The Most Important Education
A complete education about death is the most important education we can have. What death is, how we die, what minds we need at death, and what happens after death—only by knowing about death and rebirth can we actually fully understand what life is and so learn how to live fully.
In the West, such questions are generally not studied. What happens at the very beginning of this life and at the end are like two big black holes; there is no clarity. Even if there are some scientific explanations, these are based on hypotheses, not on personal experience. It seems that if scientists cannot verify something with their instruments, it doesn’t exist for them. They can explain how, at death, the cells break down and the brain stops functioning, but they cannot go beyond that, and they can never address the real question of what happens to us at death.
While Buddhism might not talk about molecular structures or details such as that, on another level it has the whole answer, the complete education on life, death, and rebirth, especially when we study the subtle explanations given in the Vajrayana, the tantric teachings, which explain about the gross, subtle, and very subtle bodies and minds.
Suddenly, without any warning, death is there facing us. Life is gone, and there is nothing we can do about it. Our time to meditate, to develop our mind, has run out. Now, for the first time, we are facing the reality of life, and no matter how much fear we have, there is no time to do anything to remedy it.
When that happens, there is so much regret. When we die, it is said that we see our whole life clearly, like watching a documentary with everything we have ever done vividly played back to us—all the mistakes, all the selfishness, all the harm we have done to others. I have often heard that when people go through this, they die overwhelmed with great terror and regret. Even for somebody who rejects reincarnation, there is still great fear that something terrible is about to happen.
For worldly people, success has nothing to do with the mind. Their definition of success is being wealthy and famous. To have properties in many countries, to be able to make millions or billions of dollars in business; that is the definition of a successful life. Whoever can make the most money is regarded as the most successful—regardless of how stressful or berserk the life of that millionaire or billionaire actually is.
In fact, their inner life could be extremely unhappy, fragmented into pieces, with so much depression, sadness, dissatisfaction, and discontentment. Their life could be full of suffering—worse, even, than the poorest beggar, whose mind might be quite peaceful, with neither reputation nor wealth that could be lost. This happens because, relying on external things for happiness, their strong attachment has caused them to harm others (and themselves) to get what they want. They have no idea that true happiness only comes from developing a good heart.
Working solely for the comforts of this life is not what being a human is all about. Even animals do this. This is something even worms, rats, or ants can do, so the billionaire is no better than the worm in this. If we only work for material comfort, we will die with such regret. We need to go beyond this. We need to at least try to obtain a better rebirth. Then we will be able to die without fear, having the potential to continue to develop our Dharma practice in our next life.
Until we can fully understand our own life—how it is impermanent and how death is inevitable—it is very difficult to fully appreciate the unique opportunity we now have with this perfect human rebirth. Without that appreciation, the rest of the path to enlightenment will make little sense. That is why I say that understanding impermanence and death is the most important education we can have.
The teachings on impermanence and death come very early on in the Tibetan Buddhist system of study and practice known as lamrim, which means “graduated path.” The lamrim was first explained by the great master Atisha in his Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment. In the lamrim, the entire teachings of Guru Shakyamuni Buddha are divided into a step-by-step approach, set up to lead us from where we are now all the way to enlightenment.
In traditional texts, such as Lama Tsongkhapa’s Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Lamrim Chenmo) and Pabongka Dechen Nyingpo’s Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand,4 we see that after discussing how to rely on the spiritual teacher, the lamrim begins with explaining the value and rarity of this precious human life, with its eight freedoms and ten richnesses,5 followed by an extensive exploration of the reality of impermanence and death. These first steps on the path show us how we need to seize this life firmly and make the most of it.
"What happens after our death depends on the state of our mind."
The various subjects of the lamrim are divided into three levels of training known as the graduated path of the three capable beings, or the three scopes. They are the graduated path of the lower capable being, the graduated path of the middle capable being, and the graduated path of the higher capable being. These three correspond to the three motivations: the lower one of attaining a better rebirth, the middle one of attaining liberation, and the higher one of attaining enlightenment. The teachings on impermanence and death are part of the graduated path of the lower capable being and are designed to help us develop the aspiration for a positive, happy rebirth. We do this by clearly seeing the transitory quality of our present rebirth—how it can finish at any moment. We also come to understand what happens after our death—whether our next rebirth is one of happiness or suffering—depends on the positive or negative state of our mind. If we can fully realize even these very basic topics, we will be unable to bear not practicing Dharma; everything else will seem totally meaningless.
The teachings on impermanence and death offer explanations of what happens to us at death. Buddhism offers a complete picture of what death is. In the Abhidharma texts there are detailed explanations of the nature of the mind and its continuity—that is, how it continues life after life. In the Vajrayana teachings, there are detailed and precise descriptions of how the extremely subtle mind moves beyond death to another life.
Being successful in worldly affairs, in obtaining the comforts of this life—food, clothing, reputation, and so forth—is not regarded as a capability in Buddhism; it is considered ordinary and without lasting meaning. Although the graduated path of the lower capable being is about securing a better rebirth, that is not the ultimate goal of our spiritual journey. By seeing how the whole of cyclic existence (samsara) is in the nature of suffering, we can determine to renounce samsara and attain the liberation of nirvana. This is the goal of the middle capable being.
It is an amazing goal, but even that isn’t the ultimate. We can take it even further by realizing that all sentient beings are also suffering, and whereas we have the means to achieve true happiness, in their present states, they don’t. And so we can develop great compassion for them and determine to achieve the exalted state of bodhichitta, the mind that determines to attain enlightenment in order to best benefit each and every sentient being. Enlightenment itself is the goal of the higher capable being.
The mind continues after death, taking a different body in a different realm. There are just two ways to go—we will be born either in the fortunate realms of the humans or gods or in the suffering realms of the animals, hungry ghosts, or hell beings. This is definite. Which rebirth we will take depends on karma, the karma we have created in this life and in previous lives.
Why should we be scared of death?
Why should we be scared of death? Life is full of problems, so if the consciousness or mind stopped at death—consciousness and mind are synonyms—all our problems would also cease at death. Therefore, wouldn’t it be better to die as quickly as possible, rather than having to experience all of life’s difficulties? Then, there would be no more problems; that would be the simplest thing. There would be no need to struggle to stay healthy and live as long as possible. There would be no need for meditation, for religion, for a spiritual path. There would be no need to build anything, no need to do anything!
It is not like that, however. When death happens, the mind does not stop with the physical body, like a candle flame finishing when the candle is extinguished. Just as the mind existed before this rebirth, even though the physical body ceases at death, the mind continues. And with it, all our problems.
The Delusion of Permanence
After attaining enlightenment over two and a half thousand years ago under the bodhi tree in Bodhgaya, India, Shakyamuni Buddha taught over 84,000 teachings and revealed the entire unmistaken path that can lead us to enlightenment. All these teachings can be summed up in one short four-line verse of the Buddha:
Do not commit any unwholesome actions.
Engage in perfect, wholesome actions.
Subdue one’s own mind.
This is the teaching of the Buddha.
This verse contains everything, including the four noble truths, the very first teaching the Buddha gave after his enlightenment. Do not commit any unwholesome actions contains the first two noble truths: the truth of suffering, which identifies suffering as a basic condition of life, and the truth of the cause of suffering, which identifies the actions and proclivities that cause all the problems we experience in our life. Engage in perfect, wholesome actions contains the third and fourth noble truths: the truth of the cessation of suffering—that there can be an end to this suffering—and the truth of the path that leads to the cessation of suffering.
These four noble truths constitute the entire Buddhist path, which is summarized in the third line: Subdue one’s own mind. Why does this short line encapsulate the whole path to enlightenment? Because not one atom of suffering comes from outside. It is not created externally; there is no external agent that forces us to suffer. All suffering comes from within, from our own mind. In exactly the same way, happiness is not dependent on external factors but is a product of our own mind. Therefore, the method to destroy suffering and attain true happiness is to subdue our own mind. All of the Buddha’s teachings lead us to this; hence the final line: This is the teaching of the Buddha.
All of the Buddha’s teachings revolve around this central imperative of subduing one’s own mind through avoiding nonvirtuous actions and performing only virtuous actions. This is the intent of all the teachings he gave, and because of that, everything within the Dharma—the teachings of the Buddha—exists to help beings overcome suffering and obtain happiness. In fact, that is the definition of Dharma: that which leads us away from suffering and toward true happiness.
By subduing our own mind, we achieve all happiness. The path that leads us to that is the fourth noble truth, the truth of the path. When we completely subdue our own mind, we achieve the cessation of suffering, which is either liberation as one pursuing individual liberation or enlightenment as a Mahayana practitioner. With a fully subdued mind, we are a buddha. The Sanskrit term buddha means “fully awakened,” and so we are a fully enlightened or awakened being, a being with a mind whose faults have been completely eliminated and whose good qualities—compassion, love, equanimity, the understanding of the nature of reality, and so forth—have been fully realized.
One of the fundamental problems that we encounter is our mistaken notion of permanence, our misapprehending phenomena that are, by nature, impermanent as permanent. All things—we ourselves, our own life, our body, our friends, our enemies, strangers, the sense objects, and so forth—are all naturally subject to change. They are all changing moment to moment and can perish at any moment. That is not how we apprehend them, however. We apprehend them as permanent, as unchanging. Our friends, our possessions, our life, and so forth, exist in this way now, and they will continue to exist like that. Although, rationally, we might know this is not true, we live our life with this concept of permanence. So long as we remain trapped in our concepts of permanence and true existence, there will be only problems and suffering.
If we could live our life with the right understanding that sees all phenomena as impermanent, we would see the reality of how things really exist; with no reason for ignorance, anger, attachment, or the other delusions to arise, there would be few problems in life. With no reason for dissatisfaction to arise, we would naturally have a contented mind. This way of seeing gives us freedom; the other way locks us into the prison of our delusions.
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There is arguably no truth more foundational to Buddhism than this: everything is impermanent. We can see this in the world all around us; old systems break down, relationships change. Death comes for those we love and, inevitably, for us. In this book, the late, beloved teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche walks us through the traditional, revelatory practices of meditating on the fact of impermanence and even—especially—on death itself. Rather than shy away from this reality, we look straight at it, and thus we learn not only how to not fear death, but how to live.
