Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 42-minute guided meditation, Ven Sangye Khadro walks you through three classical Buddhist contemplations on death’s certainty. She begins with physical and mental setup — straight posture, clear focus, positive motivation — then guides three key reflections: everyone dies (from historical figures to billions alive today); your lifespan continuously decreases with each passing moment (using the hourglass and train metaphors); and the time available for meaningful spiritual practice is also running out. She connects each point to a practical question: how are you actually spending your days? The meditation concludes not with despair but with clarity and resolve — since death is certain and time finite, now is when to work on your mind, developing peace and positive qualities that will sustain you at death and benefit others.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1.13 Meditation 2 The Inevitability of Death.mp3
UUID: 267bc821-1451-4c6a-b4e4-f4561b985f0d
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 41.8 minutes
Words: ~2,642
Okay, so first of all make sure that you are sitting comfortably. The most important thing in your posture is keeping your back straight. Whether you are sitting cross legged, on a meditation cushion or sitting in a chair, see if you can have a straight back because that enables your mind to be more clear and concentrated during the meditation. Other than the back being straight, let the other parts of your body be relaxed. Relax all the muscles.
Let go of any tension you may have anywhere in your body. And let your breathing be natural. Just let your body breathe as it normally does. And settle your mind in the present. Put aside any thoughts of the past or future, other places, people, work or problems.
So put aside all other thoughts for now and make the determination that you will keep your mind focused on this meditation for the duration of this session. And if any other thoughts do arise while you’re doing the meditation thoughts not related to the meditation be firm about putting them aside until later and bringing your mind back to the meditation. And now generate a positive motivation for doing the meditation. One possible motivation you could have is: I’m doing this meditation in order to bring about a positive change in my own mind, to help my own mind be more positive, less negative, so that in my interactions with others, relationships and contacts with other people, I’ll be more helpful to others and less likely to hurt others or cause problems to others. And you can also think in terms of creating more positive energy to share in a wider sense with the world, to be able to send out more positive energy such as love and compassion and peace to the world, to all beings.
Or you could think, I am doing this meditation in order to create the causes for enlightenment, bring myself to the state of enlightenment so that I can help all other beings reach enlightenment as well. So generate some kind of positive attitude as your reason or intention for doing this meditation. So now the meditation on the inevitability of death. So normally we think a lot about the future. We make plans and have dreams, fantasies, wishes with regard to what we’re going to do and what’s going to happen to us in the future.
Starting with later today, tomorrow, the coming week, and so on. And of all the things that we think about, dream about, plan for, wish for, it’s actually not certain that any of these things will actually happen. Sometimes we plan for things and then they don’t happen. Our plans are not actualised. And there is only one thing that is definitely going to happen to us in the future, without doubt.
And that is that we are going to die. Our life is going to come to an end. Everything else is uncertain. Everything else is a maybe. Maybe it will happen.
But the only thing that is certain to happen is that we are going to die. And yet, that’s something we don’t usually think about, we don’t plan for, we don’t take into account with regard to the future. And instead, we have a tendency to avoid thinking about death. To push that subject aside and keep ourselves busy with things in this life. And so, as a result of that, we don’t really prepare ourselves for death, for dying.
But it is important that we think about death and at least spend some of our time preparing ourselves for death. So contemplating that death is certain, it is definitely going to happen, can help us see the importance of spending some time preparing ourselves for death. So the first of the three points to meditate on, to get a sense of the certainty of death is that everyone has to die. Death is something that happens to all people, all living beings. So, you can start by thinking of historical figures.
You can think of people who were famous or great in some way. Such as leaders, presidents, prime ministers, kings, emperors. Or generals, conquerors. And think about how even though those people were great, they may have done great things, they may have been incredibly powerful, had many people following them, doing what they said and so on. But they were not able to avoid dying.
Every single one of them had to die. And you can also think of people who are great in other ways such as great artists, musicians, writers, or great thinkers, geniuses, scholars, philosophers, scientists, great athletes. And you can also think of just the ordinary people who have lived on this planet since human beings began living on this planet. People who are farmers or merchants, men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers living, having families, getting old and dying. So there’s probably been millions of people who have already lived on this planet, who were born, went through their life, and then died.
So just think about some of those people in the past and say to yourself, just as they died, one day it will happen to me. One day I too will die. And then think of people from your own life. Go back and think about your own life from when you were small until now. Think of people that you yourself have known who have already died.
People from your family, relatives, people you knew at school, classmates, schoolmates, teachers, friends, people you worked with, neighbours. Just bring to mind the people you yourself have known who have already died, already passed away. And with each of these people you think of, say to yourself, Just as that person died, so I too will die. One day it will be my turn to go. Now ask yourself if you can think of anyone anyone who is alive today or anyone from the past any human being who didn’t have to die, who was able to live continuously without getting old, without dying.
So right now, in this world, there are more than six billion people. One hundred years from now, all of us, all of the people who are now living on this planet, with a few exceptions, a few babies or small children who will have a lifespan of more than a hundred years. Other than them, the rest of us will all be gone. One hundred years from now, the vast majority of human beings who are now alive, living, working, breathing on this planet will be gone. And that means you.
So really try to get a sense of that. That there will be this time in the future when I will no longer be here, no longer be on this planet, no longer alive. And then the second point in the meditation is contemplating that our lifespan is continuously decreasing. So time is continuously passing. It never stops, it never stands still.
Even if we sit here very still, not moving, time is passing. Seconds are going by, they turn into minutes. And then minutes turn into hours. And hours pass and turn into days. Days pass, weeks pass, months pass, years pass.
So it’s like this continuous flow of time. And as time is passing, we are getting older, not younger, and we are getting closer and closer to the end of our life, to the time of our death. So, one way you can get a sense of this is to imagine an hourglass which has been turned so that the sand is at the top. Immediately after you turn it, the grains of sand start to fall from the top to the bottom. And as time goes on, the sand on the top gets less and less and eventually it runs out completely.
So that’s similar with our life. As soon as we are born, the sands of our life start to run out. We have a certain amount of time to live, a certain number of years, months, days, minutes, seconds, and a certain number of breaths that we will breathe. So with each passing moment, with each breath that we take, the amount of time that we have to live is getting less and less. And we are getting closer and closer to death, to the end of our life.
So try to get a sense of that. And another way we can get a sense of how we are getting closer and closer to death is to think of our life as being a journey on a train. We are travelling on a train which is continuously moving. It never stops, it never slows down, never changes direction. We have no chance of getting off.
So, are riding on this train which is bringing us closer and closer all the time to its destination, which is the end of our life, death. Imagine then, try to get a sense of yourself, your life moving ever closer to its end, to the time of your death. And then the third point is to consider that the amount of time that you have for doing what is really worthwhile, really meaningful in life such as spiritual practice that this is getting less and less all the time. As we are getting closer and closer to death all the time, are we doing anything to prepare ourselves for it? So, one thing, probably the best thing that we can do to prepare ourselves for death is spiritual practice, which can include prayer, meditation.
But mainly spiritual practice has to do with our mind, working on our mind. Working on decreasing negative thoughts, emotions. Learning how to manage these so that our mind doesn’t get totally caught up and overwhelmed by them. And on the other hand learning how to increase our positive qualities, positive aspects of the mind which include love and compassion, patience, acceptance, peacefulness, joyfulness and so on. Positive qualities that enable our own mind to be peaceful and in a good state and are also beneficial for others, bring more peace and happiness to others.
So that’s the real essence of spiritual practice. Decreasing the negative aspects of the mind and increasing the positive aspects of the mind. Bringing about a positive transformation of the mind. This is actually the best thing we can do to prepare ourselves for death because it’s very important that we have a positive and peaceful state of mind at the time of death And be able to keep our mind free of disturbing negative thoughts and emotions. So it’s spiritual practice that enables us to do that.
So, as we have a limited amount of time to live and that time is running out all the time, our lifespan is decreasing all the time, then it’s useful to look at what we are doing in our life. How we are spending this time that we have and how much of our life are we using to engage in spiritual practice. This work of transforming our mind, bringing about a positive transformation of our mind. So, one way we can get a sense of that is to look at one average day or twenty four hour period and how we spend that time. How we spend that twenty four hour period.
So, we spend part of it sleeping. It could be six, or eight, or ten hours. So, that’s a big chunk of that twenty four hour period gone sleeping. And then we probably spend another big chunk working, going to your job, doing your work, which may or may not be helpful for your spiritual practice. If you are using your time at work to develop patience and other positive qualities, then that’s good.
But on the other hand, if you are engaging in arguing and becoming negative and getting into problematic situations with other people, then that’s not necessarily helpful for spiritual practice. And then other things that we do, spending our time, would be eating, buying food, preparing food, eating it, cleaning up afterwards. Socialising, spending time with other people, talking, not necessarily about very meaningful things. Entertainment, watching TV or movies or sports. It’s not that these things are wrong and we shouldn’t do them.
But the question is, are these contributing to spiritual practice? Are they helping us have more positive thoughts and feelings and less negative thoughts and feelings in our mind? Are they helping us prepare for death, being able to die with a peaceful positive state of mind? So just look at a twenty four hour period of your life and check to see how much of your time are you involved in this work of spiritual practice, this work of transforming your mind. So now, as a conclusion to this meditation, see if you can come to the conclusion that since death is definitely going to happen to us, that’s an experience that awaits us in the future.
We’re getting closer to it all the time. The amount of time we have for this life is decreasing all the time. And if there are important, valuable, meaningful things that we would like to do with our life, with our time, such as working on our mind, preparing our mind for death, being able to die with a peaceful positive state of mind, learning to manage our disturbing thoughts and emotions. The amount of time we have for engaging in this kind of work is also decreasing. It’s getting less and less.
And so if we have discovered that we’re not really spending that much time or maybe we’re not spending any time at all engaging in spiritual practice, working on our mind, preparing ourselves for death, then it might be useful to generate the determination that you will start to do this kind of work now, while you still have time, before you run out of time. So see if you can come to that conclusion that it is important to spend at least some of your time, some of your life doing things that will be meaningful and beneficial for you both now and also at the time of death and for what lies beyond. And also it’s important to conclude the meditation with a sense that we have this very precious life, we have this precious opportunity to do things that will be beneficial for ourselves and also beneficial for others. There are so many wonderful things we can do with our life. So, we should not feel depressed or frightened about the fact that we’re going to die, but instead positive about the time that we still have to live.
And feel the strong wish or aspiration to use the time that we have wisely in ways that are beneficial and meaningful, that bring benefit and peace to others as well as to ourselves, and that will enable us at the end of our life to look back on our life and feel good about what we have done. So see if you can conclude the meditation on a positive and optimistic note. And finally, dedicate the positive energy of doing this meditation as well as listening to this session with the same thoughts, feelings, intentions that you had at the beginning of the meditation with your motivation. Wishing to bring benefit to others as well as to yourself, to bring greater peace and happiness, freedom from suffering and problems, and ultimately to create the causes for yourself and everyone else to become enlightened. Dedicate this positive energy that it will bring happiness and peace to yourself and others both now and in an ultimate sense bring you all to the state of enlightenment.