I don’t know whether being born into a much older family was a blessing or a curse. My father was born in 1898 in a shtetl1 in what’s now Belarus. That’s right—he was born in the century before last. He was the youngest of seven siblings, so I’m the son of a much older father who was the son of a much older father. My mother, born in 1907, was the middle of five siblings.
Unlike Siddhartha Gautama, whom we know as the Buddha, I got accustomed early to relatives getting sick and dying. I was 11 when my father passed from this life after a couple of years of illness. I’ve also experienced more than my share of sudden, violent losses: one murder by stabbing and two by gunshot, two deaths by suicide and two by auto accident. And I survived a terrorist bombing in which another man died.
I don’t need any help understanding impermanence.
So, it has been a surprise how many of my Buddhist friends—even older ones—still have trouble with impermanence and death. Some have accepted impermanence but can’t quite get their heads around death, especially their own.
In his wisdom, the Buddha must have understood that our human difficulty facing death would last for millennia. He often advised his followers to meditate on it. Here are a few examples:
All conditioned things are impermanent. - Dhammapada
The root of suffering is the illusion of permanence. - Dhammapada
Meditate on the inevitability of your death to cultivate a sense of urgency in your practice. - Satipatthana Sutta
Meditate on the fact that all conditioned2 things are subject to decay. - Anguttara Nikaya
Contemplate the fleeting nature of human life, like a water bubble in a stream. - Samyutta Nikaya
Death is inevitable; the time of death is uncertain. - Upajjhatthana Sutta
How does one meditate on death? The earliest Buddhists observed decaying corpses and were encouraged to imagine themselves in that condition. That’s not very practical in the Western world.
The Buddhist Master Atisha (982-1054) taught Nine Contemplations on our deaths:
All of us will die sooner or later.
Your remaining lifespan decreases as your life goes on.
Death will come whether you’re prepared or not.
Like all living beings, your lifespan is not fixed.
Death has many causes.
Your body is fragile and vulnerable.
Your loved ones cannot keep you from death.
At the moment of your death, your material resources are no longer of use to you.
Your body cannot help you at the time of your death.
A few meditations on dying:
Zen master Roshi Joan Halifax offers a guided meditation in PDF format on Atisha’s contemplations.
For a meditation on death that you can do in less than five minutes, here’s a video from clinical neuroscientist and Zen practitioner Philippe Goldin:
If you can spare ten minutes and still have inner resistance to accepting your mortality, here’s forceful (brutal?) meditation from Tsem Rinpoche (1965-2019), who was 53 when he died.
On a more cheerful note (seriously), here’s a three-minute video from my teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche on preparing for the moment of death:
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“Shtetl” is not Pali, Sanskrit, or Tibetan. It’s Yiddish for a small Jewish town or village.
“Conditioned” in Buddhism refers to having been produced by a combination of conditions—in other words, all physical and mental things.
I'm grateful that daily meditation has helped me accept change and especially death (of others, so far.)