Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 8.7-minute talk, Ven Sangye Khadro explains why helping someone die with a peaceful mind is one of Buddhism’s greatest acts of kindness—the moment of death shapes what comes next. She outlines how the dying have physical needs (pain relief, basic care), emotional needs (respect, listening, sometimes silence), and spiritual needs. The teaching focuses on managing our own emotions—fear, sadness, clinging—through mindfulness and remembering impermanence, so we can sit calmly with the dying person rather than being overwhelmed. She covers drawing strength from faith or devotion to enlightened beings, and for those caring for someone close, the crucial work of letting go of attachment and giving the dying person permission to leave.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 5.05 Helping the Dying.mp3
UUID: b1a34181-079b-49db-9bad-b0de679457f5
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 8.7 minutes
Words: ~1,223
So now we’ll look at some other things that we can do to help people who are dying. So, actually, it is said in the Buddhist teachings that helping another person to die with a peaceful, positive state of mind is one of the greatest acts of kindness that we can offer. And the reason for this is that the moment of death is so crucial for determining what will happen to the person afterwards. The situation of their next life, the place they are born, the experiences they have and so on. Because it is so important that the person can have a positive and peaceful state of mind in order to have a fortunate rebirth in the next life.
So the most important aim in helping someone who is dying is to help them die with a happy, peaceful, and positive mind. And also, if possible, it’s good if we can do various prayers, mantras, and practices with the person or for the person as they are dying. However, helping a dying person is not so easy because when people die, they experience various problems, difficulties and changes. And this might give rise to confusion as well as painful emotions. They have physical needs.
They need to be relieved from pain and discomfort. They need help in performing the most basic tasks like drinking, eating, relieving themselves, bathing and so forth. They also have emotional needs. They need to be treated with respect, kindness, patience and love. They need to talk, they need to be listened to.
Or at certain times they need to just be left alone and in silence. And they may also have spiritual needs to make sense of their life, their suffering, their death, to have hope for what lies beyond death, to feel that they will be okay, they will be cared for and guided by someone or something who is wiser or more powerful than themselves. So one of the most important skills in helping a dying person is to try to understand what their needs are and to do what we can to take care of these needs. And the best way to do this is when we are with a dying person to put aside our own needs, wishes, emotional problems, and just make ourselves available. Just make up our mind to simply be there for them, ready to do whatever has to be done, whatever will help them to be more comfortable, happy, at peace.
So there’s many excellent books available on how to care for a dying person in terms of their physical and emotional needs. Some of these books are listed in the recommended reading list. But here we will focus on the spiritual needs of the dying person and how we can provide for these. So one thing that is very helpful, very important in helping someone who is dying is that we learn to deal with our own emotions. So as I mentioned before, when a person is approaching death, they might sometimes experience disturbing emotions.
These can include fear, regret, sadness, clinging to the people and the things that they had in this life, maybe even anger. And they may have difficulty coping with these emotions and may find themselves overwhelmed as if they’re drowning in them. And one thing that’s very helpful to them during these times is if we can just sit with them calmly, not get caught up in the same emotions ourselves, listen to them compassionately, and offer comforting words to calm their minds. But in order to be able to do this effectively, we need to know how to cope with our own emotions. When we are in the presence of someone who is dying, this might bring up the same disturbing emotions in our mind as in the dying person’s mind.
We may feel fearful, sad, clinging, not wanting to let go. A sense of helplessness or despair, depression and so forth. And some of these emotions may be things we’ve really never experienced before. We may feel surprised and even confused to find them coming up in our mind. So it’s important that we learn how to deal with these emotions in ourselves in order to be able to help another person, this dying person, to deal with them.
So one of the best methods for dealing with emotions is mindfulness meditation, as mentioned earlier in this course. And another very helpful technique is reminding ourselves of impermanence, which has also been mentioned before. The fact that everything is changing. Ourselves, our bodies, our minds, other people, and all the things in the world around us. So all of these things are not fixed, solid, static, permanent, but in reality are changing every moment.
Do not stay the same from one moment to the next. So the more we become aware of and accepting of the impermanent nature of things, the less likely we will be to be caught up in emotions. Because we recognise that they too are impermanent, so even if they arise in our mind, and sometimes they might arise quite strongly. But if we can remind ourselves that they are impermanent, we’ll be able to watch them come and watch them go without becoming caught up in or overwhelmed by them. It’s also very helpful if we have faith or devotion to some objects of devotion, such as the Buddha or other Buddha figures, a spiritual teacher or teachers that we have met and feel trust in, or whoever you feel confident in.
Enlightened beings, holy beings, saints that have positive qualities such as wisdom and compassion and love. So if you feel a sense of faith, devotion, trust in one or more of these figures, calling on them, making a mental connection to them, praying to them for help and guidance can be very helpful when you find yourself in a difficult situation and maybe not knowing what to do, how to handle it. So making a prayer and making that mental or spiritual connection with a being that you feel trust in can give you the strength and even the wisdom that you need to be able to handle this difficult situation. And also, if the dying person is someone close to you, a relative or a friend, then we’ll have the additional challenge of having to deal with our own attachment, our feeling of wanting this person to stay and not wanting them to go. So even though it’s difficult to do, the best thing that we can do is to learn to let go of the person.
To accept that they’re not gonna be there forever and to give them permission to die. Because people sometimes find it difficult to let go, partly because they feel that the people around them need them. So if we can let go of our own clinging and our own sense of neediness and dependence on this person who is dying, that makes it easier for them to let go. So again, remembering impermanence, the inevitability of the change that’s taking place in all things, the inevitability that people as well as all other things one day must pass away. So contemplating that, becoming more accepting of that is the best remedy to clinging and attachment.