Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 8-minute talk, Ven Sangye Khandro explores spiritual methods for preparing for death. She advocates studying sacred texts to cultivate positive qualities and practicing devotion to spiritual figures like Buddha, Chenrezig, or Kuan Yin — especially as sources of comfort when facing fear or pain. She illustrates this through a story of a woman in Singapore who, frightened before surgery, dreamed of Kuan Yin and found peace. Khandro then explains a practical visualization: mentally place your chosen spiritual figure before you or above your head, confess negative actions, and visualize purifying light filling and transforming your body and mind. She concludes with meditations on love, compassion, forgiveness, and patience, which ease the dying process and create positive karma for the next life. For practitioners of any tradition.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 3.11 Spiritual Teachings.mp3
UUID: 42cea543-1d35-475e-910e-bb9d2bcde003
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 8.5 minutes
Words: ~1,278
A third method we can rely on in our life to help us prepare for death is to study spiritual teachings. So this can involve reading books by spiritual teachers, masters such as the Buddha, or reading the Bible, making ourselves familiar with the words of beings who had great wisdom and love and compassion, and emphasised the importance of non selfishness, non attachment, non anger and hatred and so forth. So reading, studying, making ourselves familiar with these spiritual teachings will help us both during our life to be able to have more positive qualities and engage in more positive ways of behaving and be helpful for us at the time of death to be able to get ourselves into a positive state of mind and be able to move off from this life to the next one in peace and with good thoughts and feelings in our mind. And then a fourth practice is some kind of practice of devotion. What we call in Buddhism, taking refuge.
Relating to some kind of spiritual being such as the Buddha or one of the other Buddha figures such as Chenrezig or Tārā. Or whatever figures there are in the spiritual tradition that you feel most close to. Again, this practice is not for everyone. Not everyone would be able to relate to such a practice. But those who do have the ability to feel faith and devotion to holy beings, spiritual beings, saints, sages, whatever you want to call them.
This can be very helpful at the time of death, as I mentioned before. It’s only natural that when we find ourselves in a difficult, painful or frightening situation, our initial reaction is to call out for help. To seek help from someone or something that is able to give us help and comfort and guidance at that time. So, it’s most probable that we’ll have that kind of feeling at the time of death. We might feel alone, we might feel lost, we might feel incapable of handling what’s going on on our own.
And if we have already cultivated some kind of relationship, some kind of spiritual relationship with a figure such as the Buddha or Jesus, God, and so on. Then focusing our mind on that person, on that being, praying to them, reciting mantras or verses or prayers to help us feel a strong sense of connection and receive help, guidance, blessing, whatever you want to call it, can be very helpful at the time of death. Just as an example of this, once when I was in Singapore, I was asked to go to the hospital to visit a woman who had just been diagnosed with some ailment and was about to go through an operation. It all happened very suddenly. And I heard that she was very frightened.
Actually didn’t know this woman, but a friend asked me to go and visit her. So I went to the hospital to see this woman, to offer her some comfort. But when I arrived there, I found that she was actually in a very positive state of mind. She was completely peaceful and happy, cheerful. And she told me that the day before she had been really really frightened, really upset, worried about the operation not going well and dying and so forth.
Then that night, she had a dream. And in her dream she saw Kuan Yin. Kuan Yin is the Chinese equivalent of Avalokiteśvara or Chenrezig, who is the Buddha of compassion. The enlightened figure associated with pure unconditional compassion for all living beings. So, Kuan Yin is probably one of the most well loved of the Buddha figures in Chinese Buddhism.
So she saw Kuan Yin in her dream and that gave her the feeling that she’s gonna be okay. She felt Kuan Yin is there, Kuan Yin is looking after me. I don’t have to worry, I’m gonna be okay. So that gave her strength, that gave her courage, that gave her cheerfulness in her difficult situation. And another practice in the Tibetan tradition related to this is to imagine or visualize this object of our devotion, whether it’s Buddha or Jesus, either in front of us or above our head.
Pray to them. And if we are concerned about negative actions that we may have done, wish to purify them, we can declare to them our negative actions and our feelings of regret for having done them. And then recite a prayer or a mantra while visualizing light flowing from this spiritual being, filling ourselves, filling our bodies and minds completely, and purifying whatever mistakes that we’ve made, whatever wrongs that we’ve done, whatever negative karma we’ve created, feeling completely purified, completely forgiven, and fully loved and accepted. And like a child in the arms of its parent, completely protected, like we’re going to be okay, it’s going to be okay, I don’t have anything to worry about, anything to fear. So, that’s a practice that we can do at the time of death and prepare ourselves for while we go through life.
So that we will be able to use that practice as we are dying. It can give us great comfort, great help. And then, there are also meditations on developing positive qualities such as love, loving kindness, and compassion. And another practice called Tonglen, which I’ll explain a bit later. As mentioned before, it’s best if we can die with a positive state of mind.
With positive thoughts and feelings in our mind. Faith, devotion is one such positive state of mind. But other positive states of mind that would be good to have as we’re dying would be feelings of love, which means wishing others happiness, caring for others. Compassion, wishing others to be free from suffering. Patience, forgiveness.
So these are examples of positive states of mind. And there are meditations in Buddhism and in other spiritual traditions in which we generate these states of mind. We meditate on these states of mind. We make ourselves familiar with them. And this gradually brings about a transformation of our mind so that we feel less angry at, hateful towards, impatient with, judgmental towards other people, and instead feel more of this very soft gentle feeling of love, caring, kindness and compassion towards others.
So making ourselves familiar with those states of mind, so that they’re part of our mind more frequently, more naturally and spontaneously. This is very very helpful in preparation for death and dying, so that we’ll be able to have these feelings in our mind at the time of death. Because if we can die with feelings of love and compassion for others, that itself is very comforting. When we have positive thoughts and feelings in our mind, we have less suffering, we have less disturbing thoughts and emotions. And even whatever physical suffering we might have will not be so disturbing to us.
We won’t be so bothered by it because we’re focused more on others, concerned more for others. And so it gives great peace and comfort at the time of death. And it’s also very helpful for our next life because these practices, these states of mind, even just generating them for one moment or one minute, is very powerful to purify negative thoughts, negative energy, negative karma and for creating positive energy or positive karma. And again, that’s what determines our next rebirth, the circumstances of our next life, the experiences of our next life. So if we can create more positive energy and decrease the negative energy, that ensures that our next life will be a positive one.