To Die Without Grief

Close your eyes and be aware of your breath. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Focus your attention there. Take some long breathing and see if long breathing feels good. Then try short breathing and then see which feels better.

The same with heavy, light; fast, slow; deep or shallow. Train yourself to be aware of the breath, of how it feels, and of what kind of breathing is going to feel good right now. If you want the mind to settle down, you have to give it a good place to settle. It’s when the mind is settled down like this that you can start seeing things clearly.

Today we’re making merit for a person who’s passed away. The Buddha said that when you see someone who’s passed away or think of someone who’s passed away, you remind yourself, someday you’re going to do that, too. And the question is, are you ready?

Once he was asked, “What do you do so that you don’t grieve when you die?” And he said, “Develop four qualities.”

One of them is generosity: being generous with your things, being generous with your time, your knowledge, your energy, your forgiveness.

But you also develop other qualities as well.

The quality of truthfulness: This means not only telling the truth, but also when you make up your mind to do something, you stick with it. You really do it—like when you’re meditating here right now. You could just be sitting here with your mind wandering around someplace else. Or you could be very active in bringing it back, bringing it back, so that it stays with the breath. So try to be true in the goodness you’re doing.

The third quality is self-control. When something comes up—anger comes up, or greed comes up—try to control your emotions. Even if you can’t stop them from coming up in the mind, you don’t have to act on them. All too often, we act on our anger to “get it out of our system,” and afterwards, we regret what we said or did.

Well, the next time you’re angry, remind yourself: Don’t say anything; don’t do anything under the power of the anger. Show some control. That way, when you look back on your actions, at the very least you were able to put a fence around your house so that the animals in the house don’t go out and bother the neighborhood.

And you get more and more clear on the fact that you’ve got to do something about these animals inside your house. Otherwise, they’re going to create trouble. If you just let them wander around, you figure out, well, it doesn’t matter. You’re going to get used to not seeing them, used to not understanding what you’re doing. So have some self-control.

And finally the quality of stamina: This is when you have some endurance. There’s going to be pain in life, there’s going to be unfortunate things in life. This is a common feature of the human world. If everything were just wonderful in the human world, it wouldn’t be the human world—it’d be a deva world. Everybody who’s born here has a mixed bag of karma.

So expect that there will be unpleasant things happening. But you can prepare yourself by strengthening yourself, teaching yourself how, when something really painful comes up, you don’t have to focus on the pain. Focus on the parts of your life that are still comfortable and easeful. Gain some strength from those so that you can stand up to the pain.

The same with unpleasant words that people say: Try to depersonalize them. Don’t make them point at you. Just remind yourself that those words are that person’s karma. As far as you’re concerned, they’re just a noise that hits the ear and is gone. And if you make yourself suffer beyond that, then it’s not what the other person did. It’s what you’re doing that’s making you suffer. When you understand this principle, you can endure lots of things that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to endure.

All of this comes under wisdom and the ability to not just to have pleasant feelings come to you, but realizing that you have to prepare yourself for the unfortunate things of the world. And you’ve got the strength where you can stand up to them. That way, you look back on your behavior as you go through life and you realize you haven’t harmed anybody. You haven’t acted under the power of your defilements.

So when the time comes to go, you can look back, and you can see you’ve left good things in the world. And you’ve prepared good things in the next world for yourself. That’s how you can face death without grieving: knowing that you’ve done good in this world, and the good that you’ve done will follow you wherever you go.