The Lord of Death

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “The Foundation of Bodhicitta”

I am going to talk to you about some of the more traditional Buddhist teachings on the sufferings of cyclic existence. (She is using a pointer with the thangka of the Wheel of Life and Death.)  I am going to use the pointer here and show you this really horrible picture. This horrible picture is horrible because above the picture we have this beastly looking thing. When you see pictures of the temple, you see that all the pictures have white scarves around them, right? Pictures have white scarves because traditionally in Tibetan Buddhism one offers a white scarf as a greeting. So we are actually greeting the image in the picture. We are greeting it, honoring it, and making an offering; but you will never see a white scarf around this picture and that is because who wants to make a greeting to the Lord of Death. That is not your favorite friend, right? This is somebody that you want to avoid. But we can’t avoid it in cyclic existence. Cyclic existence means the cycle of death and rebirth; and death and rebirth constantly occur.

One of the faults of cyclic existence is that we have doubt. We do not believe that cyclic existence occurs in the way that it does because we cannot remember our previous death.  Therefore we cannot remember our birth. If somebody didn’t tell us for absolutely sure that we were born as a tiny baby, we might not actually understand that. It is something that we are taught and we were taught to understand that. We don’t actually remember our birth. We remember our childhood maybe from two years old on. Sometimes we have crib memories that are very, very vague, but we don’t remember really coming out of our mother’s body. So we don’t really know that for sure. Likewise we don’t really know that we are going to die for sure. Intellectually we do. We are told by our parents and teachers and everybody that we come in acquaintance with that would speak in that way that we are eventually going to die. And we look around and we see that everything that has lived will also die. So from that we deduce that we are going to die, but we don’t believe it.

If we believed it, we would act differently than we do. If we believed that we really only had about seventy-five years, we would make better use of those years than we have; don’t you think? Haven’t you ever lost whole days and said to yourself, “Where did this day go?”  Well, if you don’t know where it went, then it wasn’t put to good use. It sort of slid by you. Have you ever gotten the scary idea that you don’t know where the week went? Have you ever gotten the idea that you don’t know where the summer went? That happens to me all the time. Did you ever get the idea that you don’t know where the year went? Did you ever get to be forty-two years old and you don’t know where twenty-two years went? That happened to me recently. Did that happen to you? You know that one, huh?

Sadly I spoke to my mother a while back and I asked her, “How old are you now Mom?” We were talking about that and I said, “How does it feel to be sixty-five?”   And she said, “You know sometimes I look in the mirror and I see this old lady looking back at me and she said, “I don’t know how that happened to me.”  And she had a lost quality in her voice. She said “How did that happen to me? I feel like I should still be young. How did that happen to me?”  We all come to that point where we realize that we haven’t really taken hold of our lives. We haven’t really used them. Time passes so quickly. In fact we are taught that the cycle of death and rebirth passes like a waterfall down a mountain, but still we don’t believe in our death. We do not make use of our days, of our hours, of our minutes. We do not make use of our weeks. And how much use have we made of those twenty-two years? Yeah, we have made some gains, but twenty-two years worth? Seems like if you really worked hard and consistently, you could have done a lot better.

So you deduce from the way people act that they really do not understand that death is impending. And this is one of the Buddha’s teachings. The Buddha teaches us not to get depressed. The Buddha teaches us this so that we can use our time effectively because it is our nature to waste our time; and one of the faults of cyclic existence is ignorance in that regard. We do not use our time. We do not effectively overcome the ignorance of passing through this time so quickly and not being able to use it and not really understanding that this time will pass quickly. We do not seem to understand that.

We are reborn again and again and again and we have no memory of it, so we have no way to understand that these realms of cyclic existence actually exist. Not too many of us here have been to China or the Soviet Union, but we all know for certain that we would stake our lives on the fact that these places exist. Why? Because we have some pictures of them, and we have been told that they exist. Yet many of us will not believe that these six realms of cyclic existence actually exist. The Buddha has told us that they exist. The Buddha has told us that they exist. The Buddha is enlightened. The Buddha knows better than anything, but we would believe a dumb camera that only knows what to do when we push its button. That we would believe. That doesn’t make any sense to me either. Sometimes we act like we are a little retarded, you know?

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