Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 11.6-minute teaching, Ven Sangye Khadro clarifies that meditating on death isn’t meant to frighten but to awaken us to life’s preciousness and motivate meaningful living. She walks practitioners through the second point of the nine-point death meditation: uncertainty of the time of death. While we may accept intellectually that we will die, we often imagine it as far off—yet death can happen at any age, from infancy onward. Khadro covers three points: life expectancy is unpredictable (people die at every age); death has many causes, both external (accidents, disasters) and internal (illness), and paradoxically, things that sustain life like food or medicine can also kill; and despite feeling strong, the human body is fragile—a virus, a fall, choking can bring sudden death. Through concrete examples, she drives home that death could come anytime, anywhere, to anyone.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2.03 Nine Point Meditation on Death Part 2.mp3
UUID: 5d3c7246-d41a-45b5-aa51-47bdcc6ff540
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 11.6 minutes
Words: ~1,726
So first of all, the meditation on the second of the three roots, the three main points, and the nine point Meditation on Death. And this is looking at the uncertainty of the time of death. And first of all, it’s important to keep in mind that the reason for meditating on death as well as thinking about, talking about maintaining awareness of death as the Buddha recommended, is not to frighten us. Purpose is not to get us into a state of mind where we’re scared, disturbed, worried about death. But the purpose rather is to realize how our life is transitory, temporary, it’s not going to last forever, we have a limited amount of time.
And if there are things that are important to do in life, for ourselves, for others, it’s important to make sure that we do those things while we still have time. And so, if we do these meditations, these contemplations properly, what it does is it brings about a sense of the preciousness of our life, the preciousness of our time. And the strong sense of wanting to use our life, whatever time we have, in ways that are satisfying for ourselves and meaningful, beneficial for ourselves and for others. And so if we do live our lives in these ways, the result is that we ourselves will be more happy, we’ll have a more peaceful, happy mind as we go through life. And at the time of death, we’ll also feel more peaceful.
We’ll be able to look back on our life and not feel regret about what we’ve done, not feel bad about what we’ve done, and instead feel good about the way we lived our life. So it’s helpful for us both while we’re alive and at the time of death. And also living our life in this way is helpful for others because it means we’re going to be living our life in ways that bring benefit, peace and happiness to other people as well. So, that’s the real purpose of doing these meditations and contemplations is to bring about benefit for ourselves and for others. So the second of the three roots in this nine point meditation on death is the uncertainty of the time of death.
And the basic idea here is that even though we may accept that death is definite, inevitable, we are definitely going to die, we may have this sense that it’s not going to happen anytime soon. It’s way off in the future. We may imagine death to be many many many years away. And so, not something we need to concern ourselves with now. However, we we can’t be sure of that.
There’s there’s no certainty at all that we have a long way to go, a long time to live before death happens. The reality is that we don’t know when death is gonna happen. It’s completely uncertain. And really it could happen any time. So there are three points in this meditation to get the sense of the uncertainty of the time of death.
The first is contemplating that human life expectancy is uncertain. So what this means is that as human beings living on this planet, there’s no definite fixed number of years that we all have to live. It’s not the case that everyone will live to be eighty years or eighty eight years or whatever. And we know we’re going to live that long and then we’ll die. So the reality is that people die at all different times, all different ages, all different stages of life.
There’s cases of children dying and even babies, and even before birth. Babies still in the womb before they’ve even had a chance to come out and start breathing have already died. And then very small babies and children can die. Teenagers can die. People can die in their twenties, thirties.
So any age at all could be the time at which death happens to a person. And when it comes to our self, we have no way of knowing how old we’re going to be when we die. And there’s no one who can tell us. So, the age at which death will happen to us, the point in our life at which death will happen to us is completely uncertain. And this is helpful to contemplate because we may sometimes have this idea that death only happens to old people.
People in their 80s or 90s, you know, they need to think about death because it’s probably going to happen soon for them. But then we think, well, I’m not that old. I’m only twenty or forty or fifty. So, I’m not going to die anytime soon. But that’s an illusion to think that way.
Because it’s possible and people do die when they’re in their 20s or 40s or 50s. So, it’s a mistake to think, I don’t have to think about death. I don’t have to be concerned about death now because I’m not old. So, not only old people die. People can die at any age.
And another sort of illusion that we may have is thinking that sick people die. People who are suffering from some kind of serious illness, terminal illness like cancer or AIDS, that they are probably going to die soon. But I’m not sick, I’m healthy. So, death isn’t going to happen to me anytime soon. But again, that’s not true.
Because death doesn’t only happen because of sickness, there are other ways that death happens. So, that’s the second of the three points. Looking at the many causes of death. Death happens in many different ways. Sometimes it happens because of external causes.
Things coming from the outside such as natural disasters, earthquakes, floods, fires. Or it could be accidents that occur when we’re travelling in a car or a plane. It could also happen because of some other person. Somebody murdering us or some animal or poisonous insect that bites us. So that’s one way that death happens.
Because of an external cause, external factors, something coming from the outside. And another way that death can happen is because of something internal, something that happens within our own body. So that includes all the different kinds of sicknesses that occur, terminal illnesses or because of some vital organ in our body not working properly, malfunctioning. So there’s many different things that can go wrong internally with our body that can lead to death. And it’s helpful if we can think of actual examples of people that we know or people we’ve heard of who have died in these different ways.
To get a sense of this being a reality and being something that could happen to us as well. And ironically, there are also cases of death happening because of things that normally promote life and prolong life, support life. For example, eating. Eating food. We need to eat food.
We couldn’t live if we didn’t have food to eat. But food itself can sometimes become the cause of death. It sometimes happens that people eat food that is contaminated, poisoned, or sometimes people eat too much food or they eat the wrong kind of food and die as a result of that. Sometimes people even choke on food while they are in the midst of eating something. It goes down the wrong way and they choke before they are able to get help.
So food can sometimes become the cause of death. And medicine is another thing that is normally helpful to prolong life, to cure illness and enable us to have a longer life. But medicine too can sometimes become the cause of death if we take the wrong kind of medicine, the wrong dosage, Or again people sometimes die in the course of an operation or receiving some kind of medical treatment that doesn’t agree with their body. So medicine and medical treatment can sometimes become the cause of death. So there’s many different ways that death can happen.
And it also doesn’t take something strange or extraordinary or tragic for death to happen. There’s often cases of people who just die in their sleep. We hear about this with babies. Babies die in their sleep, but it happens to people at all ages. I know personally several people who went to sleep and just didn’t wake up again and they were not sick, they were not ill, nothing happened to them.
Just died in their sleep. So, death is something that can happen at any time and in any situation and in any circumstance. So contemplating that helps us get a strong sense of the uncertainty of the time of death, how we really don’t know when it’s going to happen. The third point in the meditation is that our human body is actually very fragile. So we may have a sense when we’re healthy, everything is going well in our life, we may feel strong and maybe even invincible and and invulnerable.
But it actually doesn’t take very much to cause our body to become completely weak, lose all its strength and die. Death can happen in a very short time for something very very small. For example, if we fall. We don’t have to fall very far, but falling in a certain way, in the wrong way, landing in the wrong place, wrong part of the body, that can cause death to happen. And sometimes it happens that something as small as a virus or cells, like cancer cells, which are so tiny, they can’t even be seen with our eye.
They can only be seen by a microscope. They are extremely tiny. They can cause our body to lose all of its strength and for our life to disappear. And also something as small as a bullet or even a needle. It doesn’t require something very huge.
But in the wrong place at the wrong time it can cause death. So, this idea that our body and our life are strong and invincible and will just go on forever is actually an illusion. Our body and our life are actually quite fragile. So, these are the three points to meditate on. You can take a short pause at this point and then we’ll begin the meditation.