Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 33-minute guided meditation, Ven Sanghy Khandro (Kathleen McDonald) leads practitioners through the Eight Stages of Death—a Buddhist visualization of the body and mind’s dissolution at death. The first four stages cover dissolution of the earth, water, fire, and air elements, with vivid inner visions: a shimmering mirage, smoke, fireflies, and dim candlelight. The final four stages shift to increasingly subtle consciousness: white appearance (bright moonlit sky), red appearance (reddish evening light), black appearance (total darkness), and the clear light—the mind’s most luminous, pure nature. She provides detailed instructions for each stage’s physical signs and mental experiences, emphasizing the importance of generating a compassionate motivation before beginning. The teaching frames familiarity with these stages as essential preparation for a peaceful death and positive rebirth.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 4.11 Meditation 8 The Eight Stages of Death.mp3
UUID: 459ab771-6163-46ac-abc6-3aa940d0912e
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 33.4 minutes
Words: ~2,037
To begin the meditation, make yourself comfortable. Whether you are sitting cross legged or sitting on a chair. Be comfortable. But it is good if you can keep your back straight. Other than the back being straight, let the other parts of your body, like your muscles relax and let go of any tension.
You might also like to do this meditation lying down. But if you do so, you have to be careful to not fall asleep, keep yourself awake. Relax your mind by letting go of or putting aside any other thoughts in your mind not related to the meditation. So, any distracting thoughts of the past or future, people, work and so on. Put all other thoughts aside and decide to keep your mind focused on the meditation and bring your mind back to the meditation anytime it wanders away.
And then generate a positive motivation for doing the meditation. For example, you might think, I am doing this meditation to make myself more familiar with the experiences of death and dying. So I can be more prepared for death by being able to do as much spiritual practice as I can during my life. And in that way I can be more helpful to others. I can help them overcome their fear of death and help them live their lives more wisely and die more peacefully.
So if you can, if you wish, imagine yourself lying on your deathbed, dying a natural death due to illness or due to age, not dying a sudden violent death, but a gradual natural death. Imagine that you’ve accepted that you’re dying. Everything that could be done has already been done. You feel ready to go. You’ve said goodbye and got your affairs in order.
So you’re lying there waiting for death to happen. And so imagine going through these eight stages, which are a progressive transformation or dissolution of the various parts of your body and mind. Going from a grosser level to more subtle levels. So try to imagine the various experiences and visions as vividly as you can. On the first four stages of the death process, the mind is still on the gross level.
And the gross level means our sensory perception, seeing and so forth, as well as gross thoughts, ordinary thoughts. So these grosser experiences gradually diminish or dissolve over these four stages. On the first stage, the earth element dissolves. This is the quality of solidity, the solid parts in the body, the hardness in the body. Because of the earth element dissolving, our body loses strength, becomes thinner and weaker, and you feel drained of energy.
You might feel as if you’re falling or sinking down into the bed. It becomes difficult to sit upright or even to move your body to hold anything. The color of your body fades. Your cheeks become sunken. Your visual sense dissolves, your eyesight becomes unclear and it becomes difficult to open and close your eyes.
And at this stage you have an inner vision of a mirage. A shimmering silvery blue mirage. On the second stage of the death process, the water element dissolves. This includes all the fluids in the body and the quality of cohesion. Because of the dissolution of the water element, you start to feel dry.
Your eyes, nose, mouth and throat feel very dry. It becomes difficult to move your tongue. And at this stage your sense of hearing diminishes and eventually ceases. You no longer hear sounds. Even the ringing in your ears ceases.
And your mind may become confused or frustrated or agitated. And you no longer experience feelings of pleasure and displeasure in your body. And here you have an inner vision of haze or smoke like smoke from incense or cigarettes just hanging in the space in a room. On the third stage, the fire element dissolves. This is the heat in our body.
So at this stage, your mouth and nose dry up completely. And the warmth in your body begins to disappear, starting from the extremities. So your hands and feet start to get cold. And you’re no longer able to eat or drink anything, and your digestive system is no longer functioning. Your mind may alternate between clarity and confusion.
Your memories of and awareness of the outside world, the activities of your life, people and so forth start to decrease. It becomes difficult to remember people’s names, even your close family and friends. You might not even recognize them. And here this sense of smell dissolves. You are no longer able to smell any odours.
And your breathing becomes more difficult and irregular. Your inhalations become very weak and exhalations become stronger and longer. The inner vision you have at this stage is like sparks or fireflies dancing in space. On the fourth stage, the air element dissolves. So here you become unable to move any part of your body, arms and legs.
So your body becomes immobile. Your mind may become more confused, bewildered, unaware of the outside world. Everything seems to be a blur. Your last feeling of contact with the outside world is slipping away. May have visions, frightening ones if have more negative karma having done negative actions in your life.
Or beautiful, joyful visions if you have done more positive actions in your life. Your last two senses of taste and touch experiences in your body dissolve. You no longer have these experiences. Your breathing becomes more and more laboured, irregular. And finally, you breathe your last breath.
You exhale one last time and do not inhale again. Your ordinary thoughts now cease. No longer have ordinary gross thoughts in your mind, and you have an inner vision of a dim light like the last flickering flame of a candle which is about to go out. And the sense that we ordinarily have of a separateness of subject and object, perceiver and perceived as totally separate unrelated entities, this decreases sense of duality. You have a greater sense of non duality of subject and object, And the clear knowing nature of your mind becomes more apparent, more manifest.
So at this stage, gross consciousness has ceased and our mind moves to a more subtle level of consciousness. The fifth stage is that of the white appearance. So here you have a vision of vast, clear, spacious sky. Like the sky in autumn, full of the bright white light of the full moon. And this occurs because of the movement of energy winds in your body.
The winds in the upper part of your body above your heart enter the central channel at your crown chakra. The sixth stage is the red appearance And again, this is an appearance or vision of vast, clear, empty sky filled with reddish light. Like the light we see sometimes in the sky when the sun is setting over the ocean or over the desert. Coppery red colour light filling the sky. This occurs because the energy winds in the lower part of the body below the heart enter the central channel.
The seventh stage involves the black appearance, which is a vision of total darkness like space, completely dark without any light from the sun, the moon, stars or any other source. Just total empty darkness. This occurs because all the energy winds in the body in the central channel move to the heart chakra. They gather there and they become enclosed in a small sphere. At the end of this black appearance, there is a momentary loss of consciousness as though the mind faints, becomes unconscious.
That experience is followed by the eighth stage of the death process the clear light appearance. This is described as a vision of space, completely vast, clear, empty space filled with clear, colorless light. Like the sky in spring or autumn, totally clear, clean, free of pollution, suffused with a clear, colorless light before the sun rises or after the sun sets. Here the mind is in its most subtle level. The subtlest clear light level of the mind.
So this is an experience completely free of all sensory experiences, all gross thoughts, conceptions, to totally peaceful, clear, calm. This is the most subtle level of your mind. Keep your mind focused on this experience as long as you can without letting it become distracted by anything else. And if the mind does get distracted by other thoughts or sounds, let go of those. Bring your mind back to this clear light experience.
Concentrate your mind on it as long as you can, with the awareness that this is the most pure and subtle level of your mind, of your being. When the clear light experience comes to an end, the mind that consciousness separates from the body. That is the actual point of death. It then enters the intermediate state, the Bardo state. It first goes through the eight stages in reverse order, from clear light to black vision, red vision, white vision and so forth.
The mind is now in a subtle body. The body of the intermediate state in the form of the body of the next rebirth, as a child. And it begins various experiences or adventures in the intermediate state, travelling to different places, having different visions. It’s similar to the dream state. When we dream, we have different experiences.
They seem very real to us, but they are really just happening in our mind. So the intermediate state is similar to that. The experiences that we have depend upon our mind, depend upon our karma. If we have more negative karma, the experiences we have will be frightening. If we have more positive karma, we will have positive, beautiful experiences.
So we remain in this intermediate state for anywhere from zero to forty nine days until we find the right situation for our next rebirth according to our karma. And once we find that situation, once we find the right circumstances for rebirth, then the intermediate state being dies and the mind of the consciousness enters the fertilized egg of the new life. So see if you can come to a conclusion, having meditated on these points, that it’s very important to live your life in such a way that you will be prepared for death when it happens. You’ll be able to keep your mind in as positive a state as possible, with thoughts and feelings of love and compassion, the wish to be of benefit to others, with feelings of faith and devotion to the objects of refuge, such as enlightened beings, saints, sages, those that can guide you on the spiritual path leading to liberation and enlightenment. Or at least being able to recognise that the experiences that you have as you are dying and afterwards are passing experiences, impermanent, coming and going, to not be attached to them, to not see them as solid and real and permanent.
But just be able to notice them, observe them and let them go. To be able to keep your mind in a state that is calm, clear, peaceful, and balanced through this experience so that you’ll be able to pass through the experience of death, the intermediate state of the next life, with as positive a state of mind as you can, so that you will be born in a situation where you can be as much benefit to others as possible. And finally, dedicate the positive energy of doing this meditation and listening to this talk, that it will be the cause for you to transform your mind, decrease aspects of your mind that are problematic for yourself and for others, that are the cause of suffering and problems for yourself and others. And instead develop those aspects of the mind that are conducive for peace and happiness for yourself and others, such as wisdom, compassion, love, and all the qualities and realizations you need to be able to attain higher states such as liberation and enlightenment. So that you can help others to do the same.
To help them become free, be able to experience the real peace and happiness of liberation and enlightenment.