Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this eight-minute teaching, Venerable Sangye Khadro explains that death is not an ending but separation: consciousness leaves the physical body and continues into a new life. She uses an analogy—a salesman staying briefly in hotels, knowing they’re temporary—to show how we should inhabit our bodies without clinging. She teaches karma: every action through body, speech, or thought leaves an imprint on the mind-stream, ripening into future experience. Positive actions produce happiness; negative produce suffering. The core teaching: we create our own circumstances through our actions, not through divine will or outside forces.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1.04 Death Is Not the End.mp3
UUID: b70c7817-1465-4cde-bc8e-8dff13c4dd36
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 8.2 minutes
Words: ~1,252
And then another thing that Buddhism has to say about death is that death is not the end of everything, but it’s actually a kind of gateway into another life. So according to Buddhism, each one of us is a combination of a body and a mind. And our body is the collection of all the physical parts such as our skin, blood, bones, organs, and so forth. And then the mind, which can also be called consciousness or spirit, that is the collection of all our conscious experiences, our inner experiences such as thoughts, feelings, perceptions, emotions and so forth. And our mind is not a physical thing.
It’s not a part of our body. It’s not made of atoms and cells and molecules as our body is. So it’s a totally non physical thing. And when we die, the actual meaning of death according to Buddhism is the separation of our mind and our body. So while we’re alive, our mind and our body are interconnected almost like being merged.
And they have this relationship where they relate to each other and depend on each other. But then there comes a point when they separate. The mind separates from the physical body. And the body is left behind as a a dead body, a corpse that needs to be disposed of somehow. But the mind doesn’t come to an end.
The mind continues. In fact, according to Buddhism, it has no end. It’s actually without beginning and without end. And then after the separation that takes place at death, our mind goes on to take a new body, a new life, and start off all over again. And so there’s an analogy in the Buddhist teachings, in particular the Tibetan Buddhist teachings, that our life is similar to what happens with a traveler.
A person who’s traveling from one place to another, like a salesman for example, and staying in hotels or guesthouses. So he may stay just one or two nights in a hotel. And he doesn’t have this attitude that this is my home. This is a permanent dwelling for me. He knows that this hotel room he’s staying in is just a temporary temporary abode.
So he doesn’t get overly attached to it, overly concerned about it. And so similarly, our mind is like a traveler going from one life, from one body to another. And so while we’re alive, our mind is living in our body, experiencing this body and the things of this life. But then that experience comes to an end. That experience of being in this life and this body comes to an end.
Our mind doesn’t come to an end. It goes on. Just like a traveller moves from one body to another starting a whole new life. So having that understanding, understanding our life in that way helps us to not be overly concerned with and overly attached to our body and to our possessions and to the things of this life. And Buddhism also explains that when our mind does leave this present body, this present life and goes to a new one, the kind of body that we take and the circumstances of our life such as our parents, family members, and other people we meet, and the kinds of experiences that we will have in that next life are determined not by our choice.
It’s not that we have a conscious choice over where we’re born. But rather they are determined mainly by our karma. The word karma is a Sanskrit word and it literally means action. So, in a very simple way, we can say that karma means that we do actions. And there are three ways that we can do actions.
One is with our body, physical actions. And the second way is with our speech, verbal actions when we speak. And the third way is with our mind, with our thoughts. So anytime we do something with our body or with our speech or with our mind or thoughts, we create karma. And what that means is that an imprint of the action that we did is left on our mind, which is like a stream.
The mind in Buddhism is compared to a stream or a river that’s continuously flowing, continuously changing and moving. So each action that we do leaves an imprint on this mental stream, stream of mind. And then at some point in the future, which could be in the same lifetime or could be in the next life or in some subsequent life, when the right causes and conditions, circumstances come together, that imprint that was left in the mind by our previous action ripens and brings about some kind of experience that we will have. And the kind of experience that we have depends on the kind of action that we did. If we do a good action, a positive action, then the result we’ll experience in the future will be a good one, a happy experience.
If we do a negative action on the other hand, then the result in the future will be something negative, a bad experience. So what this means is that we are the creator. We are responsible for whatever experiences that we have. It’s not that anyone outside of us, other people or some kind of creator, decides what kind of experiences that we’re gonna have. And then we just have to helplessly go through those experiences.
But rather, whatever happens to us, whatever experiences we have are determined by our own actions of the past. So we are the creators of our own experiences. We are responsible for our own experiences. So this is a very important concept in Buddhism. And it’s not only Buddhists who believe this, but this idea of karma is found in many other religions and spiritual traditions.
For example, in the Bible, it says, What you sow, you shall reap. What you do, you will experience in the future. And so this question of where we’re going to be born, what kind of life we will have, what kind of experiences we will have, is answered by this teaching on karma. So it is our karma, our actions of this life as well as past lives, because we still carry with us the karma we created in past lives, that determines these circumstances of our next life. And it’s only natural that we want good experiences.
We want we would like to be born in a good situation and have good people. People kind to us and caring for us and have a good life, good experiences. So if that is so, if we want those kind of experiences, what we need to do is make sure we create the right causes, are good actions, positive actions, such as being kind and helpful to others, being honest, being generous, patient, and so forth. So acting in positive ways with positive attitudes. And on the other hand, we want to avoid experiencing an unfortunate rebirth and unpleasant experiences in our next life, we have to make sure that we avoid creating negative actions.
Because it’s negative actions such as, lying and cheating, doing things that are harmful to others, whether it’s physically harming them or verbally speaking hurtful words to them, or even having hateful thoughts towards others. Those are the kind of actions that will bring about being born in unfortunate situation and having unpleasant experiences. Hi.