Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 3-minute session, Ven Sanghy Khandro teaches the nine-point meditation on death from the Lamrim, the Buddhist path to enlightenment. The practice is organized as three roots, each with three sub-points: the certainty of death, the uncertainty of when it will occur, and what is helpful at the time of death. She focuses here on the first root—the inevitability of death—with an explanation followed by guided meditation. For practitioners new to death meditation practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1.11 Remembering Death.mp3
UUID: 1bcb4b83-c480-4ec2-8071-5d562ed9be54
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 3.1 minutes
Words: ~445
I’ve spoken about how important it is for us to be mindful of death and maintain an awareness of death. Then you might be wondering, well, how do I do that? How do I go about that? So there are various meditations on death found in Buddhist teachings, the Buddhist tradition. One of these meditations is known as the nine point meditation on death.
And within the material you have for this course there should be a page where these nine points are listed. So this nine point meditation on death is found in the Lam Rim. Lam Rim, this is a Tibetan term, it literally means the stages of the path. And the path here is the path to enlightenment. So the Lam Rim or the stages of the path to enlightenment is a way of taking the main points that were given by the Buddha, taught by the Buddha and arranging them in a step by step way, showing us everything we need to know and everything we need to do to get from where we are now in an unenlightened state in Samsāra to where we can be the state of enlightenment.
And so within the Lamrim there are various subjects that we study, we learn about from teachers and books and so on. And then we meditate on in order to incorporate into our mind and into our life. So one of these subjects is impermanence and death. And within the subject of impermanence and death, there’s discussion of how important it is to meditate on death, what are the advantages of doing so, disadvantages of not doing so, and so forth. And then there’s this nine point meditation on death.
The nine point meditation on death consists of three main points which are called three roots. And then each of these three roots has three points under it. So, three x three = nine. The three roots are first of all the inevitability of death or the certainty of death which simply means that death is definitely going to happen to us. And the second of the three roots is the uncertainty of the time of death.
In other words, we don’t know when death is going to happen to us. And the third of the three roots is looking at what is helpful at the time of death. What will be helpful and not helpful at that time in our life. So, during this session we will do meditation on the first of the three roots, the inevitability of death. I’ll just give a little bit of introduction or explanation of this and then guide a meditation on it.