Lam-rim 15: Nine-Part Death Meditation: Meditation on the Third Root Fact

Is It Detrimental to Die while Sedated or Unconscious?

Participant: My grandfather died after coming out of surgery. During the operation, the doctors had found that he had severe damage to his colon, so they decided to let him die after the surgery. He’d been given sedatives so that he would never regain consciousness. Is it a problem to be sedated or unconscious when you’re dying?

Dr. Berzin: I think it really depends on the level of training of our minds. If our minds are well trained in Dharma practice, we have done a lot of daily meditation, and so on, we will have a lot of very strong Dharma thoughts before going into an operation. These positive thoughts would be very much on our minds, even if we were hit by a truck and immediately became unconscious. But dying in a neutral state of mind is certainly better than dying in a negative state of mind – a state of fear, attachment, regret, or anxiety. So, in many ways, if we are not trained, it’s better to die in our sleep, when we’re unconscious, and so on. 

But as they say, if we die in our sleep or when we’re unconscious, what will affect our next rebirths most strongly – this is talking about the throwing karma that throws us into the next rebirth – are the strongest thoughts that we had before we went to sleep or fell unconscious. So, since death can come at any time and we don’t know when, it’s very important to keep mindfulness of the Dharma. As Shantideva said, at the time of death, we don’t want to be distracted from thoughts of the Buddha Dharma, voidness, bodhichitta, compassion, and all these sort of things. So, everything really depends on the state of mind we had while we were still conscious.

Participant: My Dharma practice might not have become very strong by the time I’m dying. If I had a good friend, a Dharma practitioner, with me, that might calm me down and help me not to be so frightened.

Dr. Berzin: What you didn’t say, but what I could add, is that this person would help you to be mindful of the Dharma. They would remind you.

What is also recommended is having a picture of the Buddha, our guru, or something like that, near our deathbed. That also can help us to be mindful. I think it is very important to examine the type of emotional relationship we have with the person we are thinking to be with us at that time. Now, we could have tremendous attachment toward the Buddha as well, but attachment to a Buddha or a spiritual teacher is certainly better than attachment to money or to other people because they could cause us to be more upset and so on. But we have to be very careful about how we arrange our deaths.

Participant: It calms me down to chant mantras, but then I’m going to lose consciousness when I die, so I won’t be able to do that.

Dr. Berzin: Well, that’s true no matter what meditation we’re doing at the time of death. The point is to use whatever level of consciousness we have to be mindful of the Dharma. 

The Stages of the Dissolution of the Mind Experienced in Death and Sleep

In the highest class of tantra practice, anuttarayoga, we rehearse the stages of the dissolution of the mind, a process by which the mind gets more and more subtle, so that we learn to recognize the various stages (either eight or ten stages, depending on the system) and to understand the voidness of the mind at each level of dissolution, in other words, to see the process as a dissolution of appearances of truly established existence. If we have come to familiarize ourselves with these various stages, then, when it actually happens, our mindfulness of them could continue. But that, I must say, is extremely, extremely difficult.

Now, a similar process happens as we fall asleep. The dissolution of stages is not exactly the same because we don’t go all the way down to the subtlest level of consciousness. Nonetheless, the process is similar to that of dying. It’s very difficult to recognize these stages as they happen because, usually, they occur very, very quickly. It is possible to notice the very first stage happening. It’s that stage where, as we’re lying in bed and starting to go to sleep, we have the feeling of falling off the bed. That’s an indication that the earth element is starting to fail as a support for the consciousness. Because of that, it feels as though we are falling. I am able to recognize that happening as I fall asleep. But, then, after that, it’s finished. I just fall asleep. Either that or I’m so mindful I wake up. Obviously, that’s not going to happen when we’re dying. 

I don’t know how quickly the dissolution process happens when we’re dying. I get the feeling that it happens fairly quickly. So, how do we maintain mindfulness as the other stages occur? Maybe maintaining mindfulness for most of us will not be so detailed. Instead, it might just be a matter of recognizing what is happening at the start of the process and remembering what will follow. I know from experience that, when I recognize that feeling of falling as I start to fall asleep, the thing to do is to totally relax. If we totally relax, we fall asleep instantly. I would imagine that it’s also very important to totally relax when the stages of dissolution are happening as we’re dying, even if we do not maintain mindfulness of each step as it happens. In common terms, that’s usually referred to as “letting go.”

Participant: Is it really parallel? When you totally relax in order to fall asleep, you basically lose mindfulness.

Dr. Berzin: Well, now we have to define mindfulness. Mindfulness, remember, is the mental glue. What we want to hold on to is an understanding of what’s happening – which doesn’t necessarily mean mentally verbalizing what is happening. The way to fall asleep, of course, is to totally quiet our minds. If we have gained the ability to do that through meditation practice, we can just totally silence our minds and relax. Now, to do that while keeping an understanding of voidness or something like that would usually keep me awake.

Participant: That’s the thing. It’s not really parallel, because when you’re dying, maintaining mindfulness of what’s happening doesn’t keep you alive.

Dr. Berzin: Right.  

Sleep and Dream Yoga

Sleep yoga is not just sleeping. It’s trying to recognize the process of falling asleep and to have mindfulness of voidness as we are falling asleep and, then, when we are actually asleep – which is very difficult to do. 

Then there’s dream yoga. The point of that is not to be able to fly and do all sorts of naughty things in your dream. The point is to recognize while dreaming that the dream is a dream. Also, the point is not just to recognize that it’s a dream. That’s rather trivial. The point is to recognize that it lacks truly established existence, that it’s like an illusion – hence, the analogy of everything being like a dream. It’s not just recognizing, “OK, it’s a dream. I’m in this scene.” That means having voidness recognition, recognizing that everything is like an illusion, and then using that opportunity to meditate in the dream. What is particularly advised is to do visualization – deity practice. So, we do our sadhanas, the whole tantric opera thing, in our sleep. At that point, we have perfect visualization because dreams are non-conceptual – the visual part, that is – and the visualizations are very vivid. We can, of course, have thoughts in our dreams, and, obviously, those would be conceptual. Plus, we have perfect concentration in our dreams because we have no distraction from our senses. 

But to do dream yoga, we not only have to have the mental glue but be able to stay in the dream without waking up. This, I think, is the most difficult aspect of it.

Now, obviously, when we’re dying, we don’t have the danger of reviving. We then need to be able to carry this mindfulness into bardo practice, when the bardo actually happens. What determines how long we stay in the bardo are the forces of our karma.

Participant: There are two things. One is that we’re trying to have these positive thoughts at the moment of death and to maintain awareness. The other thing is that we’re trying to be so accustomed to having these Dharmic thoughts that they arise automatically.

Building Up Positive Habits of Thought in Meditation

Dr. Berzin: That’s right. Of course we want to be able to do these meditations as we’re dying, but in order to be able do that, we have to have meditated. “Meditation” (sgom) means to build up positive habits by repeatedly generating and focusing on beneficial states of mind, doing it over and over again – in other words, to practice just as we would practice the piano – so that these positive thoughts come automatically. Then, at the time of death, we won’t freak out. We won’t need somebody to calm us down because we will have built up these positive habits. That’s what this point saying – that if we have used the opportunity of this precious human rebirth to build up these positive habits, positive thoughts will come automatically at the time of death, rather than “oh, shit, it’s over.”

It’s very interesting to look at the Tibetans. For many of us who are from Western countries, when we bang our foot, have an accident, or something goes wrong, like the computer breaking down, the first thing that comes out of our mouths is, “Oh, shit!” “Scheiße!” or “merde!” What the Tibetans say is, “Konchok sum” (dkon-mchog gsum), “the Three Jewels.” They have accustomed themselves to say this. Now, whether or not they’re mindful of what it means is something else, but it’s certainly a better thought than “oh, shit.”

Participant: It’s like, “Oh, God!”

Dr. Berzin: Right. In very strong Catholic families, they’ll say, “Mother of God,” or “Jesus Christ!” That certainly is a better thing to have on our minds than “shit,” isn’t it? Even better is to have patience and not to curse or say anything at all, whether it’s a curse with a positive word or a negative word.

The thing to practice with – somebody pointed this out to me – is our computers. A computer is the best teacher of patience. When something doesn’t work – when it fails, loses some documents, or whatever – don’t curse at the computer. I found that, being mindless, I said all sorts of nasty things when something went wrong with the computer. But then I started trying to practice mindfulness and not to say “shit” when things happened. Instead, I tried just to be patient and not to make any comment whatsoever, even in my mind. It’s very, very good practice. It’s difficult, but it’s a good area to work on. Or when something drops and breaks or whatever – be mindful of what thought we have. The best is to meditate on patience.

Participant: It builds up a habit.

Dr. Berzin: That’s exactly what Dharma practice – this word “practice” – is all about. Drub (sgrub) is the Tibetan word. Drub is actually to make something a habit, to build up a habit. 

The final meditation on death is imagining the scene of our own deaths. It’s very useful to visualize our own death occurring right now. We should test ourselves periodically to see how well prepared we are and how we would take it. 

We picture, in vivid detail, our relatives and friends gathered around us crying and mourning.

Obviously, we wouldn’t want that disturbance, but this is the description.

We go on to picture our own funeral and then imagining our bodies being cremated, completely enveloped in flames, or being buried in the ground, decomposing and being eaten by worms.

There’s the chod (gcod) practice, in which we imagine our bodies being cut up and then offering it to various beings to eat or to do with whatever they like.

We imagine the consciousness entering the bardo and then consider the type of rebirth we might take based on the potentials we’ve built up in our lives so far. In this way, we impress upon ourselves the imminence and concreteness of the coming of our deaths.

Participant: Where are these quotations from?

Alex: From the Anthology of Well-Spoken Advice, which is a collection of Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey’s oral teachings that I had written down. I’m not quite sure where he got the meditation from, but, in any case, it gives a great of detail. I published only the first volume of the anthology, actually. The other volumes are still sitting in my computer. 

So, we imagine our deaths and what’s going to happen. Don’t focus so much on the people around you and what they’re going to think – “They’ll really miss me and appreciate me when I’m gone. They didn’t appreciate me now,” these childish types of thoughts. Instead, as it says here, imagine it from your own point of view. Thinking, “Would I be ready if I were to die now?” is the point. 

Imagine having a heart attack and dropping dead right here, as happened with my friend Alan, and your body being cremated, buried, or whatever, and then going on into the bardo. What kind of rebirth can you expect on the basis of what you’ve done so far with this life, not to mention what you’ve done in previous lives – not that we’re aware of very much? The point of this is to think, “Hey, I’d better get my act together.” 

[meditation]

Trijang Rinpoche, who was the late junior tutor of His Holiness, gave a guideline instruction, which was that when we leave somebody, we should think, “One of us might die before we ever meet again,” and that upon going to sleep, we should think, “I might die before I wake up.” These types of thoughts will make our attachments, aversions, and anger seem trivial and petty. This is actually very helpful. Also, when we wake up in the morning, it’s helpful to realize that it’s quite a miracle that we’ve woken up again; we could have died in our sleep. Certainly, when parting from someone, it’s helpful to think, “I may never see this person again. Am I OK,” in terms of our attachment or hostility toward this person, “with the fact that either they or I may die?” That’s a very helpful type of thought. 

We’re here together now, so when we leave this evening we can think that we may never see each other again. So, what’s the point of having any disturbing emotions toward each other? I think we can extend that to thinking that when we leave, we may never see anybody we know in this lifetime ever again. Are we prepared for that?

[meditation]

To read further from the text:

The point of all these practices to become mindful of death is not to become depressed. Nor is it to develop the type of short-lived, all-excited determination for freedom with which we give up all food, sleep, comfort, and wealth in a fanatic practice of the Dharma.

It’s important not to go to either of those extremes: getting all depressed or getting absolutely fanatic about doing Dharma practice. 

The point is to develop a realistic attitude toward life and death. While maintaining a balance of spiritual and material concerns, we must practice as best as we can without wasting the respites and opportunities of our precious human lives. We must set our determination not to die pathetically like a rat in the gutter of a street but, instead, to die with some accomplishment, having taken sound steps toward liberation and enlightenment. Therefore, instead of being either downcast or frantic at the thought of death, we adopt a constructive and mature attitude, especially when we consider the quality of the future lives that we are creating now by our actions.

So that’s what we try to develop: a mature and realistic attitude. We don’t want to become fanatics, but on the other hand, we also don’t want to get all depressed – or go to the third extreme, which is just to waste the opportunities that we have now. We want to use these opportunities in a mature way. Fanaticism, what I’ve translated as “short-lived, all-excited determination,” which is a Tibetan term, doesn’t last. We get all excited, “Yes, I’m going to do it!” and “Wow!” but it’s completely short-lived. It wears out and is not something that we can sustain. 

It’s a mature type of view that we need to develop. His Holiness always says that he gains this by thinking that it will take three zillion eons of building up positive force. If it’s going to take that long, then we just sort of do it without expectations that “ah! If I just put in an excessive amount of time, in a few months, I’ll be able to gain enlightenment.” 

Is It Better Not to Disturb the Body Immediately after Death?

Participant: My father has a request for when he dies. He asked my brother and me not to disturb him for thirty-six hours because it has an influence on the mind and the process of dying.

Dr. Berzin: Is this based on Buddhist thought?

Participant: No, I think it’s Hinduistic.

Dr. Berzin: So, it would be the same thing. The idea that any disturbance of the body immediately after death has an influence on the rebirth can come from either Hindu or Buddhist thought. 

Participant: So is that an illusion, or is that really important?

Dr. Berzin: To a certain extent, it is important. I went recently to this Körperwelten, or World of the Body, exhibition. It was an exhibition about the human body, showing different parts of the body preserved in a special way. The focus of this particular exhibition was on the stages of life, which also included the stages of death. What was really interesting and what I never knew was that after we stop breathing, it takes a certain length of time for each of the organs and systems within the body to die. So, it actually takes a certain period of time for the brain, the nervous system, the kidneys, or whatever to cease functioning. 

According to the Buddhist point of view, and I would imagine the Hindu as well, the subtlest consciousness – or to put it in sort of Western terms, the “spark of life” – hasn’t completely left the body, even though the person might be considered medically dead. So, it is better to not disturb the body for at least a certain period of time, particularly if the person is doing meditation. 

Now, this is a very difficult issue. If we have a heart attack, would we want to be revived with electric shock? Obviously, in some cases, we can’t be revived.

Participant: What about donating our body parts?

Dr. Berzin: Right. That has to be done right after we die. 

So, these things are considerations. From a strict meditation point of view, we wouldn’t want to be disturbed. But then we have to evaluate how advanced we are. Are we actually doing what’s called the death-juncture meditation – being focused on the voidness of the clear light mind as we die? Most of us aren’t there yet.

Participant: Even in the Christian tradition, the dead body is normally kept in the bed for a while.

Dr. Berzin: In India – mind you, most people aren’t doing Hindu meditation or anything like that – they cremate the body as soon as possible, certainly the same day. I think this has to do with the heat and the decomposition of the body.

Also, if there’s going to be an autopsy, how soon would we want to have the autopsy done? If we’re going to be embalmed, how soon would we want that to be done? All sorts of questions come up. 

Participant: If one of you collapsed here in the room right now, I, especially being a doctor, would want to do heart palpitation or mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. There would be a good chance of reviving you because your brain wouldn’t have stopped functioning.

Dr. Berzin: I think that all of us would certainly want that to be done, especially if we just had a heart attack. 

These are difficult issues, really. They’re difficult even if we have a living will saying that we don’t want that. How would Monica know what our living will was? As a doctor, she would be ethically obligated to try to resuscitate us. 

Does It Matter How the Body Is Disposed Of?

Participant: In Germany, there’s a discussion going on about what to do with the body after the person has died. For example, nowadays, people are sometimes buried in the forest. There’s the usual idea of burying people in a graveyard or the idea of cremating them, but aside from cultural considerations, is there really a difference?

Dr. Berzin: You didn’t mention this, but there’s also the issue of what to do with the ashes if the person has been cremated.

What the Tibetans do with the ashes is to bring one portion to the ocean and one portion to a high mountain. This I found out because I will be doing this with my friend Alan’s ashes, which I have. I’ll be bringing them to India. My teacher told me that what we should do with them is to put a portion in a river that goes to the ocean, if we can’t get to the ocean itself, because that’s auspicious for developing a broad and extensive bodhichitta like the ocean, and to put another portion high on a mountain because that’s auspicious for developing a very lofty understanding of voidness.  

In Tibet, where there isn’t readily available fuel – unless one uses cow or yak dung – they chop up the body and feed it to the vultures. Well, we feed the body to the worms, so there isn’t really that much difference; it’s just that we don’t see it. 

From a Buddhist point of view, it doesn’t make any difference what we do with the body. The body isn’t “me”; the body isn’t the person. But we could think, as a practice of generosity, “I’m going to feed my body to the worms by putting it in the ground.” 

The usual thing that’s done with high lamas is to cremate them in a fire puja type of thing, with a big ritual. Then the ashes are mixed with clay and made into tsa-tsas, these so-called votive tablets. I have no idea what that word really means, but anyway, it’s like a relic that one would have. I have here some clay statues that have some of Serkong Rinpoche’s ashes in them. 

If it’s an especially super, super high lama, the body is embalmed. Some of the Dalai Lamas were embalmed. That was done with Ling Rinpoche, the senior tutor. The body is kept in His Holiness’s residence, which is pretty unusual – although some of the bodies of old Dalai Lamas were kept in the Potala Palace. 

I saw the process done with Ling Rinpoche. He was one of my teachers. I used to translate for him as well. They embedded the body in a certain type of salt. The salt drained out all of the liquid from the body so that the body got very small. Then they encased the body. Actually, it was done in a new way. One of my friends, who is a sculptress, did this. They actually put the body inside a plastic mold that was molded to look like him – which was really weird. It was a smaller version of his body. I don’t think they normally did that. I’m not quite sure what they did to coat the body so that it didn’t decompose. At the end, the salt was given to various disciples and other people so they could have a relic type of thing. 

I had a horrible experience with that. I’d gotten some of this salt because I was one of Ling Rinpoche’s disciples. I had it in a little bag that I carried with me when I went on a trip to the West after that. I remember I entered England, and I had some of this salt inside my attaché case. They randomly check the luggage of various people, and they opened my case up and found these little white crystals of salt. They asked, “What is this?” To which I replied, “This is the embalming salt of the mummy that they made out of my teacher.” Well, you can imagine what followed from that. I had to wait a long time while they did a chemical analysis of the thing. They discovered that it was in fact salt and let me go. 

Most of the people in my family – which was the case with my mother – want to be cremated, basically because they don’t want others to be bothered maintaining a grave in a cemetery. People can remember the person from their memories; they don’t have to go to a grave. Actually, we distributed my mother’s ashes at a waterfall in the town where I grew up and which my mother liked very much. So, that’s a place where we can go and remember her if we need to have a place to remind us of her – which, obviously, is not really necessary.

A wonderful Buddhist thing is to offer one’s body to science – to have it for medical students, for instance. Now, that’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? Am I willing to have my body cut up and perhaps not be treated very respectfully by medical students or to have it given to exhibitions like this World of the Body exhibition and to have different parts of it put in plastic and shown to people so they can see what the body is like? There are various things we can do to make a gift of our bodies. 

That brings us to the end of the class. Next time, we will start the meditations on the worst rebirths – the hell realms and so on.