Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 4.7-minute teaching, Ven Sangye Khadro explains how practitioners can continue supporting someone after their death. She outlines practical methods: reciting prayers and mantras, performing meditations, and dedicating the accumulated merit toward the person’s fortunate rebirth. These practices are traditionally continued for forty-nine days, the Buddhist period between death and rebirth, though they can extend beyond. She notes that donations made on behalf of the deceased—using their own money if available—create powerful positive energy. Direct relatives’ actions carry special weight in this regard. Sangye Khadro emphasizes that even after rebirth occurs, continued merit-making may assist in future lives. She concludes by recommending Medicine Buddha practice as the most beneficial approach for supporting those who have died.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 5.12 Helping After Death.mp3
UUID: 681b62a2-e5ba-45c3-93e7-086f478fb982
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 4.7 minutes
Words: ~592
And we can continue to help a person who has died even after they have died. We don’t have to stop just because the person has stopped breathing and the body has been taken away. The things we can do to continue helping the person would be to continue to recite prayers, mantras, do meditations and dedicate all the positive energy that we are accumulating, that they will have a fortunate rebirth. We can also ask others to recite such prayers. There are communities, monastic communities with many hundreds or even thousands of monks and nuns dedicating themselves to spiritual practice.
So we can request that they recite prayers on behalf of the person who has died. And we can continue to do these practices up to forty nine days because as mentioned before, the intermediate state, that is the period of time between the moment of death, when that person’s life has ended, until the next rebirth could be a maximum of forty nine days. So it’s traditional in Buddhist countries among Buddhist practitioners to continue reciting prayers for doing practices and dedicating merits for someone who has died for forty nine days after the person has died. And it is also good to use, if you can, some of the person’s own money to create positive energy. For example, by making donations on their behalf.
Donations to charitable organizations, projects that help needy people, churches or temples or monastic communities. So these are considered objects to make donations to that are very powerful. So such charitable donations create a lot of positive energy. If you can use some of the deceased person’s own money to make such donations, it’s very good. If that’s not possible, if you don’t have access to such funds, then you can use your own money and just dedicate the merit, the positive energy to that person’s fortunate rebirth and quick enlightenment.
And it’s also said that any positive energy or merit that is created by direct relatives of the person who has passed away, that positive energy will be more powerful than positive energy created by people who don’t have that relationship. So if the deceased person is is a relative of yours, then you have the opportunity to create more positive energy. Anything you do will be more powerful in helping that person find a fortunate rebirth, happiness in future lives, and ultimately enlightenment. So you can continue to do positive actions, create good karma, merit and so forth every day up to forty nine days. You can continue to do that afterwards as well.
You don’t have to stop after forty nine days. You can do it as long as you like. But it’s also important to understand that once that person has taken rebirth, then the positive energy, merit, good karma that we create and dedicate to them may not be able to help them in that life, but it could help them in subsequent rebirths. For example, it could shorten the length of an unfortunate rebirth, help them go more quickly to a fortunate rebirth. So those are some actions and practices, advice on how to help someone who is dying.
So as mentioned, as recommended by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, the best practice that we could do for someone who is dying from the Buddhist point of view is the practice of the Medicine Buddha. So we’ll have a short pause here and then do a meditation on the Medicine Buddha with the recitation of the mantra of the Medicine Buddha.