The Six Shortcomings of Not Being Mindful of Death (continued)
We have been going through the meditations for becoming aware of death. These start with recognizing and thinking about the shortcomings of not being mindful of death. We’ve covered the first three shortcomings: (1)We will not be mindful of the Dharma, the preventive measures. In other words, we’ll think only of this life and not about taking any preventive measures for the future. (2) Even if we are mindful of them, we will not put them into practice. So, we will procrastinate and put off practicing the preventive measures until later and later. (3) Even if we do practice, we will not do so purely.
We saw that in order to practice the Dharma purely, we need to overcome our immature or childish attitudes toward the eight transitory things in life, feeling all excited about the first of each pair and feeling all depressed about the second:
- Receiving things; not receiving things
- Things going well; things going poorly
- Hearing good news; hearing bad news
- Being praised; being criticized or abused
In other words, we need to develop equanimity. We then went through the ten gem-like innermost attitudes from the Kadam tradition that help us to develop that equanimity.
(4) We Will Lose Our Determination to Practice Earnestly at All Times
The next disadvantage or shortcoming of not being mindful of death is that we’ll lose our determination to practice earnestly at all times. In other words, we won’t practice all the time, only some of the time. The account that’s usually given here is of the great Kadam Geshe, called Karakpa, who always ripped his robes on a thorn bush outside of his meditation hut. He never took time out to cut down the bush because he felt that death could come at any instant. Why waste time cutting down this bush?
Wasting Time on Things That Do Not Ultimately Matter
This brings up the issue of how we make use of our time. Does death awareness help us not to be attached to things that, in the end, don’t make terribly much difference? We have to think about that. What things don’t really make a difference in our lives? Do we not spend time on having a nice place to live – decorating our homes, cleaning up, and so on? Do we ignore all of these things? What sorts of limits do we set? Any ideas? Does it really make much difference if we get a new piece of furniture, change the color of our curtains, get new plates, or buy more clothes?
Participant: We should have things clean and tidy. Tidying up kind of settles my mind.
Dr. Berzin: Actually, part of the preliminary practices we do each day is to dust and sweep the meditation room and to make everything neat and clean. So, from the point of view of inviting the Buddhas and bodhisattvas into our visualizations and showing them respect, we would want the place to be nice. It’s also a way of showing respect for what we’re doing. Additionally, if the environment around us is neat and clean, our minds tend to be more orderly. I think we can extend this not just to the place of meditation but to the whole environment in which we live – our homes, etc. If everything is chaotic, our states of mind will often be chaotic as well. But then the question is, how much effort should we put into that?
Participant: I guess this is very much related to simplifying your life. If you have a huge house with many rooms and a lot of stuff, keeping things clean is going to take a tremendous amount of time.
Dr. Berzin: That’s true. This gets into the whole topic of being satisfied with leading a simple life. It’s not necessary to have a lot of elaborate things or to constantly get new things just for the sake of getting new things.
I think this is the point here: if we are mindful of death and of the fact that it can come at any time, what’s the point? It is nice to have a nice environment around you, that’s true. At the same time, I think we have to set certain limits and determine what is and what isn’t going to be conducive for our work and meditation. Certainly, if we were living in a meditation hut, we wouldn’t need very much. But what about our homes – what limits do we set? This is something to think about and to reflect on while being mindful of death. Do we think that we’re going to live forever and therefore spend a lot of time taking care of so many things that, in the end, are actually very trivial?
Let’s think about that for about five minutes.
[meditation]
I think the issue here is about not wasting time on things that ultimately don’t make much difference. This is just my own thinking. If something can be easily done and not take a great deal of time to make life a little bit easier, then OK. But if it’s going to take a great deal of effort and time and ultimately not make any difference, what’s the point? Thinking about death in this type of situation is very, very helpful.
I think of the things in my house that need fixing. Well, I certainly am not going to spend a great deal of time fixing them if they still work. If I have a student or a friend who can fix them easily and they offer to help, fine. But, in the end, does it really make very much difference? I think of my desk, for example. It would be very nice to have a new desk. It’s a very, very old desk, and the top had become terribly scratched. I covered the desk with some contact paper, and that had become all ripped and torn. Everybody was saying I should get a new desk. But I couldn’t really be bothered, because what difference does it make? The solution, in the end, was just to put more contact paper on top of the desk. It took very, very little time to fix. Ultimately, it doesn’t make any difference as long as the desk is functional. So, it’s like that.
Or I think of my home in India. It was very, very simple. It had no water and no toilet. I had to collect water in buckets when it was available, which was not very often. But it was fine, and I couldn’t see really putting all the effort into trying to get something different or make something different. I lived like that for twenty-nine years. So, as long as things were functional, to me they seemed okay.
As I say, I think this whole issue comes down to not wanting to waste time on things that don’t make any difference in the face of death. What do you think?
Participant: I think you don’t care so much about flowers and things like that, but I find flowers very uplifting, so I spend a lot of time watering the flowers on my balcony. It really soothes my mind. It gets me away from my work, gets me in another space, and it gives joy. So, you can’t really say it’s unnecessary to have these flowers.
Dr. Berzin: I think that the point is not to go to extremes. There’s a difference between having a small garden that doesn’t take so much time to take care of and having a very elaborate one that takes a tremendous amount of time. So, it’s about setting certain limits. We certainly do need things that will help us to relax.
Participant: Also, they can uplift the mind.
Dr. Berzin: But how many flowers do you need to uplift the mind is the question. It’s the same question as how much food do you need to eat in order to enjoy it.
Participant: To stay balanced, I need to spend time doing useless things, like sports or other things that nobody needs to do. Those things somehow satisfy me and keep me balanced. They are also like some sort of meditation for me.
Dr. Berzin: Well, playing sports isn’t completely useless because it’s good for your health.
I think that the attitude that we have is important – for example, making dedication before eating food. I think it was Nagarjuna who had said in one of his works, “I eat this food not out of attachment, not out of greed. I eat it as a medicine to sustain me in order to be able to practice more.” We could look at tending a garden in a similar way.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama has a garden, and he likes to tend it. He finds that relaxing. Or doing sports – I go to a fitness club. Whatever we might do, if we do it with the idea that it is to inspire us, regenerate us, and so on, so that we can continue working to achieve our goals – which, ultimately, means working toward enlightenment – then I think that’s OK.
Participant: Or watching TV.
Dr. Berzin: It’s OK to watch TV or a movie if it’s done for relaxation. I’ll take myself as an example. I often watch a DVD at night, but that’s after working ten or more hours a day on the website.
Participant: But in this way, you can rationalize anything that you want to do – like, for me, playing guitar for hours and hours a day.
Dr. Berzin: That’s the whole point, I think. When is the rationale just an excuse for laziness, and when is it a sincere justification for something necessary, like regenerating ourselves? I think it’s not always so easy to discern. I confess that I watch more DVDs than I need to, and they’re usually quite stupid. At least I’m starting to develop some sense in that if it’s stupid, I turn it off and don’t watch the whole thing.
But this all has to do with death meditation. So, how aware are we of death? Like my friend Alan – he suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. There was absolutely no warning beforehand. If we’ve spent so much time doing something that was quite useless, we would feel that we had really wasted our time, wasted this opportunity. So, it’s a matter, I think, on the one hand, of not being a fanatic and, to use the English colloquial, “burning ourselves out,” and, on the other hand, not being lazy and just indulging in things that are quite useless.
Participant: Also, I think it’s trying to be really honest about our motivation during the day and not going to the extreme of feeling guilty when we take a little bit of time off.
Dr. Berzin: Right. But as I say, with the death meditation and awareness of death, we realize – to go back to this Zen koan that I like so much – “Death can come at any time; relax.” That means knowing when to take a break. But it also means not taking a break all the time or putting time and effort into things that don’t ultimately matter, like fixing this or that when it still works or spending a lot of time going from store to store looking for shoes or whatever.
Participant: Or to save one percent on the price.
Dr. Berzin: Exactly, to save one percent of the price when it really doesn’t make any difference. And to save that one percent, you spent five hours shopping when you could have done the whole task in fifteen minutes. This, I think, is a very good example. I think this is what it’s talking about. If we think in terms of death and death meditation, it becomes even more significant.
OK, let’s go on.
(5) By Our Destructive Actions, We Will Disable Ourselves from Gaining Liberation
The fifth shortcoming: By our destructive actions, we will disable ourselves from gaining nirvana, release from samsara. This has to do with developing strong attachment to friends, hostility toward enemies, causing trouble, filing legal suits against others, and so forth. If we remain mindful that death must come to everyone, we’ll realize there’s never any reason to fight, hurt, or be possessively attached to anyone.
Wasting Time Engaging in Destructive Relationships with Others
This is similar to the shortcoming we just had, but instead of busywork and possessions, this is talking about our relations with others. Does it really matter if we get even with somebody who has hurt us or to get so attached to somebody that we’re driven to a very disturbed state of mind? Causing trouble – why cause trouble if you think that death can come at any time?
For example, in previous years, the street I live on was so noisy in the summer that I had to move into the kitchen to sleep. Again, why cause trouble? It just gets me aggravated. It wastes time to try to get the restaurant downstairs not to have people eating outside late at night. It’s pointless.
There are many reasons for operating in this mode of “there’s no point in causing trouble.” Obviously, the deepest one has to do with the lack of inherent existence of the person who’s getting angry and the one we’re getting angry at – so, voidness meditation. But death meditation is the point here. I’m going to die, and this other person is going to die, so what’s the point of making a big fuss? For example, somebody takes our parking place. What difference does it make? We find another parking place. Whatever it is that they do, the point is not to waste time. OK?
Let’s think about this one. How aware are we of death? Wouldn’t it be helpful to be aware of death in order to realize that causing trouble for others or becoming overly attached and involved with them just keeps us away from any practice and is a total waste of time?
[meditation]
If we’re not aware of death, we think that we have all the time in the world to get involved in various things and that there will be time for Dharma practice later on.
I’m thinking of the example of being single and having a Dharma practice. How does going out to bars or cruising around and so on trying to find somebody to have a relationship with fit with that?
Participant: I think we need some sort of balance in life. We are lay practitioners, and that requires us to use everyday life for our practice. So, even having a relationship and all this gives us an opportunity to practice. Staying single and not going to bars or whatever just because we don’t want to get distracted might create big obstacles for us. So, I think that it’s a very personal thing.
Dr. Berzin: I think my point is about how much effort we want to put into looking for a relationship. If we meet somebody and a relationship develops, that’s one thing.
Obviously, this type of thing is an individual matter, and a lot will depend on one’s age. There are people who have been married, have raised families, and whose partners have died or have gotten a divorce. A lot of them think, “Do I really want to go out and find somebody else at this point in my life?” At that point, death awareness tends to have more of a role. But what about when we’re young?
I look at my own situation. I had two opportunities to get married or to stay in a long-term relationship. But that would have meant living in the West and not going to India and staying in India, which would have meant giving up an aspect of my life that was very, very important to me. So, I said no. I went to India, and I stayed in India. But maybe I’m not a typical example. Also, I had the opportunity to become a university professor. I said no, no thank you. Now, was I aware at that time of death meditation? Perhaps not, but I didn’t want to waste my life – what I considered wasting my life – staying in that academic environment when I had the opportunity to use the precious life that I had to study with the Tibetans in India. So, I made those choices. Maybe those aren’t the choices everybody would have made. Probably not. But if we’re talking about death meditation and the precious human life, I think that we need to have a general idea of what we want to do with our lives. What am I going to use this precious human life for, and what are my priorities?
Participant: I see this issue as being like doing sports: you try to raise the level of how much you can take little by little. Realistically, when it comes to the Dharma, you will, in the end, have to devote all your efforts – your whole life – to the Dharma by becoming a monk or a nun and leading a very simple life. So, you would try to go in this bit by bit.
Dr. Berzin: That’s very good. So, stepping stones. This is the direction that we are going in. We’re not quite ready for a certain level yet; nonetheless, we try to take some steps in that direction and to simplify our lives. Also, we try to stay aware of death, realizing that the opportunities that we have are not going to last. Teachers might not always be available. We might die before we get to do that long retreat – whatever.
Participant: A friend of mine did a lot of Dharma practice before she had a child. She said that since she’s had the child, she can’t do longer retreats. On the other hand, looking after the child has meant she has had to train so much in patience. So, if we are trying to practice all the time, we can find the opportunities to do so wherever we are.
Dr. Berzin: Yes. That’s a very good example. Certainly, raising children is a very worthwhile activity and can really help us to develop. But remember, this shortcoming is not just talking about attachment. It’s also talking about spending time engaging in hostile relationships – for instance, suing somebody because they insulted us, banged into our car, or whatever. If we are thinking in terms of death, would we think it worthwhile to spend the amount of time, effort, and money that’s involved in suing somebody? Or would we just want, as the English expression goes, to “cut our losses,” give the victory to the other, and go on with our lives?
Somebody once borrowed quite a lot of money from me and didn’t pay it back. They ran away with it. Then I had to make the decision, “Am I going to spend a tremendous amount of time trying to get that money back and being angry and all of that, or am I just going to say, ‘Forget it’?”
Participant: Also, you can’t underestimate how much energy it costs you to hold on to this kind of thing for a long time.
Dr. Berzin: Yes. It’s very, very damaging to everything. So, we just say, “It’s not worth it. Death can come at any time. I don’t want to spend all my time trying to get that money back when, in the end, it doesn’t make that huge a difference in my life.” Obviously, if we’re left with absolutely nothing, we might try to get it back. But, then, again, how much effort do we want to put into it? How much distraction are we willing to accept?
(6) We Will Die with Regrets
The last point is that at the time of death, we will die with regrets. This is a very important point. How would we feel if we were to die right now? Would we die regretting that we’ve wasted our opportunities? That’s a very sobering thought, so let’s think about it for a little while.
Looking back on my life, how do I feel? Do I have regrets? Have I used my time well, or have I wasted a great deal of my time and the opportunities I’ve had?
[meditation]
As we’ve mentioned several times in the previous classes, all of these death meditations are based on having some conviction that there is rebirth – that our mental continuums will go on; appreciating that we have a precious human rebirths now but that our future rebirths could be much, much worse; and recognizing that practicing the Dharma is a way to avoid such worse rebirths. So, we’re thinking in terms of future lives and taking some preventive measures to avoid things getting worse in future lives. If we were not to use the opportunities we now have, we would die with tremendous regrets, wouldn’t we? Obviously, there is no guarantee that, unless we are super practitioners, we will continue to have precious human rebirths. Still, we can take a great many steps to increase the probability.
Questions
Participant: I really can’t think about doing death meditation right now. I think it was in the last class that you said that we shouldn’t aim for spiritual attainments in this lifetime. So, karmic results will be mixed.
Dr. Berzin: I didn’t say that we shouldn’t aim for spiritual results in this lifetime. I said we shouldn’t expect them. We aim to achieve enlightenment as soon as possible, even in this lifetime. But chances are it’s not going to happen. If we are super, super practitioners like Milarepa – sure, then it’s possible. But most of us aren’t like Milarepa.
Do We Still Have Concentration at the Time of Death?
Participant: We realize that, at the moment of death, we lose everything. There’s nothing we can hold onto, nothing we can take with us. One thing that came to my mind was that having meditative concentration, for example, might help face the moment of death. But the question is, is concentration still there when we die?
Dr. Berzin: If we lose everything at the time of death, do we also lose concentration? Do we lose bodhichitta? Do we lose all these things? That’s complicated.
Technically speaking, clear light mind, the subtlest level of mind, has good qualities. It is free of disturbing emotions. It’s free of unawareness, or ignorance and its constant habits, so it doesn’t make appearances of true existence or believe in those appearances. But it can have compassion as well as discriminating awareness of voidness since both of these can accompany a non-conceptual level of mind. It can have bodhichitta when we are a Buddha, because only a Buddha has non-conceptual bodhihchitta. Before becoming a Buddha, bodhichitta is conceptual, so the clear light level could only be held by the force of bodhichitta, and not accompanied by it. At such a time, conceptual bodhichitta becomes a tendency as an imputation on the clear light mind.
But the clear-light mind could certainly be accompanied by the discriminating awareness of voidness. That’s the whole aim: to have bodhichitta with a correct understanding of voidness, and that’s the way it could occur before we are Buddhas. All the good qualities that could accompany the clear light mind would need to be able to still occur when the mind no longer makes appearances of truly established existence. So, you certainly would have perfect concentration with such a non-conceptual state of mind. There’s no distraction with the clear light mind, so you would have concentration.
Participant: Would you have that concentration only at the particular moment of the clear light state of mind, or would you have it in general – say, in the bardo?
Dr. Berzin: You don’t have clear light mind in the bardo. In the bardo, you could have all sorts of disturbing emotions.
Our Strongest Habits Will Surface as We Die and Be Prominent in the Bardo
Participant: What karmic ripenings do we experience during and after death?
Dr. Berzin: Any strong positive habits we’ve built up will surface as we die. They will be prominent as we are dying, but will be dormant at the actual moment of the clear light of death. They certainly will be prominent in the bardo and will help to shape our future lives. It’s just as with dreaming. In our dreams, we could be killing people, we could be meditating and helping people, we could be meeting our teachers and studying with them, we could be doing meditation practices, and so on. It all depends on how strong the positive habits we’ve built up are.
Now, the problem is if we have dementia. I think of my mother who went through a very long period of Alzheimer’s disease before she died. She couldn’t even remember how to lie down when you put her on a bed. In that type of situation, do we forget everything? Do we forget the Dharma? In a sense, I think we do. But what’s interesting with Alzheimer’s, for instance, is that the strongest personality feature that one has stays the longest.
My mother was an incredibly kind woman. That’s something that stayed with her at the end. If you brought her something like ice cream – she liked ice cream – she wouldn’t eat it unless we first shared it with the other people who were there in the room. Also, she also liked to walk around with the nurses as they went to the various patients, just in case she could be helpful – not that she knew how to do anything, but this was her strong instinct.
So, I think this is what we’re talking about: the strong instincts that we’ve built up and take with us.
Participant: Would we take them into the bardo?
Dr. Berzin: Into the bardo and into future lives. They would also come up as we’re dying.
This is why His Holiness says that, although all the very elaborate tantric visualizations and practices we may do while we’re alive are very, very beneficial, they’re too complicated for most of us to practice at the time of death. At the time of death, we would get very confused. We would wonder, “Am I doing it correctly? How does this visualization go?” etc. It’s much better at the time of death just to keep focused on bodhichitta: “May I continue to work toward enlightenment to benefit all beings. May I continue to have the opportunities of a precious human rebirth and be the foremost disciple of the foremost gurus so as to be able to continue toward enlightenment and to help others.” That’s the thought to die with. It’s much easier to stay focused on. If we have done all these tantra visualizations during our lifetimes, they will appear again in the bardo. So, it’s like that.
Participant: At the time of death, I think you have to find a balance between regretting and rejoicing.
Dr. Berzin: Well, it’s not that we want to regret. That isn’t the point of the meditation. The point is to realize that if we haven’t stayed mindful of death and taken advantage of the opportunities that we have had, we will die with regrets. Do we have regrets now? Yes. If we look at our lives, most of us will regret certain things that we’ve done as having been a tremendous waste of time and a waste of this precious human rebirth. We’re not just referring here to bad decisions that we’ve made. It’s just in general – “Have I wasted this opportunity.” That would be something that we would regret. But the point is also to see whether we’ve taken advantage of the opportunities we’ve had. If we have, then we rejoice in that. And certainly, we can rejoice in what we did in previous lives that enabled us to have the precious human rebirths that we have now.
Participant: Also, it’s important to think every evening of the negative things we regret having done.
Dr. Berzin: Right. We regret them and make a determination to try not to repeat them. Then, thinking of the positive things that we’ve done, we rejoice. That’s certainly part of the daily practice.
Participant: But at the time of death, regretting is really stupid.
Dr. Berzin: Right. It doesn’t help.
Participant: But regretting would just come automatically.
Dr. Berzin: This last point is saying that we don’t want to die in a state of regret, thinking, “I blew it,” as we say in English, “I didn’t use the opportunity that I had, and now it’s lost.” It’s saying we want to avoid that.
Participant: In a Christian context, when they pass away they say, “Oh yeah, I’ve done really bad things in this life.”
Dr. Berzin: Well, there is the Christian practice of confession before one dies.
Participant: I think that confession can be very helpful, but by itself, it certainly doesn’t fully eliminate the negative consequences of our misdeeds.
Dr. Berzin: We wouldn’t want to have thoughts of the negative things we’ve done as our dying thoughts. But, certainly, beforehand, we could think, “I regret all the negative things that I’ve done and the time that I’ve wasted. And if I have another precious human rebirth, I will certainly try to take more advantage of it.”
Shantideva describes very well a pathetic scene of dying with regrets. We would want to avoid that. But some type of purification certainly is there. It’s always recommended that, if we’ve taken tantric initiations, have done retreats, and are familiar with how to do self-initiation, we take the self-initiation again in order to renew our vows before we die so that we die with pure bodhisattva and tantric vows. That is very highly recommended, provided that we know how and have enough presence of mind and ability to do that. At least, we would want to retake the bodhisattva vows. We don’t need a huge ceremony to do that.
Participant: After we’ve died, can we still think in words? Will we still have our memories?
Dr. Berzin: I am not sure. In the bardo, there’s always the danger of being attached to our previous bodies and the places we’ve been. That attachment is part of the reason for being reborn as a clutching ghost and haunting a place. So, there may be some memories. I don’t know when having memories of the previous life and places ends. There are some people who, even after having taken rebirth, have memories of those things. If that’s the case, it certainly could be the case in the bardo, but I don’t know that it necessarily has to be the case.
Participant: Maybe you can recite a mantra or something.
Dr. Berzin: Certainly, we can recite mantras if we’ve built that up as a very strong habit. Just as we can recite mantras in a dream, we can recite mantras in the bardo. Mantras and practices like those in Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo (Bar-do thos-grol), what’s translated as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, are to remind us of practices that we’ve done during our lifetimes so that we continue to do them in the bardo.
Participant: I heard that, at some point after dying, white light can appear. I don’t remember whether the recommendation was to go toward this light or not.
Dr. Berzin: I’ve not actually heard that in a Tibetan context. According to the Buddhist teachings, there will, in the end stages of death, be a sort of whitish type of appearance, like moonlight. That doesn’t mean that we see a bright white light. It’s described as being like moonlight reflecting off snow. Then there’s a reddish light, which is sort of like the light at sunset. Then there’s darkness. Then there’s a type of very dark blue light, like the light of the sky when it starts to get a little bit of blue color before the sun rises. But it’s not a bright white light that we either go toward or avoid. That I’ve not heard. In the bardo itself, almost anything can appear, just as anything can appear in dreams.
Participant: I thought that Tenzin Palmo had talked about it.
Dr. Berzin: I’ve not heard about that. But just because I’ve not heard doesn’t mean that there aren’t teachings like that.
Participant: I also heard something like that. I don’t know what the color is supposed to be, but it’s something that seems cozy – something you should avoid.
Dr. Berzin: I have no idea. I would tend to think that there aren’t standard things or visions that happen to absolutely everybody in the bardo. I would think that what happens would be as varied as in dreams.
There is the stage of coming out of clear light. So, just as we have these white, reddish, and black appearances going into clear light, there is the reverse sequence coming out of clear light – which is what we would experience going into the bardo. But that would be very, very quick.
Participant: I think the main idea was not to go after what one is attached to, not to look for a nice spot where one can stay, a place to hold on to.
Dr. Berzin: Well, one doesn’t want to stay attached to a previous life. One needs to go on, as it were. But, in general, one doesn’t want to have any disturbing emotions in the bardo. Ideally, we would do meditations in the bardo. That is what one practices doing in dream yoga. Obviously, the advantage of dream yoga is, first of all, being able to recognize that we’re dreaming and being able to see that everything is like a dream, like an illusion – that things don’t have solid, truly established existence. The other advantage is being able to meditate without being distracted by the senses. The dream state provides the best opportunity to meditate with perfect concentration. And the meditations that the dream state is most conducive for are the ones involving visualizations. There, the visualizations are very, very clear, very vivid. If we’ve practiced doing that in dreams, we presumably would have built up enough of a habit to be able to do it in the bardo.
Participant: Sounds good.
Dr. Berzin: Sounds good, but don’t think that it’s easy. It’s very, very difficult. But keeping focused on bodhichitta, wanting to achieve enlightenment, and wanting to continue to study with the gurus and to have a precious human rebirth, would, I think, sort of propel us in a positive way through the bardo.