To All my Relations

Life in Relation to Death
by Chagdud Tulku

Introduction

Death and dying is a subject that evokes such deep and disturbing emotions that we usually try to live in denial of death. Yet we could die tomorrow, completely unprepared and helpless. The time of death is uncertain but the truth of death is not. All who are born will certainly die.

People often make the mistake of being frivolous about death and think, “Oh, well, death happens to everybody. It’s not a big deal, it’s natural. I’ll be fine.”

This is a nice theory until one is dying. Then experience and theory differ. Then one is powerless and everything familiar is lost. One is overwhelmed by a great turbulence of fear, disorientation, and confusion. For this reason it is essential to prepare well in advance for the moment when the mind and body separate.

There are many methods, extraordinary and ordinary, to prepare for the transformation of death. The greatest of these results in enlightenment in one’s lifetime. In enlightenment, death has no relevance to one’s state of being. Enlightened realization is deathless, but it requires flawless meditative practice.

If deathless enlightenment is not accomplished during one’s lifetime, the transition of death itself offers another supreme opportunity to attain enlightenment. But again, realizing the potential of this opportunity depends on having mastered certain meditative skills.

Enlightenment is the highest attainment of the death transition, but it is not the only one. If meditative realization is incomplete yet one has developed the power of prayer, there can be liberation into an environment of perfect bliss, free of suffering, by invoking the blessings of enlightened wisdom beings.

To accomplish the meditative skills and power needed to direct our mind at death, we must learn about the relationship of life and death, about the process of dying, and about the transitions from the moment of death until rebirth. In this way we become familiar with death and are not caught by surprise as the process begins to unfold.

Warned of a hurricane, we don’t wait until the storm pounds the shore before we start to prepare. Similarly, knowing death is looming offshore, we shouldn’t wait until it overpowers us before developing the meditative skills necessary to achieve the great of the mind at the moment of death.

Death as well as birth, sickness, and old age are the four basic afflictions of the human condition. They are obvious and inescapable, in our personal experience and the experiences of other people. Yet these four afflictions fall within the larger categories of suffering that are experienced by all beings, human and nonhuman alike.

One of the greatest sufferings of sentient beings is the pain they experience from not getting what they want—or getting what they think they want, then finding it is not enough or that it is not what they really want. These constant frustrations are intrinsic to the impermanent, changeable nature of cyclic existence.

Then there is suffering atop suffering, which means that no matter how bad it is, it can get worse. On the day you lose your wallet, your tooth begins to ache and you get a furious call from your boss. Or on a larger scale, countries plagued by famine are also wracked by war.

Suffering pervades cyclic existence like oil pervades sesame seeds. Like the oil, the complete pervasiveness of suffering is not always apparent, especially in phases when pleasure predominates and things seem to go well. Yet, just as oil becomes obvious when the hard little seeds are ground and pressed, so latent suffering is directly experienced when our layers of egotistic assumptions crack under the oppression of cyclic existence.

Why is it like this? The answer is that we are subject to karma, the inexorable law of cause and effect. The question that follows logically is: What causes karma? The root cause is the poisons of the mind. Our mind is basically confused, because we do not recognize its absolute nature. Lacking this understanding, we slip into an erroneous framework, which is duality.

We first grasp at a “self” who perceives and an “object” that is perceived. Seeing the object, we define its size, shape, and color. Then we judge it: “It’s pretty. It’s ugly. I like it. I don’t like it. It makes me happy. It makes me unhappy.” Finally, we feel either attachment or aversion: “I want it. I don’t want it.” This is where suffering begins.