The two certain things in life are, famously, death and taxes. If you are rich enough, you may be able to mitigate your tax liability, but death cannot be bought off. How do Buddhists handle it? Episode includes the Prayer for Rebirth in Dewachen. Words or phrases you might want to look up: Pashupatinath Naropa Tilopa Dewachen Amitabha Dzogchen Link to that file: Link to the Dewachen Prayer (pdf) Burning ghats at Pashupatinath #Buddhism #Vajrayana #Tibet #DoubleDorje #death
Full Episode
Hello everybody, including those who are listening regularly and those who've just stumbled across this podcast. Please feel truly welcome to the Double Doge. I'm Alex Wilding and in this episode I'm going to talk a little bit about death and what Buddhists do about it.
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Now, first things first. There are two obvious sides to teachings about death. Firstly, there is the question of how we should think about, prepare for and ultimately handle our own death. Secondly, the question of what we do when somebody close to us dies. Preparing for our own death is a major issue in Buddhist teaching.
In Christian thinking, and I believe in other Abrahamic religions, once one is dead, there is nothing left to do but to hope for some kind of resurrection in the future. What happens then will have been determined by things in our life, but death is the ultimate bottom line.
The Buddhist view is rather different and suggests that the way we think about death, the way we react to it, our motivation and intention continue to operate and influence where we go next. Of course, the thoughts that we've habitually cultivated in this life will have a very strong effect, forming our mental states after we've left our bodies.
And there are many teachings and practices designed to help during that drastic phase. But as I like to emphasise, I'm not here to be your Buddhist teacher, but rather just to be a fellow traveller with a little bit of experience. So I shan't be looking at those things very much. When somebody close to us dies, it is, of course, a time of considerable sadness and grief.
It's not my intention in this episode to touch on any of the themes that you might call grief-cancelling. I just want to look at some practical things that might make your dealings with this in the Tibetan Buddhist context go a bit more smoothly. You may, for example, hear of a practice known as Powa, meaning transference.
The term actually refers to all sorts of ways involving gentle and subtle meditations as much as forceful techniques for ejecting our consciousness out of the top of our head. Talking about any of these things would be above my pay grade.
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