Mindfulness of Death (1)

Tonight we begin a series of three talks on mindfulness of death.

We’ll start by continuing the story of Ven. Raṭṭhapāla and King Koravya. Raṭṭhapāla told the king his third Dhamma summary, “The world has nothing of its own. One has to pass on, leaving everything behind.”

The king responded, “How can you say I have nothing of my own? I have plenty of storehouses filled with gold and silver.” But then Raṭṭhapāla asked him, “Can you take that with you when you die?” And the king said, “Oh, no, I’ll have to leave it behind as I go on in line with my kamma.”

This is a lesson both in death and in not-self. Ultimately, your material wealth doesn’t really belong to you. However, you do have the qualities of your mind, and those you’ll be able to take with you. In Ajaan Lee’s image, death is like a forced immigration: You have to go right now, and you can’t take any bags with you. So what will you be able to take with you? Only your skill set—in other words, the qualities of your mind, good or bad.

The Canon says that your good and bad deeds will be waiting for you on the other side. Your good deeds will be like relatives who will welcome you and be glad to see you. Your bad deeds will be like a heavy cart that you’ll have to drag behind you.

The Buddha gives another image for rebirth: It’s like a fire swept from one house to another as it clings to the wind. The fire stands for you as a being, the wind stands for craving, and the other house stands for your next lifetime.

Now notice, the Buddha doesn’t say that there is no such thing as a being. He basically says that you, as a being, are a process. His definition of a being is any desire, passion, delight or craving for any of the aggregates. If you’re caught up there, tied up there, then you’re said to be a being. In other words, a being is a process or an activity that’s part of the process of becoming.

So at death, there are three important factors. There’s the fire, which stands for the being, the wind that sustains the fire is craving, and then the house nearby stands for your next life. So you have three options:

The first two options are basically aimed at a good rebirth. The third option aims at going to freedom from rebirth. Our talks for tonight and for the next two nights will deal with these three options.

Tonight’s option is ensuring the possibility of a good house next door, while at the same time beginning to get some control over the direction of the wind of craving so it’ll be more likely to take you to that house. In other words, we’ll focus on how to prepare for death ahead of time, living life in a way that increases the odds for a good death and a good rebirth.

There was a question that came up that I didn’t address earlier, and it was based on the thought that a bad death would be an accidental death, whereas a good death would be a natural death. From the Buddha’s point of view, though, that’s not the definition of a good or bad death. What makes a death good or bad is where the mind goes.

So, to start preparing for a good death, he recommends the practice of mindfulness of death. There are two points on this topic that we have to make clear right at the beginning.

One is that mindfulness of death doesn’t mean thinking, “Death, death, death, I’m going to die.” Instead you realize that death is something you have to prepare for and that it could come at any time, so you should work now while you have the chance to foster qualities of mind that will minimize your suffering at death. You remind yourself that even in the span of one in-breath and out-breath, you can accomplish a lot, so don’t throw the present moment away.

Two, mindfulness of death doesn’t just contemplate the fact of death, for that can have all sorts of implications depending on what you think happens at death. If you think that death is annihilation, you might think, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die” as in the old drinking song. Skillful mindfulness of death requires taking into consideration the Buddha’s teachings on what happens at death and what you’ll need to do to be well-prepared in line with those teachings. So the proper way to develop the strength of your mindfulness around death starts with strength of conviction, being convinced of the lessons from the Buddha’s awakening concerning the truth of rebirth and of the principle of causality that your past kamma does create options that will be available to you at death.

Now, there’s a common complaint. A lot of people say, “Why do we have to think about death? Can’t we just enjoy life?” The response is that the Buddha is not against enjoyment. He teaches lay people that they should enjoy their wealth and not be miserly, otherwise they’ll develop an unhealthy attitude toward pleasure: their own and that of other beings. But you have to remember that the way you enjoy pleasure has long-term consequences into the future.

Sometimes it seems as if saṁsāra is a sick joke. You work hard at developing good qualities through generosity and virtue, which lead to pleasant rebirths, but if you simply enjoy the pleasures there, they erode the good qualities of your mind. That will cause you to fall back down, and you can fall lower than you were before. It’s because of this tendency that the Buddha developed saṁvega when he gained his second knowledge about the whole process of rebirth.

The attitude he recommends toward pleasure is that you don’t weigh yourself down unnecessarily with pain. You enjoy pleasures that accord with the Dhamma, i.e., that don’t give rise to unskillful states of mind. What pleasures these are will vary from person to person. Some general examples he gives of skillful pleasures include the pleasure of wild nature, and the pleasures of living in a harmonious and moral community of people.

There’s also pleasure in the skillful act of preparing for the conditions of a future life. In other words, you’re not just working, working, working, and hoping that some day you’ll get a reward in the future. It is possible to find joy right now in being generous, being virtuous, and meditating. In this way, you provide yourself with comforts in the house you’re currently living in at the same time as you prepare comfortable houses next door.

So, what kind of house would you like to build? You might ask a building developer, “What different models do you offer?” In same way, you might want to look into the possible levels of being in the cosmos as the Buddha saw them.

The first point to notice is that the Buddhist cosmos is bigger, both spatially and temporally, than the cosmos of modern physicists and astronomers. We can start with the lower realms. There are lots of Buddhist hells. The big difference from the hells taught by Christianity is that the hells in the Buddhist cosmos are not permanent. When you’ve used up your bad kamma, you leave them and return to the higher realms. Still, they can be pretty fiendish.

My favorite hell is the one that’s an iron box with glowing hot iron walls on all six sides. Is this a house you would want? There are flames going from the left side to the right, from the right to the left, from the bottom to the top, and from the top to the bottom. Hell beings run around inside this cube. Their flesh gets burned away by the flames but then keeps getting replenished so that it can get burned away again. Every now and then, a door opens in one of the walls, so the beings all go rushing to the door, but as soon as they get there, the door slams shut. Then another door opens on the other side. They run to that door, and then it slams shut just as they get there. This keeps up for a long while. Finally, they get to one of the doors and it doesn’t shut, so they go running through it and then they fall into the hell of excrement. So, that’s one possibility.

Higher than the hell realms are the animal realms, which we see around us: the realms of cats and dogs and wild animals of all sorts, big and small. Higher than the animal realms are the realms of the hungry ghosts, who can live in various conditions. Some of them are constantly poor; some of them have good places to live in during the day, but they have to wander around at night. Higher than the hungry ghosts are human beings. You can look around you and see all kinds of human beings in this world, living in widely varying conditions of poverty and wealth, illness and health.

Higher than the human beings are the devas, and here again there’s lots of variety. Their pleasures are more refined than human pleasures. For some, their pleasures are a little better than those of kings; for others, the sensual pleasures are far more continuous and extreme. Higher than the sensual devas are the brahmās. These are the beings whose pleasures are like the pleasures of concentration.

The lower realms in this cosmos start with human births in which there’s a lot of suffering, and go all the way down to the various hells. The path to the lower realms is to break the precepts—killing, stealing, having illicit sex, lying, and taking intoxicants—or to engage in types of wrong speech, which would include divisive speech, harsh speech, and idle chatter.

The path to the safety—starting with fortunate human rebirths and going up to the brahmā realms—is to learn how not to delight in doing any of these unskillful activities. The path to the higher realms starts with observing the precepts, practicing generosity, and practicing meditation. Your safest resolve, if you’re going to be reborn, is to aim at a place where you can continue practicing the Dhamma, as I said this afternoon.

The basic strengths you need in aiming at the higher realms, in addition to the strengths of conviction and mindfulness that we’ve already mentioned, are the strengths of persistence, shame, and compunction. The need for persistence is obvious: You have to motivate yourself to make the effort to abandon unskillful behavior and to develop skillful behavior.

As for shame, I’ll give you a story that shows how shame can be helpful when thinking about rebirth.

There’s a story in the Canon of two monks and a laywoman. The laywoman provided the two monks with food throughout their lives. Then they all died. She went to one of the higher deva realms, and then looked around and asked, “Where did the monks go?” It turns out they were reborn as gandhabbas. Now, gandhabbas are a low-level deva. They’re like the teenagers of the deva world: obsessed with music, sex, and fast cars. (They actually have paintings on the walls of temples in Thailand of gandhabbas flying around in fast deva vehicles.) So she was upset. She went to them and scolded them: “I fed you all your lives and this is what you do with the practice?” One of the gandhabbas became very embarrassed, so he went off and meditated for a while and then was reborn as a higher-level deva. But the other one didn’t care. He stayed as a gandhabba. So, shame can actually be a useful motivation in getting you to go to a higher level.

Another helpful strength is the strength of compunction. Remember what this means: It’s the fear of doing something unskillful, because unskillful behavior leads to harmful consequences. This is the type of fear that the Buddha actually recommends, in contrast with what he calls the four fears of death. We’ll go into detail about the four fears tomorrow, but for now, just listen to the list:

These four fears come from ignorance and powerlessness. Compunction, however, is a fear that comes from having a sense of power. You realize that you have the power, through your actions, to shape your life and rebirth, but you’re afraid of abusing or misusing that power. The Buddha actually recommends this as a skillful form of fear.

Now, to go back to the strength of persistence: Persistence with regard to good rebirth in general means focusing on developing four qualities:

Conviction we’ve already covered in some detail. It basically means belief in the Buddha’s awakening and how it applies to your life, motivating you to work on good deeds that will lead to happiness now and on into the future. Simply having this conviction makes you happy because it puts power into your hands.

I was reading a while back about a psychologist who was studying babies, and he noticed that what makes babies happiest is when they discover that they can repeat the same action and get the same results again and again. You’ve probably noticed how they make a sound and then keep repeating it again and again. It can drive you crazy, but for them it’s an exertion of power. They know that “If I do this, I’ll get these results. I can make a difference in my life.” This is a principle that keeps us happy as we go through life: having a sense of agency, that we can make a difference in our lives. Hopefully, though, we do it in more skillful ways as we mature.

This is why it’s so important that you not listen to people who say that causes and conditions simply have to be accepted as they play themselves out, without any interference from you. That belief is actually a recipe for depression. The Buddha’s message is that you can learn to understand the principles behind causes and conditions so that you can direct them in a skillful way. When you’re following the path, you’re basically taking the raw joy of agency and learning how to direct it toward the best possible aim.

The second quality you develop through persistence is virtue, and this, too, makes you happy in the present moment because it gives you a sense of self-esteem. You have high values and you can hold yourself to them even when society around you doesn’t. You lift the level of your heart and character. A healthy, confident sense of your self is a necessary part of the path. It’s also necessary for confidence when you’re dying. It’s one way of counteracting that fear of being punished after death.

The third quality you develop through persistence is generosity, which also can make you happy in the present moment. It’s happy in the sense that acts of generosity create an expanded state of mind. If your mind is stingy, it’s like living in a tiny, narrow hovel, but when you’re generous, as Ajaan Lee says, the whole world is your home. Everywhere you go, you’re at home because the people you’ve helped are like your relatives, and people are always happy to welcome a generous relative. This brings a sense of self-worth and makes your life with other people easier. Looking back on your acts of generosity, you feel good about yourself. This is a pleasure that never grows stale.

This is where it differs from sensual pleasures. Sometimes you look back at your sensual pleasures and there’s a strong sense of regret that they’re gone. Or you can feel remorse for some of the unskillful things you did in order to get those sensual pleasures.

To make sure that generosity never grows stale, the Buddha emphasized that it has to be voluntary. The monks have a rule that if someone asks us, “Where should I give this gift?” we should say, “Give wherever you feel inspired or you feel your gift would be well used.”

Generosity also exercises your imagination. Of the different parts of the Buddha’s path, this gives you the most room for creativity: Who would you like to give to? What would you like to give? How would you like to give it? Use your imagination. It’s fun, and it develops your sense of agency in a way that spreads your happiness around.

The fourth quality you develop through persistence is discernment. In this context, the Buddha defines discernment as “penetrative knowledge of arising and passing away, leading to the right ending of suffering and stress.” The emphasis here is on the word penetrative. It means understanding that things don’t just arise and pass away on their own. They have their causes and they can vary in their effects. Some of the effects are good and some of them are bad, so you want to do only the actions that lead to good effects. For your discernment to be penetrative and to lead to the end of suffering, you can’t just watch things coming and going. You have to develop, through experimentation, a sense of which activities are skillful and lead to happiness, and which actions are unskillful and lead to suffering.

This is going to depend on your own honesty and powers of observation to know this. These, in fact, are the two qualities that the Buddha said he looked for in his students: honesty and powers of observation.

Learning the Dhamma is not just a matter of following instructions. You take an active role in employing the two qualities that the Buddha said nourish the Dhamma: commitment and reflection. These two activities connect with the qualities he looks for in a student, in that ideally you’re honest in your commitment, and try to be honest and observant as you reflect.

Commitment means that you do the practice to the best of your ability because that’s the only way to learn. After all, if you know that you didn’t do your best, what would you learn from your actions?

When I was a layman, I taught English in Chiang Mai University. My second year there they asked me to teach some courses in English literature. One of the books I had the students read was The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. It’s a difficult book, even for a native speaker of English, because the narrator doesn’t tell the story in straightforward way: He keeps jumping back and forth among events that don’t seem connected. What makes the book interesting is figuring out that the narrator is trying to hide his less-than-honorable role in some of the events he’s narrating. For students of literature, it’s a good case study in the unreliable narrator.

I tried to explain the story to the kids beforehand, laying out the timeline of what actually happened, and explaining how the narrator can often be the most interesting character in a story. The interest lies in figuring out his psychology. But even with all the help I gave them, the students complained. One day, one of the students asked, “Ajaan, why do you give us such difficult books to read?” And I told her, “If I gave you easy books, what would you learn?” It was as if a little light bulb went off over her head. From that point on, she turned from a C student into an A student.

That’s how you learn: by doing your best. When you think of doing something, ask yourself, “What do I expect to happen from this intention?” Act only on the intentions that you think will be skillful. If it turns out that you were wrong, still you’ve learned something.

All of these qualities—the strengths of conviction, mindfulness, persistence, shame, and compunction, plus the helpful qualities of honesty, your powers of observation, commitment and reflection—become treasures that are built into your mind. They not only provide a good house to live in now, but also a good house for the fire to go to when it gets blown from this house. At the same time, they create good attachments for the fire so that it clings skillfully. That gives you a better chance that it’ll cling to a wind going in a good direction.

Now, in addition to the four basic qualities for a good rebirth—conviction, generosity, virtue, and discernment—the Buddha adds two qualities specifically associated with going to a rebirth in a heavenly realm. These are learning the Dhamma and practicing the brahmavihāras or the sublime attitudes.

Learning the Dhamma means reading it, listening to it often, and memorizing passages that you find especially meaningful. The Canon adds that you should discuss them with other people who are trying to penetrate their meaning. When the Buddha compares Dhamma practice to the ways in which a fortress is protected, learning is the cache of weapons used by the soldiers of right effort.

Now, it’s not hard to see why this sort of learning would be a useful preparation for death. When craving comes whispering its deceptive ideas into your mind, knowledge of the Dhamma gives you a fund of resources to use to counteract it. This type of learning is especially needed in the modern world where people’s minds exposed to mass culture have so many thoughtless jingles, songs, and narratives sloshing around inside. I’m sure you can think of some examples yourself. When you’re dying, do you want that stupid stuff taking over your mind? Your best defense against that is to learn passages of the Dhamma. Let them slosh around in your mind.

The Canon says that this sort of learning is also useful for when you arrive in the deva world, because when you’re surrounded by heavenly pleasures, it’s really easy to forget the Dhamma. But if you’ve memorized the Dhamma on the human plane, it can act as a reminder in the heavenly world and so encourage you to stay heedful and to keep on practicing.

As for as the brahmavihāras or the sublime attitudes, these include universal goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. These are good attitudes to develop throughout life. They inspire skillful actions in all situations, especially with difficult people. They help to ensure that you don’t let the unskillful actions of difficult people infect you with the desire to harm them in response.

Now, these sublime attitudes have to be developed. You have to deliberately give rise to them and maintain them. After all, they’re considered brahmā attitudes and not human attitudes, because on the level of human attitudes, you naturally tend to have goodwill, compassion, etc. for some people but not for others, which also means you can’t trust yourself in all situations. You need to lift the status of your mind. The Buddha also calls these brahmavihāras “determinations” that you have to be mindful of at all times. This shows that universal goodwill, etc., are not innate, because if they were your innate qualities, you wouldn’t have to keep them in mind.

These are also good attitudes to develop in anticipation of death. They protect your mind from being seized by memories of times when you were wronged in the past, and they can also lift your mind above your personal concerns around death, as you see that death is universal. You have to develop equanimity at the time of death for the things you can’t change at that point.

The Buddha gives the image of bandits cutting you up with a two-handled saw—I’ve always liked the detail that the saw has two handles. The bandits have pinned you down so that you can’t move, and two of them are working at the same time, cutting you into little pieces. The Buddha says that even then, you need to have goodwill for them, and then for the whole universe—to take your mind off of them—because you’re dying and you don’t want to die with ill will in your mind. So when you’re suffering from other indignities and problems in life, tell yourself, “Well, at least they’re not cutting me up in little pieces with a two-handled saw.” That helps keep things in perspective.

There’s also a story concerning the Buddha’s cousin, Mahānāma. The Buddha is leaving the place where he’s been staying for the Rains retreat, and Mahānāma, who is his cousin, has been staying nearby. He comes to see the Buddha and asks, “Suppose one of your followers is dying while you’re away. What should I tell him?” And the Buddha says, “Tell him, ‘If you’re worried about your family or anything else you’re leaving behind, there’s nothing you can do about those things now because you’re dying, so put those worries aside.’”

You have to develop equanimity for the things you’re leaving behind so that you can focus your mind on keeping your mind on track.

It’s important to remember that when the Buddha teaches equanimity, he’s not teaching that you be defeatist or that you simply resign yourself to accepting things. The equanimity he advises is the ability to put your mind in a good place where pains and suffering don’t touch it.

The way he advises developing equanimity is that you start by trying to create a sense of joy inside. At the very least, it would be the joy in agency, because there are things you can do in the present moment even when you’re dying. Even better, you try to develop equanimity based on the pleasure of concentration or the pleasure that comes from seeing through your defilements with insight and being able to let them go.

So if you can develop this kind of equanimity as part of your discernment, it’s one of the treasures you can take with you. In fact, all of these qualities we’ve been talking about—conviction, virtue, generosity, discernment, learning, the brahmavihāras—are treasures that you can take with you at the moment of death, unlike the treasures in King Koravya’s storerooms. And with these treasures in your mind, you can do something about your situation so that you’ll at the very least have a good house to go to after death, one where you can keep on practicing the Dhamma.

Yesterday evening, there were two very basic questions about meditation. I didn’t want to wait until this afternoon to answer them.

The first one is: What is the difference between mindfulness and concentration?

Mindfulness is the ability to keep something in mind. Concentration is steadiness of mind. Now, the Buddha’s descriptions of right mindfulness are basically the instructions on how to get the mind into right concentration. You keep track of the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.

For example, you remember to stay with the breath: That’s the duty of mindfulness.

Then you’re alert to what the breath is doing and also to how well the mind is staying with the breath.

Ardency is the whole-hearted desire to do this well. If you see that the mind is wandering away from the breath, you bring it back right away. While you’re with the breath, you try to be as sensitive as possible to how it feels and you try to keep it as comfortable as possible.

As you do that persistently, you get the mind into right concentration. You give rise to a sense of pleasure and refreshment as you talk to yourself about how to make the breath as comfortable as possible. Once it’s comfortable, then you try to maintain that sense of comfort and then think of spreading it throughout the entire body. You continue to be ardent, alert, and mindful to maintain that state of ease and refreshment. It’s in this way that right mindfulness and right concentration converge.

The second question is: What visual image are you trying to gain as you get the mind into concentration?

There’s no need to give rise to any sort of visual image. The focus of the concentration is basically on the sensation of the breath and whatever sense of well-being you can maintain in the body. There’s no need to have any visual image of light or forms. Now, some people will have images of that sort appearing in the mind as it settles down, but even if you have a vision like that, you don’t pay attention to it. You keep on paying attention to the breath. For people who do have images like that, it’s a sign that the mind is beginning to settle down. It’s like a sign on the side of a road saying that you’re now entering Auriol. If you see the sign, you stay on the road, right? Don’t drive on the sign. But if you don’t have any signs like that, that’s still okay. The road is still there; you can follow it and get into Auriol. The mind can still settle down because the breath can provide it with a steady point of focus and a sense of well-being. Just try to keep maintaining that if you get it.