Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 3.7-minute talk, Ven Sanghy Khandro explains how tonglen becomes powerful when facing death. This compassion practice purifies negative karma and attitudes that cause suffering at death and beyond, while accumulating positive energy for good experiences now and in future lives. It transforms the suffering we actually experience into something meaningful. She illustrates with a story: an artist with AIDS in New York, not a spiritual practitioner, found that tonglen—simply taking on his suffering with intention to relieve others’ pain—didn’t lessen his pain, but gave his mind ease and purpose. The teaching concludes with practical guidance: start now with small difficulties and gradually work to larger ones, so tonglen becomes natural at life’s most difficult threshold.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 4.04 Tonglen at the Time of Death.mp3
UUID: a27f4720-55e5-45ed-99ce-e2b6e4b7a307
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 3.7 minutes
Words: ~509
Tonglen is one of the best practices that we could do as we are approaching death. It is a very powerful way to purify our negative karma and our negative attitudes which would be the cause for us to have suffering at the time of death and also suffering after death in the next life. So we are freeing ourselves from the causes of painful experiences, so we don’t have to experience those. And it’s also a way to accumulate a huge amount of positive energy or good karma, which is the cause for good experiences, happiness, now, at the time of death and in the next life. But Tonglen is also a way of making good use of whatever suffering or difficulties we might experience as we are dying.
There is a story told by Sogyal Rinpoche in his book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, about one man, an artist who lived in New York. And he was dying of AIDS And he wasn’t a spiritual practitioner. He didn’t have any religious or spiritual beliefs or practices. And he was really quite miserable because he was experiencing suffering and he was dying. And he just felt all the suffering he was going through was useless.
There was just no use at all to him to experience these problems. And he was told about the practice of Tonglen. And he started to do the practice, a simple form of the practice, taking on the suffering that he was experiencing with the wish to benefit others, with this feeling of love and compassion for others, may it relieve the suffering of others, may it bring happiness to others. So he did it in a fairly simple way and not within the context of Buddhism or any other spiritual practice. But he found doing the practice very, very helpful.
Didn’t necessarily relieve his suffering, but it made his mind more at ease. He found a use of his suffering. He found something useful to do with his suffering instead of seeing it as something totally useless. So so it made his mind feel much better. And so if we would like to do this practice at the time of death, then it’s good to start now making ourselves familiar with this practice.
We can start by doing it with regard to smaller problems, the minor problems that we experience in life. And then gradually work on doing it with bigger and bigger problems. And then it will become kind of easy and natural to be able to do the practice with regard to what are probably the most difficult experiences of our life. The experiences that we have as we are approaching death. So as I mentioned, there are different ways of doing the Tonglen practice and I thought it might be best to start with a simple way of doing it.
A way that involves taking on a problem that we ourselves are experiencing. So, let’s take a short break now and then we’ll begin doing that meditation.