Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 8.9-minute talk, Ven Sangye Khadro provides practical antidotes to two emotions arising with death: fear and sadness. For fear, she teaches straightforward analysis — clarify exactly what you fear, assess its likelihood, and consider what you can do to prevent or prepare for it, drawing on Śāntideva’s teaching: if you can act, do so; if not, accept it. She also discusses prayer and the cultivation of compassion for others as an antidote to fear rooted in self-focus. For sadness and grief, she traces the root to attachment and grasping at permanence, recommending contemplation of impermanence as the primary remedy. She also emphasizes that the love and memories shared with a deceased person remain with you always, and encourages redirecting that love toward others who need it.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2.09 Fear and Sadness.mp3
UUID: 917ca992-ce63-4cfe-ae66-7c21135bd5bd
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 8.9 minutes
Words: ~1,301
And then a third emotion that can arise with regard to death and dying is fear. And as I mentioned before, fear can cause our mind to see things in an unrealistic way. We have these ideas or images in our mind of some dreadful thing that might happen to us and then we live in fear of that happening and and feel, oh, I I wouldn’t be able to handle that. That would be just terrible if that would happen to me. So fear, I think most of the time is unrealistic.
And so one of the best ways of dealing with fear is to face it and analyse it. Look at your fear. Put it out there and look at it and ask yourself, Well, what exactly is it that I’m afraid of? What do I imagine is going to happen that is so dreadful, so frightening? And once you’ve clarified that, ask yourself, how likely is it that it’s going to happen?
And you might discover that, yeah, it might happen, but it also might not happen. So maybe I don’t need to be so worried about it. And even if you realise that it is likely to happen, you can ask yourself, is there anything I can do to prevent it, to avoid it? Because often there are things we can do to prevent unwanted things happening. Or there are things we can do to prepare ourselves for those unwanted things happening.
To get ready for it. So even if it does happen, you know, I can be strong, I can be courageous, I can handle, I can deal with it. So that’s much more useful than just being frozen, paralyzed by fear. So there’s a saying by one great Buddhist master, Śāntideva, where he says, There’s really no need to be worried or frightened or unhappy about something. If there’s something you can do about it, do it.
If there’s nothing you can do about it, accept it. So that’s a very useful verse idea to work with regard to fear, as well as other things that we might be unhappy about. Another method for dealing with fear is to pray. So this may not work for everyone, but if you do have a sense of some entity, whether it’s Buddha, enlightened beings, God or Jesus, saints, that there are beings out there who have love, compassion, wisdom and all positive qualities and are completely dedicated to helping us, there for us whenever we need help, whatever kind of help we need. So if you can have that feeling, if you can believe in that, then bringing them to mind and praying, asking for help, asking for strength, asking for courage to get through this experience.
So prayer is a method that helps a lot of people, gets gets a lot of people through difficult situations and gives a lot of people peace at the time of death or in other difficult situations that they find themselves in. Another thing that’s helpful for fear is to recognize that it’s very much about I, about me. I don’t want anything bad to happen to me. Oh, this terrible thing may happen to me. What am I gonna do?
So so it’s very much about me and my wish for comfort and happiness and wanting to avoid anything uncomfortable. So the more we have self centeredness, self-cherishing, the sense of self importance being at the center of the universe, the stronger that is, the more likely we will feel fear. So a good antidote to fear is to focus more on others, to think of others and their needs and their wishes, and generate love and compassion, wishing others to have happiness, wishing others to be free from suffering. In general, turning our focus away from me to others with compassion and love and altruism. So that is a very helpful way of decreasing and even overcoming fear.
And then a fourth emotion that we may experience with regard to death and dying is sadness. And this can include depression or grief. And again, it’s completely understandable that this would occur as we ourselves are facing death or dealing with the death, the loss of a loved one, someone very important to us. So usually, sadness comes about because of attachment. Attachment is a state of mind that arises in us with regard to people as well as things that we regard as important, as a source of happiness and pleasure for me, for myself.
And it causes us to feel I don’t want to lose these people and these things. I want them to always be there, and I want never to separate from them. So it’s of grasping at things as being permanent. And as we’ve seen before, nothing is permanent. People, things, our self, our life, all of these things are impermanent, naturally subject to change and eventually passing away.
So attachment is very much aligned with a sense of permanence and grasping at things as being permanent, clinging to things as being permanent, not accepting impermanence. So it’s said that probably the best antidote to attachment is to contemplate impermanence and death. Just make ourselves more familiar with, more accepting of the reality that nothing is permanent. Everything is changing, that’s just its nature, that’s just how it is, changing moment by moment by moment. And eventually it’ll get to the point where it’s gone, it will disappear.
So it’s our unwillingness to acknowledge that and accept that that leads to attachment and then leads to this sense of sadness, this sense of of grief and depression, not wanting to lose. So, contemplate impermanence. Impermanence, the inevitability of death. And most probably will still feel very sad with regard to people who are very very precious, who’ve given us a lot of love, who we have been able to love, have that very beautiful loving relationship with. So, it’s difficult not to feel sad when parting from such people.
But it’s also very helpful to realize that whatever beautiful experiences that we had with that person, the love that we had, the love that we shared, the wonderful experiences and feelings that we had in relation to that person, that those are things that will never die. Those are things that will stay with us, will always be with us in our mind, in our heart, in our memories. We can cherish those things. Even if the person physically is no longer there, we can still carry the precious feelings and experiences that we had with that person. And then again it’s good to generate a sense of altruism, love and compassion and think that whatever love, whatever precious experiences I had with that person, may I be able to share those with others.
I be able to give that same love to other people? Because there’s so many people out there who are hungry for love, starving for love, needing love. Instead of being so so caught up in me and, you know, my need for love, it’s better to contemplate others and their need for love and share this love that you experienced in your precious relationships with other people. And many people also find it very helpful to accept that in fact a person doesn’t really die. It’s just a transition.
There’s the mind or consciousness or spirit of the person which is leaving that body that they were in and going to another body, another life. And there’s a good chance that we’ll meet again in the next life. So it’s not like a final parting, final end of that person and our relationship with that person. But it’s just going through a transition to some other kind of relationship.