Mindfulness of Death

This morning we received news that a member of our extended community passed away yesterday. She was the artist who did the tiles in the library and the restrooms here in the kitchen complex and over in the guest house. And she was planning to do more tiles for the new meditation hall. But death came.

It makes you stop and think about your plans for the future. You never really know how much longer you’re going to be around. This is why the Buddha recommends contemplation of death—but not just the fact of death or the fact that death could come soon. You think about death to remind yourself there’s work to be done, and you don’t know how much time you have to do it. But you do have time right now.

There’s so much talk about how the Buddha focused on the present moment as something wonderful, as an end in itself. But when he talks about the present moment, it’s almost always in the context of death contemplation. There were the monks who told the Buddha that they would think of death once a day, twice a day, three times a day. Finally there was one monk who said, “I think of death each time I breathe in, each time I breathe out. ‘May I live to breathe one more time. I could accomplish quite a lot in that time.’”

And the Buddha said that, of all the monks, only that last one was heedful. Because you realize, where else are you going to do the work? When else are you going to do the work? You keep putting it off, finding excuses not to practice. The day will come when you don’t have any more opportunity.

So. Take advantage of the opportunity you have right now: this breath right here, right now. What are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with your mind? Because that’s where the real problem is. The problem is not the breath. It’s the mind.

Sometimes you hear that if you were to breathe calmly and openly throughout the whole body, there would be no clinging in the mind. That’s not the case. You can breathe calmly and clearly, and cling to that. You can cling to all kinds of things, even as your breath is really smooth coming in, smooth going out. We get the breath smooth so that we can turn around and look at the real source of the trouble, which is in the mind. “Why is my mind creating all these issues? What can I do to stop?”

The Buddha is telling us with the four noble truths that what you’re doing right now is causing suffering. There’s something you’re doing wrong, and you want to learn to see what it is that you’re doing wrong so that you can do it right. Bring knowledge to the way you put together your sense of the present moment. Then you can turn the present moment from just an ordinary moment that’s passed, passed, passed into something that can make a real change, make a real difference.

So keep your focus where it really needs to be. In that way, you get the most out of each breath as it comes.