[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you, and happy listening. [music] Now thirdly, the defilement, the poison of craving. This is intense, powerful. If you like neurotic, desire, craving, lust to possess this, that and the other. And this is very powerful, very primordial, one might say, and very, very difficult to overcome. And here, there are three kinds of methods given. Whereas in the case of the other defilements, there's usually only one. But here there are three. First of all, the recollection of impurity. This is a rather drastic method that very, very few people have recourse to nowadays. It's usually supposed to be practiced only by monks and Hermes and such like people. It consists in going to a burning ground and sitting down in the proximity of corpses in different stages of decay. And this is still practiced by some people in the east. But obviously you have very strong nerves and very strong spiritual resolutions you'll be able to practice in this way. And then there's a recollection of death, which is the same sort of thing only milder. And thirdly, recollection of impermanence, which is still more general, and therefore milder still. Now we are particularly concerned this evening with the second of these. The second of these three methods of overcoming craving. That is to say, we're concerned with the recollection of death. So let's go into this in a little more detail. According to the tradition of practice, before one actually starts practicing the recollection of death, you must practice mindfulness. You must develop mindfulness preferably, if necessary, with the help of the method of the mindfulness of breathing. In other words, when you take up the practice of the recollection of death, your mind must already be in a very integrated, peaceful, harmonious, and happy state. And relatively free from discursive thought, and cogitation, and reflection, and so on. Now this is very important for a definite reason. If you take up the practice of the recollection of death without having experienced mindfulness beforehand, the likelihood is that in your practice or the recollection of death, you'll go astray, and your practice unwisely, maybe even with harmful results. For instance, if you take up the recollection of death straight away, without having achieved a very definite mindfulness first, you may start thinking of people near and dear to you who've died. And since your state is one of unmindfulness, you may start feeling sad. And this would certainly get in the way of your meditation practice, it would pull you down. You start getting depressed. Or again, if you took up the practice of the recollection of death, without having established mindfulness first, if you happen to think of someone who you disliked who had died, you might even feel rather pleased. You might feel rather happy. Well, thank God he's gone. You see? So this would be very undesirable. This would be an unskillful thought, a negative emotion on your part. Feeling glad that Sansa had died. And that would also pull you down. Or again, if you took up the practice of the recollection of death, without experiencing true mindfulness first, and if you either thought of or even actually saw people who were dead, you saw people even suffering death and the going death, and you didn't feel any particular reaction, you just felt completely indifferent about it in a purely mundane sense. That also would be bad. This would be a negative indifference, an indifference of not caring. You wouldn't feel compassion, you wouldn't feel objective sorrow for them, and this would be bad. So therefore one is advised very strongly that before one takes up the recollection of death, you must be firmly established in mindfulness. Otherwise, you may experience feelings of depression, or you may experience feelings of an English we haven't got a word for it, but the Germans have got a word, a sort of sadistic joy. Or you may just feel a very negative indifference. So one should experience awareness, mindfulness, even if possible, a higher state of consciousness first, and then take up the practice of the recollection of death. So having done that, having established one's awareness and mindfulness, and being in this state of sort of higher serene consciousness, and able to start thinking about death without any morbid feelings or any feeling of depression, without any feeling of being rather glad that other people are out of the way, and so on, what does one do? Well, in this sort of serene, happy frame of mind, you start reflecting that death is inevitable. This may seem rather a truism, but it's a sort of thing that people acknowledge when they hear it, but which they never actually realize. You say to yourself that death will come. It's as simple as that. You recollect death in this way, in this happy serene frame of mind you say to yourself, "Well, I'm going to die. Death is inevitable." And you really try to see that fact. Now, one might say that, broadly speaking, other factors as it were being equal, the younger you are, the more difficult this is. When you're very young, it's practically impossible. You don't really feel that you're going to die. You've got this irrational feeling as though you're going to go on living forever and ever and ever. That's your real feeling. You can't really think, you can't really feel, you can't really experience that one day you are going to die. You might even see people dying all around you, but it may not occur to you really to apply this to your own self. You can't grasp it, you can't imagine it. It seems that absolutely remote, absurd, ridiculous that you are going to die. But it's a fact. And the older one gets, the more one begins to see this. And the more clearly one sees this. And you begin to see, you begin to realize that so far you've never seen it at all. You hadn't really understood this, this simple fact that you were going to die. So at the beginning of this practice, this is all that you do. This serene, happy, concentrated frame of mind, you just say to yourself, well I'm going to die. Or this tradition says you can simply say to yourself death, death. And you can go on saying this like a sort of mantra, an interval, death, death. Just letting the thought of death sink in, and especially the thought that you are going to die. And the tradition of practice says it's helpful under these sort of circumstances that this stage in your practice, it's helpful if you can actually see dead bodies. But notice, if you are in, if you've already achieved this state of mindfulness and awareness as you should have done before your practice began. It's no use trying to take a look at dead bodies at corpses, if your mind is unconcentrated, is not very calm, is liable to depression and so on. You've got to have not only steady nerves in your thoughts but real inner calm. Otherwise if you take up this sort of practice and start looking around for corpses, you can do yourself more harm than good. Or if you don't want to go so far as actually to take a look at a corpse, which many people of course in this country have never seen the course of their whole lifetime. Unlike in the east, where you can see a corpse almost any day of the week if you want to, as they're passing by, being carried to the burning ground every day down the main road, not discreetly hidden away in a coffin as we have them in this country. What you can do if you don't want to go to an extent of actually seeing a corpse is, and this is what is very often done in Buddhist countries, you can keep a skull by you. You might have wondered sometimes why Tibetans have sculled cups and things like that, whether even where ornaments of human bone have thigh bone trumpets. It's partly with the idea of familiarizing themselves or familiarizing themselves with the idea of death, of handling things which have got to do with death and overcoming their natural fear of death. So if you don't want to go the whole hug as it were, if you don't want actually to go and look at a corpse, then you can either keep a skull cup by you, or just a fragment of a skull, even that will do. Some people in the Buddhist east have a rosary made even of human bone. You can't get nice round beads, I'm afraid, but they have sort of discs of human bone, and they use them in the same way. And it's all to bring home to themselves the fact of death. And once again I must repeat, there's nothing morbid about it. You have to be quite sure to begin with that you are already in a state of calmness and concentration and peacefulness within yourself before you begin this sort of practice. In other words, mindfulness, serenity of mind, is the indispensable basis of this kind of practice, the recollection of death. Now tradition goes on to say that if the simple methods I've so far described don't seem to be very successful, if they're not enough, if they don't seem to be producing results, then there are other reflections in which one can engage to assist one's recollection of death. For instance, you can start thinking systematically of the precariousness of human life, in fact of life in general. The precariousness of it can reflect it hanging all the time by a thread. Your life, the continuance of your life depends on all sorts of factors. You need air. If you stopped breathing for a minute or more, you just die. You're totally dependent on breath. You're totally dependent on that pair of bellows inside your chest called your lungs. If they stopped pumping air, finish. All the air was sucked out of this room, finished. It would all be gone. And in the same way, we're dependent upon warmth, dependent upon temperature. If the temperature goes up a little bit, we can't carry on living. If it goes down a little bit, can't carry on living. If the earth was to wander just a little bit, just a few miles out of its orbit, we couldn't carry on living. And in the same way, if we didn't get food for a few days, a few weeks, a few months at the most, we couldn't carry on living. Life is dependent on all these factors. It's so precarious. It's a marvel that anyone's alive at all. Life is a continuity of treading this tight rope over an abyss. It's a continuity that's walking along the azure of precipice. It's so difficult to be alive. Yet we are alive, we've achieved it somehow, but all the time that life is just hanging by a thread. And then we can reflect, again, that there are, as it were, no special conditions for death. And this is very interesting, which we don't usually realize. There are no special set of conditions for death. It's not as though you die at night, but you don't die during the day. So that if, when during the day, at least you're safe, you know you're not going to die. It isn't like that. You can die either during the night or during the day. You can either die when you're young or when you're old. It isn't that if you're young, you can think, "Well, I'm young, so therefore I'm not going to die." You know, "I'll only die when I'm old." No. You can die either when you're young or when you're old. You can die when you're sick or when you're healthy. You can die in your home or outside. Or you can die in your own country or in a foreign land. In other words, there's no sort of set of conditions, which if you come within those conditions, you can be sure that you're not going to die. You can't be sure. Death doesn't abide by any conditions. There are no special conditions for death. In other words, it's something you can't possibly escape. You can't go anywhere to escape it. You can't be sure at any time that because of certain substances conditions, therefore you're not going to die that particular instant. You can never be sure of that. You never know. So this also is another subject for reflection that death does not have any special conditions. There are no special conditions for death. It can come at any time under any circumstances whatsoever. There's actually no foolproof barrier between you and death at any time in any place. So this also one can reflect upon. So rather sobering thought. And also one can reflect upon the fact that everybody has died. Every single member of the human race, however great, however distinguished, however noble, however famous, they all had to die one day. They might have been a great poet, they might have been a great artist, might have been a great yogi, might have been a great spiritual figure, might have been even the greatest of the disciples of the Buddha, might have been the Buddha himself, but they all had to die. So you're not going to escape. So this is another line of reflection, and this of course begins to bring us back to the actual occasion that we're commemorating today. That is the death of Parinirvana of the Buddha himself. We hope you enjoyed the talk. 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