Lessons In Practical Buddhism - Sirimangalo.Org

great suffering. This is a danger that even in this lifetime
can be avoided, the danger of suffering because of old age,
sickness and death. If we’re not ready for cancer and then
we happen to fall victim to cancer, or diabetes, heart
disease, sickness that comes from old age, or even simple
aliments like a cold or a flu, then when they come they will
bring great suffering. More importantly, if we’re not ready
for death, then when death comes it will of course bring
great suffering; if we’re not ready to leave, if we’re afraid of
death, if we are not able to come to terms with the dying
process then it too will bring great suffering.
We can see that often the danger in all of these things does
not come from any sort of craving or attachment, it simply
comes from not understanding them. For instance, by not
understanding death, not knowing what to expect, not being
able to come to terms with what’s happening at the time of
death, when we die we die confused and afraid, simply
because we are not able to process the phenomena that are
coming into our minds; not able to deal with the
impermanence, with the new, the unusual, the unexpected.
In the practice of meditation we work at breaking our
experience down into its ultimate reality. When we say
“rising, falling” or when we have pain and say “pain, pain” or
when thinking, “thinking”, or “afraid”, or “angry”, or “upset”,
or “confused” whenever these arise, when we break
experience down into what is truly real, then in the end
anything that arises, no matter how strange or unexpected it
may be, it becomes something very easy to deal with. At the
time of dying there are still the same phenomena as
throughout the life; even though the content may be
different, there are still just moment-to-moment experiences
of seeing, hearing, etc. At the time of sickness there is the
same pain, aching, and discomfort that we have experienced
countless times before, even though it may be of a different
degree or frequency. Most importantly, we don’t cling to
concepts like “I have cancer” or “I am dying”, staying
focused at a level of ultimate reality: “there is pain,” “there
is fear,” “there is anger,” “there is upset,” “there is worry,”
and so on, by simply saying to ourselves, for example,
“worried, worried” or “afraid, afraid”. When we remember to
respond in this way, we aren’t caught off guard by what
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