Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 11.5-minute teaching, Ven Sangye Khadro offers practical Buddhist methods for two emotions that often arise around death: denial and anger. She begins with denial — whether one’s own avoidance of mortality or the denial of a dying loved one — and draws on psychiatrist Robert Buckman to guide when to encourage acceptance and when to respect protective distance. Turning to anger, she outlines its costs: disturbed peace, harm to others, physical damage, and negative karma. She then offers concrete antidotes: if anger is toward another person, generate loving-kindness and recall their positive qualities; if anger arises from one’s own impending death, remember that everyone dies, develop compassion, and understand that current suffering results from past actions — a perspective that can shift blame into acceptance and motivation for ethical practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2.08 Denial and Anger.mp3
UUID: 55217b78-41c7-468c-834d-843a8f0a1c5b
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 11.5 minutes
Words: ~1,762
So now I’ll talk about specific emotions and some specific methods that we can use to deal with these. So, one thing that often happens with regard to death and dying is denial. Maybe that’s not so much an emotion, more of an attitude, but still it can be problematic. This is the sense of wanting to avoid or escape from the whole subject of death and dying. Now this could be due to fear.
And I’m going talk a little bit later about fear. So if you look into your mind and recognize that actually I’m really frightened, I’m really afraid, you could use some of the methods for dealing with fear. But it’s also helpful to gently, kindly remind yourself that death is something that happens to everyone and you are no exception. So just contemplate some of the points of the meditation on death or the meditation on impermanence to make yourself more familiar with and more able to accept that this is simply the reality of life. The more you can become accepting of that, then the less likely your mind will want to avoid or run away from that whole subject.
Also with regard to denial, denial can sometimes be a problem experienced by other people. Like you may be dealing with a friend or loved one who’s dying, and they’re in a state of denial about it. And there’s a lot of discussion about what to do in this kind of situation. Should you try to force the person to acknowledge the reality of their illness, their death, or just leave them be. So Robert Buckman, Doctor.
Robert Buckman, who’s the author of a book called I Don’t Know What to Say. This is a really good book on how to help people, how to deal with people who are dying. And he himself had over twenty five years of experience working in hospitals, dealing with a lot of death. So what he says about this issue is that generally it’s good for a person who’s dying to know what’s going on so that they can get their affairs in order, say goodbye to loved ones, and prepare themselves for death. However, if a person really doesn’t want to know, I mean some people have this attitude, I don’t want to hear any bad news, I don’t want to hear the word cancer or death or anything like that.
If they are really stuck in a state of denial, then it’s good to check, is there a need for them to know that they are dying? For example, they need to make some important decisions regarding their medical treatment, their situation, their property and so forth. So if there is a really important need for them to know the reality of their situation, then it’s good to tell them. You could also check if you did tell them, would they be overly distressed and just totally unable to accept what’s going on. So if that were the case, then maybe it’s better not to tell them.
Better to just let them be in their state of denial. It has been found when research has been done that most people do want to know. Even if they say, oh, I don’t really wanna know. Even if they appear to be in some kind of denial. But deep down inside, they really do want to know and it is beneficial for them to know.
But on the other hand, if the person really wants to be in denial, doesn’t want to know, there’s no real need or reason for them to know, and even if they were told they might just ignore it or reject it, then it’s better to just leave them alone. Don’t push them. Don’t try to force them to accept something that they’re not willing or able to accept. And then another emotion that could arise with regard to death and dying is anger. Anger can sometimes come up.
For example, a person may feel, Why me? Why am I sick and other people are not sick? Why am I dying and other people are not dying? Or it could come up simply because of discomfort, physical and or mental emotional discomfort. The person is just not able to handle it and so they become very impatient, very angry, grumpy, bad tempered, and take out their anger on other people.
So there are some some things we can do to work with anger. One thing that’s very important is to recognize that anger is a very disturbing state of mind, a negative state of mind. It brings lots of problems both now and in the future, both to oneself and to others. So It’s very helpful to recognize the faults or disadvantages of anger. For example, how it disturbs our peace of mind.
It’s not possible to really be peaceful and happy while we’re angry, while anger is in our mind. And it can also be harmful for others if we speak or act in an angry way. We can hurt people. We can destroy relationships. And it’s also harmful physically.
There’s lots of research done showing that anger is actually bad for our body, bad for our health. And if you’re already sick, it could impede your recovery and make it much more difficult for you to die peacefully and comfortably. So those are the kind of short term effects of anger. And then from the Buddhist point of view, anger also has more long term effects. When we get angry, the kind of karma that we create is negative karma.
And so the result of that karma will be problems, painful, unwanted experiences in the future. So, we create bad karma with our anger. And if we don’t want that to happen, we don’t want to experience those negative experiences in the future, it’s better if we can learn to do something else with our anger rather than getting caught up in it and acting it out. It’s also a major obstacle to attaining higher states of mind, such as enlightenment, nirvana, happiness in the future. It’s important to see that anger doesn’t bring positive results, it brings negative results both to oneself and others, both now and in the future.
So if we have that understanding, then even when anger arises in our mind, we’ll feel the importance of doing something about it, dealing with it in some other way rather than getting caught up in it, getting stuck in it, acting it out. So, what are some things we can do with our anger? If our anger is towards another person, then it can be helpful to generate some kind of positive feeling, loving kindness. Loving kindness is wishing happiness for others. Now it may be difficult to immediately transform anger into loving kindness, but what’s helpful is to focus on something positive about the other person.
Because when we are angry at someone, are just focusing on negative things. Negative aspects of their behaviour, or their attitudes, or qualities. And it’s like we ignore or deny anything positive about them. So if we want to change our mind from anger into something more positive, then we can deliberately bring to mind good things about the other person. Good things that they’ve done, maybe even things they’ve done to us, acts of kindness or generosity they have shown us, or good qualities, good aspects of their behavior.
Focus on positive things about the other person. And see if you can generate the wish for that person to be happy and to be free of suffering and problems. So working on that can help switch your mind, move your mind away from anger to loving kindness, or at least patience. And if the anger that we’re experiencing is because of our sickness, if we’re the one who’s sick and dying and we’re feeling this, why me? Why does this have to happen to me rather than other people?
As I mentioned before, it can be very helpful to remind yourself that you’re not the only one who has this experience. That everyone else has to go through this experience. Even if it’s not happening to them right now, it will happen in the future. Death is something that happens to everyone. And so it’s not that you’re being picked on, you’re being treated unfairly.
But you’re just going through something that everyone has to go through. And again, if you can use that contemplation to generate compassion, to understand that, you know, death is difficult for others as well as for yourself. And feel compassion for them, wish them to be free from this difficult situation. And if you can accept karma and that whatever we experience is the result of actions that we had in the past. So if we are experiencing sickness or injury or impending death, an untimely death for example, we may feel, Well, I’m too young to die.
But these experiences are happening to us not without reason or cause, but as the result of actions that we ourselves did in the past. Perhaps we ended someone else’s life. We killed someone or caused someone to die at a young age or inflicted tremendous suffering on another person or other people. And as a result of that, we’re now having this experience. So being able to understand that and accept that can bring peace to the mind, bring acceptance of what is happening to yourself rather than this rejection and this feeling, Oh, it’s not fair.
This shouldn’t be happening to me. And it can also help us generate a strong sense of wanting to do what’s positive and refrain from what’s negative. We can think, well, okay, in the past I did hurtful things and that’s why this is happening to me now. If I don’t want more problems, painful experiences in the future, have to make sure I don’t create the bad karma that would bring those about. And instead I have to make sure I create good karma and do good things as much as possible.
So it can really help us to turn our mind around, turn our behaviour around being more positive, less negative. And there’s also the practice of purification, which I’ll explain a little bit later. This is something we can do to purify any negative karma that we have created, any negative action that we have created. There’s no karma that is so bad that cannot be purified.