Here Buddhist nun Ayya Khema guides listeners to see with clarity the impermanent nature of conditioned phenomena.
The Buddha's last words of advice:
Then the Blessed One addressed the monks, "Now, then, monks, I exhort you: All fabrications are subject to decay. Bring about completion by being heedful." Those were the Tathagata's last words.
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“When I was a very little boy I learned that I must die, and I set that down, so of course, I am not disappointed now. Death is as near to you as it is to me.”
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
~ Henry David Thoreau
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“He who in autumn does not provide for the coming winter
Is considered a fool.
The Dharma alone will help us when we die, and we know that death is certain-
So not to practice it now is utterly foolish.”
~ Gyalse Thogme, quoted by Dilgo Khyentse in The Heart of Compassion, The Thirty-Seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva
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Our birth and death are just one thing. You can't have one without the other. It's a little funny to see how at a death people are so tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It's delusion. I think if you really want to cry. Then it would be better to do so when someone is born. Cry at the root, for if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this?
If you trained properly, you wouldn't feel frightened when you fall sick, nor upset when someone dies. When you go into the hospital for treatment, determine in your mind that if you get better, that's fine, and that if you die, that's fine, too. I guarantee you that if the doctors told me I had cancer and was going to die in a few months. I'd remind the doctors, " Watch out, because death is coming to get you, too. It's just a question of who goes first and who goes later. " Doctors are not going to cure death or prevent death. Only the Buddha was such a doctor, so why not go ahead and use the Buddha's medicine?
You'd think that people could appreciate what it would be like to live in a person's belly. How uncomfortable that would be! Just look at how merely staying in a hut for only one day is already hard to take. You shut all the doors and windows and you're suffocating already. How would it be to lie in a person's belly for nine months? Yet you want to be born again! You know it wouldn't be comfortable in there, and yet you want to sick your head right in there, to put your neck in the noose once again.
The "One Who Knows" clearly knows that all conditioned phenomena are unsubstantial. So this "One Who Knows" does not become happy or sad, for it does not follow changing conditions. To become glad, is to be born; to becomes dejected, is to die. Having died, we are born again; having been born. we die again . This birth and death from one moment to the next is the endless spinning wheel of samsara.
If you ask me: Is there a next life after death? Can you show it to me?
I will ask you: Is there tomorrow? If yes, can you show it to me?
~Quotes by Ajahn Chah
For more guided meditation with Ayya Khema: ayyakhematalks.org/Contemplati...
May all beings see clearly into the nature of conditioned phenomena and live in understanding and happiness, free from attachment, clinging and grasping.