Awake at the Bedside

The Third Messenger: Death Is Unavoidable

LARRY ROSENBERG

In brief, without being mindful of death, whatever Dharma practices you take up will be merely superficial.

— MILAREPA

We know in our heads that we will die. But we have to know it in our hearts. We have to let this fact penetrate our bones. Then we will know how to live.

To do that, we need to be able to look at the fact of death with steadiness. We can’t just glance at it casually. All of our training in Dharma practice is preparation for such deep seeing. Taking the refuges and ethical precepts, which is a traditional first step; working with the breath — which can be a long process — to develop a calm and concentrated mind; working with sensations, with small fears and progressively larger ones; developing mindfulness in everyday life: All of these steps work together to build a mind that is strong enough to look at the fear of death. Sometimes, before we are able to observe this fear directly, we need to learn how to be with our resistance to it. We are mindful of how much we hate to have fear in the first place.

If you haven’t done this preparatory work, you probably aren’t going to be ready to look at death. There may be a few exceptional individuals who can, who just seem to arrive on the earth with remarkable spiritual maturity or who have perhaps had life experiences that develop that maturity. But most of us need to work at it. We need to develop a mind that is capable of looking at things with some steadiness, so we can stay with them long enough for the message to come through. Communing with fear stimulates an understanding that has liberating power.

Typically, our awareness is sporadic. We might be watching the evening news and hear some tragedy, and we notice a momentary pang or a real feeling of heartsickness. But something else comes on the screen, or we move on to some other activity, and it’s over. That’s the way of the modern world. Short brief bursts of attention.

Our practice is different. The samadhi we develop is not a rigid attention, which shuts things out. The mind that develops samadhi is strong and supple, very much alive. The state we develop is more like tenderness. The heart begins to melt. You see the true sorrow of life and its true beauty. You can’t see one without the other. Practice opens us up to both.

Sometimes when your heart grows tender from practice, a single event touches it in such a way that you are suddenly more awake: You see deeply into the nature of things. Then everything becomes more precious, all of the people and all of the surroundings of your life. Your urge to intensify meditation practice can grow as well.

I don’t mean something narrow by practice, that you quit your job and leave your family to go off and meditate in a cave somewhere. I mean it in a broad sense: You stay awake in everything you do. You make the practice a vital part of your entire life. And when you learn to practice with ordinary events, you are capable of staying with the extraordinary ones. Like the moment of death.

I have learned a great deal from the teachings of Zen Master Suzuki Shosan, a meditator who had also been a samurai and who had even put in some time as a hermit. He had been fiercely trained in combat. His teaching was to use death awareness or, as he put it, “death energy,” to stimulate his practice. When problems came up in his life, he would use death energy to reorchestrate the conditions, and it proved to be a great help.

“If you yourself can die gladly,” he said, “you will have become a Buddha. Buddhahood is to die with an easy mind.” He goes on, with painful honesty: “Because I am a man who does not want to die, I practice in order to be able to die freely. Freely stretching out my neck for the executioner without a thought.”

He is using the executioner as a symbol of death. He means that when the time comes, he hopes to surrender to death gracefully. “I’ve trained myself in various ways,” he says, “and I know the agony of not dying freely. My method is a coward’s Buddhism.” We are all cowards, in that sense. We all need some kind of training.

Some of the deepest learning about death is not formal, of course; it comes about naturally when — for instance — one’s parents die. But you learn from such an event only if you really look at it, as you would in more formal practice. If you’re open to the experience, every person who dies is your teacher.

I feel that my father’s last gift to me was that he taught me I was going to die. I’m not exempt from the law he was subject to. I have had moments in my life when it seemed unthinkable that my father would die, this man who for many years seemed bigger and stronger than I and who I modeled myself on when I was growing up. But he did die, and he’s not coming back. Ashes do not become wood again. Someday I too will be ashes.

Practicing Formally

These thoughts about my father actually begin to move us into more formal death awareness practices. I have used — and taught — a nine-part meditation that has been adapted from the teaching of Atisha (980–1055), the great Indian Buddhist sage. I have modified these contemplations with personal instructions from Tara Tulku Rinpoche and Ajaan Suwat. They are the basis of the death meditations that I teach today.

This practice is divided into three general topics: the inevitability of death, the uncertainty of when we will die, and the fact that nothing but the Dharma can help you at the time of death. Each category includes three contemplations.

In a typical session, it is a good idea to begin with breath awareness, giving the breath exclusive attention until the mind settles down. Once you have reached some calm, you are ready to take up a contemplation like the first one: Everyone must die.

Obviously, this contemplation requires a concentrated mind. There is no fact of human existence that we are more likely to want to escape. We naturally have great aversion to it, and when our capacity to pay attention is limited the true significance of the contemplation does not penetrate to the heart. But in a serene mind, thinking can be sharp and pliable. We can direct our attention with precision and focus, and our reflection can be uninterrupted. It has the powerful support of samadhi, which enables us to stay emotionally engaged and keenly interested.

If we just turn the contemplation over in our mind, the richness of its meaning reveals itself. We stay attentive to our experience as it tells its story and allow the truth of the contemplation to affect us. We experience it not just with our thinking mind but with our entire being. These nine reflections of Atisha are an exercise in yoniso manasikara — careful concentration. Any of these simple verbal statements when attended to in a thorough and sustained way can take us beyond their surface meaning. Probing these statements deeply can help us uncover the workings of the natural law of Dharma in our own bodies and minds.

In a given session, you might give your primary focus to a particular contemplation, then briefly review the other eight to remind yourself of them. You might choose to do one contemplation per day, or perhaps all three within a particular heading. If a given contemplation seems fruitful, you might want to stay with it for a number of days. All of these contemplations get at the same basic truth, and your practice with them need not be rigid. You can use your innate wisdom to decide how best to work with them.

All of this will become clearer as we move into specific examples.

The Inevitability of Death

I. Everyone must die.

The first — and boldest — of these contemplations is that everyone and everything must die. No one escapes this inevitable law. Death is a logical consequence of birth and begins to work on life at the moment of birth. There are no exceptions. Differences in wealth, education, physical strength, fame, moral integrity, even spiritual maturity, are irrelevant. If you don’t want to die, don’t be born.

Buddhaghosha’s Visuddhimagga is of some help here. It suggests that you compare yourself with others of great fame, merit, supernatural powers, deep understanding. The Buddha died. Jesus Christ. Socrates. Great and famous athletes: the strongest men and women in the world, the fastest, those capable of the most extraordinary physical feats.

I often contemplate Krishnamurti in this way. It is helpful if you have actually known the person. He had incredible inner strength and clarity and immense vitality, which I experienced in his presence over a period of many years. He taught until several weeks before he died at the age of ninety. But he did die.

You can also take up ordinary people who have seemed extremely vital and alive. Probably we have all known someone who seemed absolutely irrepressible and unstoppable. That person, too, is subject to death.

Sometimes methods just suggest themselves. One night some years ago I had given a talk on death awareness, so it was on my mind afterward when I went up to my apartment to unwind. I love movies, especially old ones. That night there was a film from 1938 with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, and as a film buff I had heard of everyone involved, the writer, the director, the producer. Suddenly I realized that everyone connected with that movie was dead.

There they were bounding around in the prime of life, wonderfully virile and sensual and attractive. And all of them were dead. The person who got the idea, the person who fleshed it out and wrote the screenplay, the person who wrote the score — everyone who played in the orchestra. Probably even the people who sold the popcorn in the theatres were dead. It was stunning to realize. The movie was so alive, and they were so dead.

The Buddha put it this way [in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta]:

Young and old,

foolish and wise,

rich and poor,

all keep dying.

As a potter’s clay vessels,

large and small,

fired and unfired,

all end up broken,

so too life leads to death.

2. The remainder of our lifespan is decreasing continually.

Our movement toward death is inexorable. It never stops. From the moment we’re born, we are dying. Death comes closer with every tick of the clock. The great Indian master Atisha used the sound of dripping water as a way to practice this contemplation.

We can use a variety of objects. One of the simplest — and best — is the breath itself. We have only a finite number of breaths in our life — it may be a rather large number, of course, and we have no idea what it is — and with each breath we use up another. Every breath brings us closer to death.

This is part of the real depth of breath awareness, the place where it can take us. We start out thinking we’re watching a simple physical function, but the more we do it, the more we realize what a profound phenomenon we’re observing. Each inhalation, after all, is a tiny bit of life; it is bringing air into the lungs, oxygen into the body, and allowing us to live. Each exhalation is a letting go, a releasing. At some point we will exhale and not inhale again. And our life will end.

We can contemplate the breath in exactly that way, releasing each exhalation with no certainty or even expectation that there will be another breath. Especially when we have been sitting for a while, the breath can grow very deep, and there can be a long pause between exhalation and inhalation. It can be a moment that is fraught with anxiety. Sometimes we finally force an inhalation, just to assure ourselves that we will breathe again. But the more we sit, the more we are able to let the process just happen and stay with the moment between breaths, when we are not sure we will breathe again.

Such a practice can sound terrifying. We might be arousing one of our primal fears — the fear that we will not be able to get our breath — which is behind many of our other, smaller fears. And whatever the contemplation calls up — fear, terror, hysteria — that is what we practice with. We stay with it, letting that fear exist alongside the process of the breath itself, and see that it too is an impermanent phenomenon, that it is workable.

Such a fear is very much like physical pain. If we turn away from it or run from it, it looms larger and larger and can become very difficult. But if we stay with it, we see first of all that it isn’t as bad as we might have thought. Then we see that it comes to an end. Our whole relationship to fear — and to breathing — can change in that moment. Seeing impermanence helps us decondition the mind’s strong tendency to grasp and cling.

Sometimes, of course, we sit down expecting fear to come up, expecting some violent reaction, and nothing happens. Or maybe fear arises briefly and doesn’t continue. We keep turning the contemplation over in our minds with no result. That’s all right. We can’t control such things and can never be sure when our emotions will engage. We don’t want to force anything or have the feeling that we’re trying to break through to something. We just want to be present with the experience we are having.

In any case, the second contemplation concerns our steadily decreasing number of days. It is as if we have fallen from a tree in the dark of night. We know we’re going to hit the ground at some point. We just don’t know when. The seventh Dalai Lama expressed it in a poem [“Meditations on the Ways of Impermanence,” translated by Glenn Mullin].

After our birth we have no freedom to remain

even for a minute.

We head towards the embrace of the Lord of Death,

like an athlete running.

We may think that we are among the living, but our life

is the very highway of death.

3. Death will come regardless of whether or not we have made time to practice the Dharma.

This contemplation focuses on the fact that our major reason for contemplating death is to spur us on to practice. I assume in that statement a basic commitment to meditation practice, and I may be assuming too much. I am, after all, a meditation teacher. It may be that another kind of person confronting the harsh reality of death might give up his job and opt for a life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Who knows?

But this contemplation is letting us know that time is precious and we have little of it. We all spend countless hours sleeping, eating, just hanging around. Not that those things aren’t important. But we have to ask ourselves how we want to spend what precious little time we have.

We have all probably asked ourselves: What would I do if I had just one more year to live? It is an interesting question, and we all hope we have more than that, but we definitely have a limited time. How do we want to spend it? To what do we want to devote our lives? It’s a question we need to ask.

As a Dharma teacher, I frequently meet people who are wrestling with this contemplation. “As soon as I get my degree, I’m really going to practice.” “When I finish my novel . . .” “When I close one last business deal . . .” “When my children are grown . . .” Gungtang Rinpoche summed up this mindset well:

I spent twenty years not wanting to practice dharma. I spent the next twenty years thinking that I could practice later on. I spent another twenty years in other activities and regretting the fact that I hadn’t engaged in the dharma practice. This is the story of my empty human life.

What is really needed here is a change in priorities, as well as a change in attitude. Almost all of us have circumstances in our lives that make practice somewhat difficult. And when people make these excuses to me, they are mostly talking about finding more time for daily sitting practice, more time to do all-day sittings and longer retreats. These things are extremely valuable and important. But the real question is: Do we dare to practice, to commit ourselves to practice, right now? The whole of our lives is a wonderful field of practice. Can we use it? The simplified, protected situation of formal sitting practice is invaluable, but can we also practice while we are raising our children, going to school, going to work, writing a novel, even driving a car or going to the bathroom? The mindset that sees certain periods of time as available for practice and others as not is mistaken from the outset. All of us can practice, with everything we do. It is just a question of whether or not we dare to do it.

When people approach practice in that way, when they bring it into their daily lives, what often happens is that they see benefits from it, and their practice catches fire, and suddenly time for sitting practice looks different. When they come to understand that sitting is the real basis of practice, it is amazing how time suddenly shows up for it. It almost happens by itself.

So the first thing people need to face is not a scheduling conflict. It is whether or not they want to give themselves to practice. When students do that, the time shows up by itself.

This contemplation faces that question directly: To what will we give the days of our lives?

The Uncertainty of the Time of Death

4. Human life expectancy is uncertain.

A graveyard is a wonderful place to practice contemplation, especially an old one. Just walk around and look at the headstones and see at what age people died. But sometimes an old graveyard gives us a false sense of security; we think that since the discovery of antibiotics and of various vaccines, because of all of our recent medical advances, things have changed. They have; the average life expectancy is longer. But people still die at all ages. Just read your newspaper. Watch CNN. Talk to your neighbors. You’ll hear all kinds of stories.

This contemplation really just reflects the law of impermanence. A corollary of that law is that change happens in unexpected ways. It would be one thing if all phenomena changed predictably. It might still be difficult, but at least it would have a pattern. But the truth is that life can snatch the rug out from under us. The floor can cave in. So can the roof. And we never know when such an event might happen.

It isn’t just death that is uncertain but also life. We all want permanent things: a permanent partner, a permanent job, a permanent family, house, income, group of friends, place to practice meditation. Permanently good weather. We do everything we can to assure permanence in all of these areas; we spend all of our time trying to assure ourselves, and it never works. Nothing is permanent. We would spend our time much more wisely by contemplating and absorbing the law of impermanence rather than trying to repeal it. If we could learn to live with it, our lives would be much different.

It is like the story of a famous sage who was asked where all his wisdom came from. He replied, “I live as a man who, when he wakes up in the morning, does not know if he will be alive when the day ends.” His questioners were puzzled. “Isn’t that true of everybody?” they asked. “It is,” he said, “but few people live that way.”

The law of impermanence is not good news or bad news. It isn’t even news. It is just a fact, the most obvious fact in the universe. But we live as if it weren’t true, or as if it allowed exceptions. Impermanence is like the law of gravity, which operates on us whether we like it or not.

Again, the seventh Dalai Lama wrote a poem on this subject, about men going into battle.

Spirits were high with expectations this morning,

As the men discussed subduing the enemies and protecting the land.

Now, with night’s coming, birds and dogs chew their corpses.

Who believed that they themselves would die today?

While I was giving the talks on which this is based, an American Zen master I knew fell over dead of a heart attack in the middle of an interview. He was in his early fifties. My writing partner decided not to move but to renovate his present house largely because he loved his neighbors; in the middle of the renovations, everyone’s favorite neighbor — the man they called the mayor of the street — was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and within a month he was dead.

Everyone has stories like these. Just look at today’s obituaries. Many of these people were elderly; many had been ill. But how many really expected they would die when they did? We hear of such things happening to other people and think it will never happen to us, but chances are that they will, one way or another. It is often true that when death finally comes, it is not expected.

5. There are many causes of death.

It seems to be a peculiarly modern problem that we think we can find a cure for everything, solve any problem. We licked polio; we eliminated smallpox; we don’t have thousands in sanitariums with TB anymore; and now we want to cure everything else. We put tremendous time and energy into seeking cures for AIDS and for various kinds of cancer, and of course these are worthy projects. But we can get into the mindset where we think we’re going to cure everything. We’re going to eliminate death.

The fact is that we eliminate one thing and another comes up. We no longer die of consumption, but now there’s AIDS. We do much better fighting some forms of cancer, but with others — despite all kinds of sophisticated treatment — we are not successful. Remissions occur, but then the cancer comes back. And we need to remember also that in large parts of the world many diseases haven’t been eliminated at all. People still die from things that killed us in this country eighty or a hundred years ago but no longer do. Malaria, for instance, is still the number one killer in the world.

And that is just illness. It says nothing of war, famine, murder, suicide, car accidents, accidents of other kinds, hurricanes, avalanches, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, and drownings. We could go on and on. If we find a way to eliminate all the illnesses we currently face, others will arise, because the earth can support only so many people, and it will take care of itself. And sooner or later the earth itself will die. It is an impermanent phenomenon like any other, with a beginning, middle and end.

To be alive, then, is to be subject to any number of causes and conditions, some of which come upon us unexpectedly and have unexpected results. To feel protected from these things is to be living in a fool’s paradise. We have just been temporarily spared.

As Nagarjuna said [in Jeffrey Hopkins’s translation], “We maintain our life in the midst of thousands of conditions that threaten death. Our life force abides like a candle flame in the breeze. The candle flame of our life is easily extinguished by the winds of death that blow from all directions.”

At about this point in the contemplations, we begin to feel that the whole thing is senseless, that these contemplations are the concoction of a wicked and morbid imagination and that if we listen to them anymore we’ll be too depressed even to live. So it is good to pause here with a word of warning: Of course this view of things is morbid and depressing, overwhelming when presented all at once, and of course there are many wonderful things in life. The fact that life is impermanent and uncertain does not mean that it is worthless. Seen correctly, these facts make life more precious. They show us that every moment is a gift.

The point of these contemplations is to correct an imbalance. We all live, too often, as if these facts of life don’t exist. These contemplations on death are intended to wake us up. They awaken us ultimately to the joy and beauty of a life free of craving and grasping, a life where we see through the illusion of being young and healthy forever and drop it.

6. The human body is fragile.

I had an uncle who died at the age of twenty-two. He was slicing vegetables with a rusty knife and accidently cut himself. Within a few days he was dead.

A son of President Warren Harding apparently died because he neglected a blister and got blood poisoning. In North Carolina this summer, a huge hulking football player in wonderful physical condition — a star of the team and president of the senior class — got overheated during practice despite many precautions by his coaches. His body temperature went up to 107 degrees and the medical emergency workers couldn’t get it down. He died soon after he got to the hospital.

So on the one hand the human body is enormously resilient. We have all heard stories of people who endure tremendous hardships during wars or natural diseases, or who are old and sick and seem to hang on forever. On the other hand, the body is terribly vulnerable. A microbe can kill it. A hard blow to a fragile organ can. A cut to a key artery can. Death can come quickly.

The import of all three of the contemplations in this category is the same. It isn’t to scare us, though fear may come up. It isn’t just to make us more careful, though it may help us take our days less for granted. The point is that we all tend to see life following a certain pattern. We imagine youth, a long period of childhood, and a serene old age, at the end of which we peacefully expire.

That is just an idea. It is an image. Death isn’t waiting for us at the end of a long road; it is with us every minute. Our lives are impermanent and fragile, our fate uncertain. The intention of these contemplations is to make that fact vivid, to call it up before us and make us see things as they really are. Whichever contemplation does that best is the one to use.

Only the Practice of Dharma Can Help Us at the Time of Death

7. Our wealth cannot help us.

The last set of contemplations is an extremely rich one for Dharma practitioners. It is in some ways a minute examination of the fourth contemplation from our earlier group: “I will grow different, separate from all that is dear and appealing to me.” It can be an extremely effective, if difficult, set of exercises.

What I would encourage you to do is actually picture yourself on your deathbed. Settle into a period of meditation, establish some samadhi, then do visualization. Imagine yourself in your room, with a clear mind, waiting for the moment of death. Imagine what you might be thinking and feeling.

Wealth is a kind of shorthand in this first contemplation. Few of us think of ourselves as wealthy (though the fact is that, compared with most people from the past and in the rest of the world, we live in almost unimaginable luxury), but we all have things, we probably all have some cherished things, and we might have spent a lifetime working to accumulate them. Our book collection. Our record or CD collection. A beloved musical instrument. Our car. Our clothes. Our house. Think of all we have done to acquire the objects, especially those that we craved for a long time.

I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with such possessions. But none of them can help you at the moment of death. Pick up your favorite book, your musical instrument, your suit or dress. Your statue of the Buddha. You will have to give them all up and will never see or touch any of them again. Those objects can’t ward off death or make the experience more manageable.

If that is the true reality of life and death, and if Dharma practice could be of some help to you — as it is certainly my feeling that it could — wouldn’t it have been better to give more of your time to practice and less to accumulating objects that are going to turn to dust in your hands?

Tara Tulku Rinpoche pointed out to me that Americans — who pride themselves on being shrewd, hard-nosed businessmen — are actually bad businessmen. They’re not watching the true bottom line at all. They are putting all of their energy into something ephemeral and ultimately unfulfilling. Even your good name, your spotless reputation, all your accumulated learning, your prizes and awards, your tenured position will not accompany you where you’re going now. Why did you spend so much time earning them?

One can’t help thinking of the wealthy young man in the Bible who approached Jesus. He asked what he could do to find eternal life. And Jesus — clearly seeing what was holding this particular person back — said, “Give up all that you have and follow me.” The young man walked sorrowfully away. He couldn’t bring himself to do that. But sooner or later we will all have to do it. It is just a matter of time. We are clinging to things that cannot last.

Krishnamurti delivered this message quite clearly. The reason that death is so hard for you is that your life has been about attachment and accumulation. “Do you want to know how to die?” he said. “Think of the thing you treasure the most and drop it. That is death.”

Avoid works of little consequence;

And seek the path to spiritual joy,

The things of this life quickly fade;

Cultivate that which benefits eternally.

— Dul Zhug Ling

8. Our loved ones cannot help.

This contemplation is the most difficult one for many people. We can see that our book collection, our music, our good reputation and our titles, our position in the community, all might have some ego in them. It might be that our devotion to them is slightly misguided. But we think our human relationships are not tainted in that way. Our relationship to our spouse or partner. Our parents. Our children. Brothers and sisters. Close friends. Our spiritual teachers. We believe we have some relationships that have a certain purity to them.

That may be true. But it is also true that our friends cannot help us when we die. They may be there (and they may not; we don’t know how that will go). They may comfort us. But in the end we have to say goodbye to them and not see them again. We have to die alone. As Shantideva said [in Stephen Batchelor’s translation]:

While I am lying in bed, although surrounded by all my friends and relatives, the feeling of my life being severed will be experienced by me alone. When I am seized by the messengers of the Lord of Death, what benefits will my friends afford? What help can my relatives be? At that time the sole thing that will provide me with a safe direction will be the degree of purity in my mind-stream. But have I ever really committed myself wholeheartedly to such cultivation?

I don’t know of any visualization that can make the truth of death more real to me. Picture lying in your deathbed. Imagine the person you love most in the world coming to your side. Then imagine saying goodbye to that person forever.

That is the reality of death. For most people, it is the most difficult part.

It is only natural to turn to those we love at the time of death. But despite our close bond with those people, we must finally be alone. Strong attachments only make matters worse; our departure will be marked with torment. Grasping and peace don’t go together. We come into the world alone and must leave it alone.

9. Our own body cannot help.

We are really getting close to home. We have just said goodbye to the person who is nearest and dearest to us. Now we must say goodbye to our body.

Throughout our lives our body has been our closest companion. At times it has seemed to be who we are. We have spent hours washing and cleaning and clipping and oiling and combing and brushing, taking care of our body in all kinds of ways. We have fed it and rested it. We might have had differing attitudes toward it, sometimes loving it and sometimes hating it. But now this closest companion, who has gone through everything with us, will no longer be here. It will no longer take in oxygen. It will not circulate blood. This body that for so many years was so full of vitality will be lifeless. It will be a corpse.

The first Panchen Lama says it well: “The body that we have cherished for so long cheats us at the time when we need it most.”

It is also true that this is not the last change that it will undergo. As a physical phenomenon the dead body, if not cremated, will decompose, and it is common in Buddhist practice to consider the stages of change and decay in order to bring the reality of death home.

Buddhist monks sometimes actually visit the charnel grounds to contemplate these other forms, to see our final fate, and there is a whole series of charnel ground meditations as well. The Mahasatipatthana Sutra, the Buddha’s main teaching on what to be mindful of in meditation, offers some guidelines as to how to practice with dead bodies at various stages of decomposition. For our purposes, visualization of these stages is more practical.

As with earlier contemplations, we first calm the mind with breath awareness; then through words and visualizations we create each stage and contemplate it. It is important to make a connection between the image and our own body. One traditional formulation is “Truly, my body is of the same nature as the body being visualized. It won’t go beyond this nature. It is of the same lawfulness.” Our bodies don’t belong to us but to nature. And nothing in nature has a stable form.

Reflecting in this way helps us come to terms with the nature of the body. We view it with wisdom, see that it can’t be any other way. If fear or resistance comes up, we see that too with nonjudgmental awareness, watching it arise and pass away.

Ajaan Suwat taught me a version of this practice that I found extremely helpful. In his approach, you would start out by visualizing an inner organ of the body that you can easily picture, then watch what happens to it after death as the body goes through its stages of decomposition. When you reach the ninth contemplation (listed below) — when everything is ashes and dust — visualize it re-forming to its starting point. Finally — and I found this crucial — focus on the mind that is aware of all this. See that it is completely separate. This understanding keeps the charnel ground contemplation from becoming overwhelmingly depressing.

Both of my parents instructed me to have them cremated when they died. My father died first, and I placed his picture and the urn with his ashes on the home altar where I meditate each day. In addition to my daily Vipassana practice, I would find some time in most sittings to look at his picture and remind myself that the urn contains all that was left of his body and that I was not exempt from the same process. Such reflections sometimes aroused a powerful sense of how unstable my body is.

As I write these words, my mother’s ashes now rest in an urn on the same altar. I am carrying out the same practice with her, and it is proving to be equally rich. Such teaching is the last gift that my extraordinarily generous parents were able to give me.

Charnel Ground Meditations from the Mahasatipatthana Sutra [adapted from U Silananda’s The Four Foundations of Mindfulness]

1. I see my body, dead for a few days, bloated, blue, festering.

2. I see my dead body infested with worms and flies.

3. I see that all that is left of my body is a skeleton with some flesh and blood still clinging to it.

4. I further consider my skeletal corpse without any flesh, yet still spotted with blood and held together with tendons.

5. All that is left of my dead body is a skeleton with no blood stains, held together by tendons.

6. I see that now all that is left is a collection of scattered bones. The bones of the feet have gone one way, the bones of the hand another. The thigh bones, pelvis, spinal vertebrae, jaw, teeth, and skull have all come apart in different directions. They are all now just bare bones.

7. All that is left is a collection of bleached bones.

8. A year passes and I see that my dead body is reduced to being a pile of old bones.

9. These bones decay and become dust; blown apart and scattered by the wind, they cannot even be called bones anymore.

As with many deep truths, people tend to look at the death awareness meditations and say, “Yes, I know all of that. I know I’m going to die someday. I know I can’t take it with me. I know my body will be dust.”

And as with other things — as with the law of impermanence itself — I would say we know it and we don’t know it. We know it in our heads but we haven’t taken it into our hearts. We haven’t let it penetrate the marrow of our bones. If we had, I can’t help thinking we would live differently. Our whole lives would be different. The planet would be different as well.

If we really faced our fear of death — and these contemplations will bring it up again and again — our lives would ultimately be lighter and more joyful. I don’t propose death awareness to depress us. It enhances our ability to live more fully.

If we understood the reality of death, we would treat each other differently. Carlos Castaneda was once asked how we could make our lives more spiritual, and he said: “Just remember that everyone you encounter today, everyone you see, will someday die.” He’s right. That knowledge changes our whole relationship to people.

During death awareness practice groups that I’ve led in Cambridge, I have asked people to leave the building after lunch, to walk around town, and to know that everyone they see will die; everyone is their brother or sister in death. It is a wonderful thing to do, especially after a period of death awareness meditation. It gives you a whole new attitude toward people you encounter.

Finally, life is a great teacher and death is a great teacher. Death is all around us, everywhere. For the most part — following the lead of our culture — we avoid it. But if we do open our hearts to this fact of our lives, it can be a great help to us. It can teach us how to live.