Thinking about death

No, I haven’t got all morbid, don’t worry. As I mentioned before, I’ve rather neglected my meditation and Buddhist studies of late, so this week I’ve started paying more attention to them. On Tuesday night, I went along to the Basic Buddhism class at the Odiyana Centre, and last night to the Awaken class at the Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery. Coincidentally, both classes focussed on the transience of life, and the inevitability of death – and so the importance of preparation for death.

Tuesday’s session over-ran, and we didn’t have time for discussion (this happens a lot – Wangchog gets carried away, and always has just a bit more he wants to say before the end of the class!).

Last night did have group discussions. In my group, there was quite a variance in our understanding of death, of how negative karma affects rebirth, and so on. One woman said she was afraid of dying in her sleep, because then she wouldn’t be able to control where she was reborn… I’m not sure that’s how it works…

Quite a few people thought that karma, and bad  karma in particular, can’t be changed; once you’ve got it you’ve got it, and you’ll just have to suffer the consequences. Here I’m on shaky ground, but I don’t think I agree with this. The way I understood this, as taught in the Goenka retreats I’ve attended, is that karma is purely internal to us, and is carried within our ‘mental continuum’, from life to life. So, there is no third party with karmic record books, saying “Aha, 500 lifetimes ago you told a lie, therefore in this life you will suffer a penalty”.

Rather, we carry the karmic seed ourselves, and ourselves create the conditions that will allow it to flourish. These seeds have strength, and are able to develop, because we are attached to them, and give them their strength. Through meditation, however, we can – with hard work, and persistence – identify these seeds of bad karma, and undo our attachment to them. Thus, they lose their strength, and their effects are weakened, or even negated entirely. As our practice becomes stronger, we can erase initially the bad karma from this lifetime and, eventually, all the bad karma we have carried with us from previous lifetimes.

Though I am certainly no Buddhist scholar, I think I’m backed up in this by the story of Angulimala, the killer who must have accumulated unthinkable amounts of bad karma and yet, through practice and meditation, was eventually able to achieve enlightenment in that same lifetime.

What does this have to do with preparing for our own death? My own view is that I have been close to being killed on a number of occasions; I once tried to count them up, and got to about eight, I think. So I know very well, that death can arrive suddenly and without warning. When people fear a lingering death from illness or whatever, it isn’t really death, but pain that they’re afraid of – something else entirely. I guess this means that I feel we should try to make sure that every day, we try not to accumulate any new bad karma, and we should meditate regularly to diminish the bad karma we already have.

Note that I say “this is what we should do”! I can’t say I am succeeding particularly well, but I’m working on it!