Five Reflections

There are five thoughts that the Buddha said to reflect on every day, whether you’re lay or monastic; man, woman, or child: “I’m subject to aging; aging is unavoidable. I’m subject to illness; illness is unavoidable. I’m subject to death; death is unavoidable. I will grow different, separate from all that is dear and appealing to me.” And then the reflection on karma: “I’m the owner of my actions, heir to my actions. Whatever I do, for good or for evil, to that will I fall heir.” We chant this here regularly at the monastery. It’s chanted all over the world in Theravada monasteries.

Here in the West, though, the interpretation usually focuses on acceptance— accepting the facts of aging, illness, and death, and separation, largely because our culture is so blind to these things, so resistant to these things. It doesn’t want to admit them. A good part of wisdom is accepting them. So the emphasis is on the first four, getting people to accept the reality of what they tend to deny.

Often the modern Western interpretation of the fifth reflection, though, is fairly ambivalent. To accept karma* *sounds like you’re going to accept the fact that you’re guilty of whatever sufferings you experience in aging, illness, and death, which is not a popular teaching. A lot of people actively don’t accept it. They say that your pains have nothing to do with your karma. They’re caused by other things.

So the emphasis is usually on the first four reflections, learning how to accept them. But that leads to just an embracing of life in the full knowledge that you’re going to have to let go at some point. It fosters a bittersweet, nostalgic attitude.

But that’s not what the Buddha had in mind. After all, he didn’t say that we reflect on these things for the sake of acceptance. He actually has two other goals for us.

The first one, he says, is to reflect for the sake of heedfulness. Heedfulness means recognizing the fact that there are dangers, but also that you can avoid the dangers through your actions.

This is where the reflection on karma comes in. The first four reflections have to do with the dangers, giving rise to a sense of saṃvega. But then the fact that we have our karma: That’s power in our hands. This gives rise to a sense of pasāda, or confidence. We can do things so that we don’t have to suffer from aging, illness, death, and separation.

What this means is that when you reflect on the fact of aging, that your body is going to grow weak, you realize that you need to develop strength of mind, such as the five strengths, starting with conviction in the Buddha’s awakening. Conviction in the power of action. Persistence, based on that conviction, to do what is skillful. Mindfulness, concentration, discernment — qualities that develop from that persistence. These are the strengths you’ll need, strengths that you can hold on to, when the body begins to decay. So work on developing them. Ask yourself which one is weak in you, and focus on developing that.

If it’s mindfulness, learn how to keep reminding yourself again and again and again. You’ve got a topic of meditation. You don’t just sit there and melt into it and stop doing anything when you settle down. You have to keep reminding yourself, “Stay here with the breath, breath, breath, breath.”

For concentration, you’re trying to develop a broad but centered sense of the body. However long you can maintain that, maintain it. Then when you begin to fall away, go back to it again. Just keep learning how to make this more and more your habitual way of relating to your body.

As for discernment, one of the main issues in discernment has to do with the fact of illness. There’s going to be pain. How do you relate to your pains? As the Buddha said, you want to learn to relate to them in such a way that they don’t invade your mind and remain. How do they invade the mind? Through the way you perceive them — the labels you slap onto them.

So here again, you use the strengths, like the strength of concentration to get a sense of well-being in the body. It’s not the case that every part of your body is going to be in pain all at once. Find the parts that you can make comfortable through the way you breathe, through the perceptions you apply to them. Focus there. Think of whatever good breath energy you can create there or nourish there spreading to the parts of the body that are in pain, through those parts of the body, so that you don’t feel so threatened by them and so you don’t perceive the pain as blocking the flow of breath energy. You feel more brave in the face of them, knowing that if they get really bad, you have a safe place to retreat to.

And finally, you develop your discernment as to what perceptions you have around the pain, what ways of talking to yourself you have around the pain.

One really bad way is thinking about how long the pain has been in existence and wondering how much longer it’s going to last. That’s placing a huge weight on the mind in the present moment. The past pain is gone, so leave it. Future pain isn’t here. Don’t anticipate it.

As for the pain in the present, is it the same thing as the body? The same thing as your awareness? We’ve discussed many times the different ways of perceiving the pain so that you can see that the pain is one thing — actually see it as one thing — and the body is another thing. Your awareness is something else.

This has a lot to do with your perceptions, such as the perception that the pain is taking control of a part of your body, or that the pain is a big solid block. You’ve got to get through that perception by perceiving the pain as individual moments, and then perceive the individual moments as going away from you when they appear, rather than coming at you. In these ways, you can use your discernment to lighten the pain and keep it from invading the mind.

As for the issue of preparing for death, again, you’re going to need all your powers, all your strengths, to be mindful as the process of death happens. But in anticipation, think about the Buddha’s image of what happens at death. He says it’s like a fire spreading from a house and going out to set fire to something else, clinging to the wind. In the same way, he says, we cling to our cravings, so learn how to get your cravings under control.

But where that fire will go will depend a lot on your past karma. This is why we make merit, practice generosity, develop virtue, both for the happiness it brings in the present moment — as the Buddha said, these activities are happy in and of themselves — and because they create good opportunities for us in the future, so that the flames, if they flicker out, will flicker out to, say, another nice house, rather than to some forest someplace where things catch on fire and flare up into a huge conflagration. In other words, create good opportunities for yourself through developing merit. Then use your discernment, all your strengths, to make sure, at the very least, that you go to a place where you can continue to practice.

As for separation, think about the fact that there are many people you love, and when we leave one another, we don’t want to leave with regret. So cultivate the brahmavihāras and act on the* *brahmavihāras now. As the Buddha said, a way to develop a good sense of fellowship with the people you live with is through acts of goodwill, thoughts of goodwill, words of goodwill. Goodwill, goodwill, goodwill: Make that your motivation in dealing with people, so that when the time comes to go, there’s no regret. The regrets that hurt the most are the ones where you actively did something out of ill will, or hurt somebody thoughtlessly. Develop a sense of shame and compunction, being ashamed to act on unskillful motivations, and just not wanting to cause harm. Care about the effects of your actions.

This is how you use the power of your karma to develop the strengths you need, so that when aging, illness, and death come, when separation comes, you don’t have to suffer from these things. That’s the Buddha’s first aim for this reflection: heedfulness.

The second aim, though, he says, is to reflect on the fact that you’re not the only one subject to these things. Human beings are not the only ones subject to these things. Everywhere you go in the cosmos, on every level of being, there’s aging, illness, death, and separation. And there are your actions, giving results. You go to other levels of being: They may be a lot happier, but they, too, will end. The problem is that many of them — because they’re so happy, so pleasant — make you careless. Heedless. Then the power of your actions can turn against you.

That reflection, the Buddha said, should give rise to the desire to find a path out of all this. After all, what causes aging, illness, and death? Well, birth. What is it in the mind that wants to keep on taking birth? Look into that. Use the noble eightfold path, starting with the right view and on through right concentration, to figure out how you can get the mind not to want to keep on taking birth again.

So we’re not here just to accept aging, illness, death, and separation. We’re here to use that fifth contemplation, the power of our actions, so that we can prepare for aging, illness, and death when they come, so that we don’t have to suffer from them.

Ideally, we get to the point where we don’t create the conditions to cause them to keep on coming. When you reflect in that way, then the reflection is really in line with the Buddha’s aims and gives the best results of all. The mind inclines to the deathless, because that’s what the Buddha said: Ideally, the recollection of death should lead to the deathless. And it’s through understanding these five recollections correctly that it can lead to that aim.