtold of somebody who had killed a lot of sheep having a vision of being trampled by sheep.
And people we know about these visions because people talk about them. They often at least can still talk when they experience these things. And people who’ve worked around a lot of dying people say that quite often people people report having visions, or can be heard, you know, talking about their experiences, maybe they’re not specifically reporting them to the people around them, but they might actually be talking to the people that they’re seeing in the vision or something like that, so they they get an idea of what the people who are around get some idea of what’s going on. So then the person naturally starts the process of death, and the first thing that happens is that the five aggregates start to be lost. So, as you know, we have one physical aggregate and four mental aggregates.
And form aggregate is the physical body. And then we have various mental aggregates which are: Feeling, Recognition, sometimes called Compounded Phenomena, sometimes called Volition, and Consciousness. And so each of these absorbs in turn, and these impure aggregates also are associated with various wisdoms. When we become enlightened we gain the wisdom which replaces the impure aggregate. And so we have various signs associated with the absorption of these various aggregates and also with the various elements.
So first of all, we have the experience of form absorbing. When we say absorbing, it means simply that its function becomes weaker and that particular aggregate really is losing its power and also the element associated with it is losing its power and there is a vision associated with that. So the first one anyway is losing the aggregate of form and the earth element becoming weaker. And so the sign is that the physical body is getting very weak, you’re losing control over your arms and legs and so on. And you feel as if you’re being buried under a great weight of earth.
And there is an internal sign which is that there is a vision like a mirage. These signs visions are associated with the elements. And you see a mirage like experience, like a mirage or heat haze, because the earth element is losing its power and the water element becomes more predominant. And after a while, you get onto the next stage, which is that the there are other things there like various organs, I’m not going to explain all the details, you can look them up if you want to. Next thing is the aggregate of feeling is absorbed and at that stage the body doesn’t experience pain, pleasure or indifference anymore.
The element that’s failing now is the water element. This was the one that became predominant after the earth element failed. Now it’s failing in its turn and giving way to the fire element, and you experience So you experience Because the water element is failing, you experience the body feeling more dry and the liquids in the body drying up. Also, inner vision of space filled with smoke. Then the next step, is that the aggregate of recognition is absorbed or fails.
And also the fire element is failing and giving away to the air element. So, the body is becoming cold, the digestive power is being lost so that you can’t digest food and drink. Also, the breathing is becoming difficult, but the person is still breathing at this stage. And the power to recognize other people and objects is also becoming lost. The person doesn’t recognize their relatives anymore because of the loss of this mental function.
And they are experiencing an inner vision of sparks of fire in the darkness, or like fireflies, all around them in the environment. And the next one is the air element failing. The aggregate of volition, or compounded phenomena, is failing or absorbing. These aggregates, in a sense, don’t really fail, but they become latent. Each one in turn goes from being active to being latent, and becomes carried on the subtle consciousness from one life to the next, and in the next life they will again manifest.
Whereas these physical elements are associated with the body and will have to be taken again with another body coming from the father and mother or perhaps some other kind of body. Not all bodies come from the father and mother but in any case whatever kind of body is taken in the future life, the four elements will have to be taken anew, but the mental aggregates get carried from one life to another. So, the person then experiences the aggregate of volitional formation or compounded phenomena absorbing and the air element is failing. And at this point the breathing stops and the person can’t move or experience any sort of external sense phenomena anymore. And it’s said the person then is dead, but they would be considered to be dead by Western medicine.
In actual fact, they still seem to be able to it still seems to be worthwhile to shout in person’s ear at this stage, so perhaps they can still hear something if it’s loud enough, but their hearing is going fast. At this point, the person is more or less dead by our standards, but according to Tibetan Buddhism they still have some way to go. So the consciousness is still associated with the body, and while the consciousness is still associated with the body, the dying process is not complete. And so, the inner sign that the person experiences at this point is a dim motionless reddish blue light. It seems to be a sort of surrounding light, an environmental sort of light, like the reflection of a dim lamplight.
Function and there’s no gross awareness of self, it looks as if the person’s dead, but they’re still going through inner experiences. And what’s happening now is that there are these two drops which are associated with the male energy from the father and the female energy from the mother, explained in terms of a drop of semen and a drop of blood. The drop of semen has been held in the Crown Chakra and that It’s just a very small point of the energy or whatever that comes down through the At this stage, during our lifetime our central channel was always closed, and the white drop was held at the top our central channel in the Crown Chakra, and the lower drop was held at the lower Chakra. And the central channel was closed off, and the subtle energy has been circulating through the two side channels. So And of course through all the other many, many secondary channels that go throughout the body.
So now the central channel opens and all these subtle winds absorb into central channel and can no longer sustain the drops, because the nature of the white drop is to come down, and the nature of the red drop is far, so its nature is to rise. And so that’s what starts to happen. The white drop actually, first of all, comes into the central channel and starts to come down. So anyway, in terms of experience, that’s how it happens. But in terms of experience, what you experience is a vision of whiteness, a purity filled with white light.
And then, after that’s gone on for some time, the person Then the white drop actually reaches the heart and gradually then the red drop starts to rise from the lower chakra and the person experiences of a vision filled with red light. Until the red drop gets to the heart, and then these two drops come together and form a little box. And the consciousness is inside that little box. I think it’s about the size of a a lentil, something like that. And, then and that’s right in the very heart center.
And then when that little box forms with the consciousness inside, the person experiences darkness, complete blackness, And the mind is becoming very subtle at this stage and it actually enters a stage of unconsciousness. And when it comes out of this state of unconsciousness, it’s in that little box inside the body. It experiences the clear light vision. And this is a vision of complete emptiness, very clear like the sky of an autumn dawn. And at this time the mind is at its most subtle state.
The gross mind has temporarily ceased to function. The mind is at its most subtle, but we have karmic cause for the gross mind to again manifest. And if we’re able to actually catch this clear light vision and make use of it. Person could meditate, use this to enhance their meditation on emptiness. But it’s difficult to do unless the person is very well trained in meditation on emptiness.
For the ordinary person, even the person with good karma, this vision just They don’t understand what’s happening during this vision and they can’t use it. And in actual fact, before very long, the gross mind begins to manifest again. They actually feel frightened by this clear light vision. The gross mind begins to manifest and immediately the clear light vision ceases and the process of going into the next life begins. Mind leaves the body and going through all these visions in reverse, I think rather quickly, and not as intensively as before, it then enters the Bardo state.
And takes the body of the Bardo State, which is a subtle wind body, but still grosser than the state of the mind during the clear light vision, which was extremely subtle. And so then they go through various experiences in the Bardo state, they can stay in that state from seven to forty nine days. It’s said that at least seven days, and at the end of seven days you either take rebirth or die in the Bardo state and take another Bardo body for another seven days. And at the end of every seven days there’s another opportunity to take another rebirth. If it hasn’t happened before, then it definitely happens at the end of the seventh week or forty ninth day.
Yes. Well, yogis don’t go into the Bardo, and he probably Yeah, you’re saying that he would have had to have been conceived more than forty nine days. Yogis don’t go through the Bardo, they can go to a pure land. They can either remain in the clear light vision for a long period of time, or in Lama Yeshe’s case, because he was in the hospital, they had to ask his consciousness to leave, and so he probably would have been in a pure land, something like that, for the period of time intervening between when his consciousness left. It was interesting because people who were there actually saw his head move.
I actually talked to one of the people who was there and he actually saw Lama’s head move when the consciousness left. They say that that’s one thing that can be seen, mostly you wouldn’t notice it, but there is a slight movement sometimes to be seen when the consciousness leaves the body at that moment. The people who are around thought they were imagining it, you know, thought I couldn’t have really seen that, but it was actually actually a real experience. So, when it comes to actually Also, there’s some things we need to know about what to do when we’re dying or when we’re helping others to die. I’m not at all expert on that because I haven’t had any personal experience with this, but there are certain things that are recommended.
Of course if you want to know more about this, there are people who are involved with palliative care and who have actual real experience. To help us to die with our mind in Dharma practice, it’s very good to get all our material concerns out of the way before we die, and to set up a situation that will enable us to not be disturbed during the process. So in Tibet, Dharma practitioners would actually give away all their possessions before they died, they would when they saw they were dying, and then they would also say goodbye to all their loved ones and so on. And then they would die without being disturbed, with nobody to help them but a dharma friend who would take care of them. So this is a bit different to our Western idea that all the relatives have to come around at the deathbed.
And in Tibet the idea was that, of course, people often did die that way with all the relatives around, but a really serious dharma practitioner would try to arrange things so that the relatives would have been farewelled beforehand, before the actual death time, and that they could actually die without the possible disturbance of relatives who would be crying and ask them to not go and this sort of thing. So this is the ideal situation. So anyway, at least to arrange to be in a peaceful situation, to have people around us who can help us, who can keep calm, and who can help us to die calmly. To have pictures of teachers, of the Buddhas and so on is very good. There are certain Dharma texts that are, for instance, Lamrim Chenmo, very good to have in the room where we’re dying because these things are supposed to help us.
But the best thing is our own previous practice and our own maintaining of a mental state of keeping our mind in the Dharma, particularly bodhicitta. If we can manage to think about bodhicitta while we’re dying, that’s the best thing. If we can’t think of bodhicitta, then if we can think of taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha or in any one of the Three Jewels is going to help us or having thoughts of kindness towards others. There’s certain things we can do such as purification practice to purify our negative karmas. If you’ve been practicing Tantra, then it’s important to try to take initiation again before you die.
As to purify All of these things things that we can do. We can have our helpers to recite our Guru’s name in our ear at the time when we showed the signs of actually dying. This is that is said that they can actually shout the Guru’s name in your ear because you can’t hear very well at that time, so they can shout, or recite mantras for us, say prayers for us, and this kind of thing. So there’s various ways that we can be helped. Also, the whole process, the whole forty nine days after the actual death, it’s important to have prayers said particularly each seventh day, and to keep up that practice for the whole forty-nine days.
And if we’re helping a non-Buddhist person, then the best way we can help is not to push Buddhist ideas onto them, but to help them to die in their own religion if they do have any religious faith. Or if they don’t, then just to help them to die peacefully in whatever way is appropriate. So if we had more time, maybe some of you would have had stories that would have been Good to tell here, but we’ve run out of time so I think it’s time to finish now. So we’ll just dedicate our merits. Page five.
May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to that enlightened realm through these skillful actions. May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart that has not arisen arise and grow, and may that which has arisen never diminish but increase more and more. And then his holiness, the Dalai Lama’s prayer on page ten. In the land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and good, all-powerful