Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 3.8-minute talk, Ven Sanghy Khandro offers practical guidance on creating a supportive environment for someone who is dying, drawing on Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings. She addresses what to include in the physical space—display sacred objects and spiritually meaningful items that the person loved—and what to remove: objects likely to arouse attachment or anger. She then covers the crucial matter of atmosphere: keep the room quiet and peaceful, discourage loud expressions of grief, and move conversations about the person’s will, property, and funeral arrangements elsewhere, since the consciousness of the dying may still hear these conversations and be disturbed. For those attending, she emphasizes maintaining a good heart, kindness, and compassion. Buddhist practitioners should use the time to contemplate impermanence, the four noble truths, and generate compassion for all beings in the cycle of death and rebirth.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 5.11 A Peaceful Environment.mp3
UUID: 9562d7db-a9d6-4d10-8d03-8c0afce8ab93
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 3.8 minutes
Words: ~493
Another aspect in helping someone who’s dying is with regard to the environment where they are, the the space around them. Lama Zopa Rinpoche says that it’s very good if we can to create a beautiful, peaceful environment. One that projects calm and order and gives an air of serenity and inspires spaciousness of mind. You can put sacred objects and pictures and spiritually meaningful items that the person has accumulated during their lifetime. You can display those in the room around the person where they can observe them.
And it’s better if you can remove any objects that might arouse disturbing thoughts and emotions in the person’s mind, like attachment, things that they would develop attachment to or anger towards. So that will make the process of separation easier for the person. And also, it is important, according to Buddhism, to try to keep the atmosphere around the dying person and also after they’ve died to keep it quiet and peaceful, if possible. If people cry, weep, make expressions of sadness, grief, wishing the person to still be there and so forth. The the dying person might hear these and it could cause their mind to be disturbed.
It could make them it could make it difficult for the person to to leave peacefully and be born in a good situation. Now that can be rather awkward, but if you can encourage people such as family members and friends who visit the dying person that if they do wish to weep or cry or make such expressions, they do so in another room. And try to be quiet in the presence of the body of the person who’s passed away. And the same goes for discussions about property, for example, the person’s will and what’s going to happen with their money and their property and so forth. Discussions about funeral arrangements and so on.
It’s better if these discussions could take place elsewhere, not in the presence of the person’s body because the consciousness is still there. It could hear these conversations and be disturbed by them. So in the presence of the person who is dying, as well as the body after it has died, it is best to have only the sounds of prayers, mantras, spiritual instructions and so on. Lama Zopa Rinpoche says that when we are attending to a dying person, the best thing for us is to have a good heart, have feelings of kindness and compassion and the wish to help others, and a peaceful mind. And it’s also recommended that those of us who are practitioners, who are meditators, that we can sit in the presence of a dying person or someone who’s died and contemplate the Buddhist teachings such as the four noble truths, the reality of impermanence, death and suffering, and generate compassion and love and renunciation, the determination to free ourselves and all other beings from the cycle of death and rebirth.