From Chapter 2: Meditations on Death

A good death
does honor to a whole life.
—PETRARCH

Meditations on death are a means of purifying the mind in order to gain a crucial revelation of the meaning and significance of life and death. As such, death meditations have been regarded as an indispensable element in a wide array of cultures: the Egyptian and Indian, the Chinese and Japanese, the Hellenic and Roman, the Hebrew and Islamic, in both their ancient and modern forms. Because of death's general unfathomableness and the dread and terror it inspires in most people, the conquest of death, or deathlessness, has a central place in the teachings of all religions. Unless this fear and terror is replaced by comfort and hope, a tranquil mind state is impossible. The unwillingness to think of death is itself a kind of death, for the poignancy of life is inseparable from the knowledge of its inevitable decay.

Death meditations may strike some as a morbid preoccupation, a falling in love with death rather than with life. Yet the deep acceptance of death as the teacher of life divests these reflections of any macabre quality. The purpose of death meditations is to instill in the meditator the confidence to walk unafraid with the ever-present prospect of death, for one never knows when it may come and take us. The denial of death, so common in our culture, inevitably strengthens the fear of it and underscores what Socrates said about the unexamined life not being worth living. Actually, pondering and meditating on death is part of the religious practices of every major tradition. There are some orders of Christian monks and nuns, for example, who live with their simple coffins always in sight and who even turn a spadeful of earth daily from the place that is to eventually serve as their grave. By contrast, some people strongly feel that thinking about their demise will only hasten it—a not uncommon form of denial.

Those who are strongly repelled by the thought of confronting their own demise even in a symbolic way—as well as those who have suffered from mental illness, particularly depressive disorders, and those who are psychologically fragile—are cautioned to avoid the more intense type of death meditations described here. To undertake them under these circumstances could result in an increase in fear and anxiety rather than a lessening of them. Children, too, should not attempt these exercises.

In his book Inventing the American Way of Death, the historian James Farrell (1830–1920) makes a vital point about the denial of death in American society:

"Keeping death out of mind cuts people off from an important fact of their physical, mental, and spiritual existence. If knowing that we will die is part of what makes us human, then forgetting that we will die threatens our humanity. In the same way, the denial of death in American society also cuts people off from our common humanity, keeping them at such a distance from the deaths of others that they cannot grieve or mourn except in the culturally prescribed 'way' . . . "

Plato in his Phaidon insists that "they are the true votaries of knowledge who practice nothing else but how to die or to meet death." Masao Abe elaborates on this: "For Plato . . . to philosophize is nothing other than precisely to practice dying while living. It is to live through dying, to practice dying while living. Herein is the way of the philosopher for Plato—the way in which death is overcome."

The Buddha was equally emphatic about the value of such meditation: "Of all footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme."

As well, Marcus Aurelius (121–180), the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, wrote, "The constant recollection of death is the test of human conduct."

Meditation that totally involves body and mind takes us beyond the senses, beyond our thoughts and feelings, into a transcendent state. But death meditations are valuable not only for that reason. When they are fueled by the primal terror of death, they can break through the psychological armor encasing us and evoke what may be called the "questioning mind," the prerequisite for genuine transformation.

Understandably the various religions have cultivated forms of death meditation appropriate to their basic spiritual aims. The methods of these religions have been preserved in both the written and oral traditions of the different cultures. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the medieval text The Art of Dying are perhaps the best known. The material that follows is drawn partly from these writings, but also from the various Buddhist traditions, with which I am most familiar. These meditations on death are intended to help the student confront the reality of his own finitude in a concrete way and thereby gain an intense awareness of his own eventual death, and with it a greater appreciation of life.

Generally, meditations on death can be divided into philosophic reflections and experiential aspects. The philosophic portions, consisting of ancient writings by prominent masters, are still taught in many monasteries and spiritual centers in both the West and the East as a theoretical basis for the practices themselves. For the so-called practical, I have drawn upon the oral teachings handed down by masters in the various traditions. Also included are specific methods of meditation transmitted to me by my own teachers during my fifteen years of training in Asia, thirteen of them in Japanese Zen monasteries and temples. In addition, I have added methods of practice congenial to Western students. Where any of the practices are inextricably entwined with their native cultures, I have sought to put them in the context of our own Western culture.

Reflections on Death: Eight Points of View
These death meditations are abstracted from the Visuddhimagga, by Buddhaghosa (fifth century CE), a highly respected Buddhist monk-teacher. To enable the meditator to come to grips with the reality of his own death, the text instructs him to reflect on death from the following eight points of view:

1. death as having the appearance of an executioner, that is, as though a murderer were standing in front of one ready to strike one down

2. death as the ruin of all success

3. death as the inevitable end for all persons: just as it strikes down the great and mighty, so will it strike us down also

4. death as the result of "sharing the body with many": a reflection on the infinite number of factors, both internal and external, that can cause death

5. death as lying near at hand

6. death as "signless," that is, nothing about it can be predicted or known in advance

7. death as the certain end of a lifespan that is short at best; and

8. death as a constant phenomenon, occurring at every moment.

I will elaborate on only one of these eight points, the third, and will briefly touch on some of the others, leaving it to the reader to supply his own examples illustrating the substance of each of the other points. Reflecting on these points is indispensable preparation for meditation on the word death, the core of the practice, which we will discuss a little later. We all know that we cannot escape death, but intellectual recognition is one thing, experiential awareness another. This is the great value of symbolically confronting death through these meditations.

Meditation on the Inevitability of Death
The third point concerns death as the end for everyone. In this practice one is instructed to reflect on the deaths of about seven accomplished individuals who have had worldly success, fame, and power and yet could not avert death. They might be past figures or contemporary. For example, one might think of Julius Caesar in this line from Hamlet:

Imperious Caesar dead and turn'd to clay
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

One can reflect, "Caesar was the most powerful man of his day, his armies had conquered most of the known world, his wealth was enormous—yet death eventually struck him down and returned him to dust. How can I hope to escape the same end?" One should remind oneself that the powerful and the weak, the sage and the fool, the generous and the stingy, the most honored of men (an Einstein, for example) and the most miserable beggar—the same fate awaits them all, and us too: death. In the grave we are all equal. Similarly, one can reflect on the violent deaths of tyrants such as Hitler and Mussolini. Both dictators had absolute power over the lives of millions of people, yet their ultimate fate, too, was death.