Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 9.7-minute teaching, Ven Sanghy Khandro presents Buddhism’s fundamental insight that accepting death is liberating, not morbid. She opens with the Buddha’s words: remembering death is the supreme of all meditations. She explores two practical reasons this matters — first, awareness of life’s transience naturally motivates meaningful action and ethical living, so that when death comes, we face it without regret. Second, this awareness prompts us now to prepare ourselves spiritually and mentally. She addresses a universal concern by noting that even those who reject beliefs in rebirth still want a peaceful, dignified death rather than a fearful one. Throughout, she anchors these teachings in documented near-death experiences, whose transformed values mirror what the Buddha taught. Practical and accessible to anyone, regardless of faith.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1.06 Accepting Death.mp3
UUID: 2ce1f269-2369-4004-be0b-0cbece7fc11f
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 9.7 minutes
Words: ~1,442
So that brings us to the next point. The next idea in Buddhism about death and dying. And that is that it’s very important that we accept and be aware of death. That we maintain some kind of awareness or mindfulness that our life is not going to last forever, but it’s going to come to an end at some point, that we’re definitely going to die. So in one sūtra, the great nirvana Sūtra, the Buddha said, of all plowing, plowing in the autumn is supreme.
Of all footprints, the elephants is supreme. Of all perceptions, remembering death and impermanence is supreme. So what the Buddha is saying here is that the perception or we could say the meditation on or contemplation or mindfulness of death and impermanence is the supreme of all meditations, all contemplations. So there are two main reasons why it’s considered so important that we maintain awareness of the reality of death. So one is that by realizing that our life is transitory, we’re not gonna be here forever, we’re gonna die at some point, our life is going to come to an end at some point.
This awareness will enable us to see how important it is to spend our time wisely, to use this life that we have in ways that are meaningful and beneficial and wise, doing things that are helpful both to ourselves and to others, and refraining from things that are harmful to ourselves and others. So it will motivate us to engage in more positive, beneficial, virtuous actions and refrain from actions that are negative or non virtuous or unskillful. And if we live our life in this way, the result is that when our life does come to an end, we’ll be able to die without regret and without fear. We’ll feel good about the way that we lived our life. We’ll look back on our life and feel feel good about ourselves and what we did with our life rather than looking back in our life and feeling tremendous regret and feeling like we wasted our time and we did all kinds of useless and stupid and harmful things.
So it will enable us to have a more positive, peaceful state of mind at the time of death. And also, it will ensure that when our life ends and our mind leaves this body, this life, and goes to the next one, we’ll be born in good circumstances, will have a good rebirth with good experiences. And the second reason it’s important to maintain awareness or mindfulness of death, it will induce a sense of the great need to prepare ourselves for death. That means, you know, not just wait until the end of our life and then, you know, figure out what to do about dying, but rather prepare ourselves now. And there are actually lots of things we can do starting from right now, starting from today.
Things that we can incorporate into our life that will help us to be prepared for death so that we can die with dignity, with a peaceful, positive state of mind. Some of these practices are more spiritual or religious practices such as prayer and meditation. But some things can be done even by those who are not necessarily interested in any particular spiritual tradition. Just living our life in a certain way can be helpful to be prepared for death and have a peaceful positive state of mind at the time of death. And even for those who don’t accept that there’s any continuation after death.
There are many people who believe that death is just an end of everything. There’s no rebirth or no continuation of mind or consciousness or soul or spirit after death. It’s just complete annihilation. So even for people who have that view, I think it still makes sense to do something to be prepared for death. Because if you ask yourself, how would you like to die?
What would you like the circumstances of your death to be like? What would you like your mind, your experiences to be like? Would you like to have a death in which you’re completely frightened, terrified, your mind is out of control? You you you’re just completely unable to deal with it. Completely freaked out.
So would you like to have that kind of death? Or would you like to have a death in which your mind is peaceful and calm and and you you’re able to speak lovingly and interact lovingly with your family and friends and whoever else may be there and and have a dignified death. So I’m sure everyone would choose the latter kind of death. I don’t think anybody would like to have a death in which their mind is completely freaked out with fear and other disturbing emotions. And everyone would like to have a peaceful and positive dignified death.
So whether we believe in some kind of afterlife or continuation, or we don’t believe in that, I think it still makes sense that we do things now to prepare ourselves for death. We learn how to die peacefully, with dignity, and with a positive state of mind. So maintaining awareness of death, mindfulness of death, this acceptance that our life isn’t gonna go on forever but will end at some point. That awareness is what gives us the energy and also realize the importance of doing things now to prepare ourselves for death. And the importance of having this awareness of death and how beneficial it is to maintain this mindfulness of death can be corroborated by the results of near death experiences.
So many people have these experiences. Sometimes they’re in a car accident or they’re going through an operation or they have a heart attack or an asthma attack. And for a period of time, it seems as though they’ve died. There’s no sign of breath, no sign of any activity in their brain or heart or other organs and they’re declared dead. But then after some time, after some minutes or even twenty or thirty minutes, they come back to life.
They start breathing again. The vital functions start happening again. And during that time when they seemed to be dead, they had experiences. People sometimes have visions, sometimes meet family members or loved ones who passed away in the past. Sometimes people even had the experience of leaving their body, their mind, their consciousness going out of the body and being up in the ceiling in the room or in a corner of the room and observing what’s going on.
And they can even come back and describe what was happening. Oh, the doctors were doing this. The nurses were doing that. And people were saying this and that. So these experiences are, you know, not just fantasy or imagination, but they’re really aware of what’s happening around them.
So research has been done on near death experiences. Many books have been written about this. And the research shows that people who have these kind of experiences often come back with a very different attitude, very different approach to life and what’s important in life and then live their life very differently. So, in his book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, points out some of the experiences or some of the results that people have who’ve been through a near death experience. Perhaps one of its most startling revelations is how it, the near death experience, transforms the lives of those who have been through it.
Researchers have noted a startling range of after effects and changes. A reduced fear and deeper acceptance of death, an increased concern for helping others, an enhanced vision of the importance of love, less interest in materialistic pursuits, a growing belief in a spiritual dimension and the spiritual meaning of life, and of course, a greater openness to belief in the afterlife. So this is what the Buddha and probably all other great spiritual masters have told us that it’s very important for us to realize that our life is transitory. It’s not gonna last forever, and that we should really live our life in a way that is wise and compassionate and loving and positive, virtuous, and refrain from doing things that are harmful and dishonest and negative. And the awareness of the impermanent, transitory, fragile nature of our life is is very, very helpful, very beneficial for making us realize what is important in life and helping us to to value our life and live our life in a way that is wise and compassionate.