What happens when I die?

What happens when I die?

This is the sharpest contrast in the course, and also the least abstract. After five sessions of aggregates, storehouses and emptiness, both traditions now do something completely concrete — and they do opposite things.

The Southern tradition sets you an exercise. Every day, for years, you are to hold in mind that an executioner is standing behind you with a sword already at your neck. The Northern tradition hands you a vow made by a buddha: if, at the hour of your death, I do not appear before you, may I never have become a buddha at all.

That last point is the finding of this session, and it is easy to miss because the two methods look so unlike each other. Watch for it: both texts name the same thing as the danger, in almost the same words.

Chapter 8 of the Visuddhimagga is a manual of six recollections, and the first of them is maraṇassati — the recollection of death. It is not a contemplation of death in general. It is a set of eight specified approaches, each with its own images, to be used until the mind steadies on the object.

Read the opening of the chapter through the eight approaches and the benefits section. You can stop before the thirty-two-part body contemplation that follows, which is a different exercise.

The Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha is the long Pure Land sūtra, and its centre is a list of forty-eight vows made by a monk named Dharmākara before he became the buddha Amitābha. Each one has the same form and it is worth noticing: if such-and-such does not happen, may I never attain awakening at all. Every vow is a wager staked on the buddha's own buddhahood.

Read the forty-eight vows in full — they are short — and then the three grades of rebirth.

Come back when you have read both sides. The rest of this page assumes you have.

1 · The executioner is not a metaphor for danger

Note the reason given, because it is not the one you expect. The executioner is not standing there because the world is dangerous or because accidents happen. He is standing there because he arrived with you — "it has come together with birth." The mushroom cannot push up without lifting soil; a being cannot be born without carrying its own ageing and death upward with it. There is no version of you that did not include this.

And the sun and the river make the same point about direction. Never turning back even slightly. Buddhaghosa quotes a verse: "The young creature that dwells in the womb / for even a single first night — / he goes on, having already set out; / going on, he does not turn back."

The other seven approaches are variations of pressure. "A body shared by many" is the most physically unpleasant and the most useful: eighty families of worms live in you, and "there they are born, there they age, there they die" — your body is "their maternity house, their sick-ward, their charnel ground, their latrine." Then the image that generalises it: "just as, when a target is set up at a crossroads, arrows, spears, javelins, stones, and the like, coming from every direction, fall upon it, so too every calamity falls upon the body."

And "without any fixed sign" is the one that removes the last handhold. Five things, the text says, are without any determination at all: how long you will live, what you will die of, when, where your body will fall, and where you go next. Not one of them is knowable. The exercise is not to accept death in the abstract; it is to give up every remaining assumption about its shape.

2 · The vow, and what makes its form remarkable

Look at the grammatical form rather than the content, because it is the form that carries the weight. 不取正覺 — may I not attain to true awakening. Every one of the forty-eight vows ends this way.

This is not a promise of help. It is a conditional self-disqualification. Dharmākara is saying: my own buddhahood is void if this fails. So if there is a buddha called Amitābha at all — and the sūtra's entire narrative is that there is — then by the logic of his own vow, the thing must hold. The tradition's confidence rests on that structure, not on sentiment.

Two honest notes, both from the sūtra's own page. Vow 18's exclusion clause — the five heinous transgressions and slander of the Dharma — "sits in visible tension" with other passages, and the sūtra does not resolve it. And the later elevation of vow 18 above the rest as "the King of Vows" is Hōnen's, in twelfth-century Japan; this sūtra does not rank its vows against one another at all.

3 · The same minute, and the same enemy

Now the thing worth the whole session. Put the two texts' own statements of what they are for side by side.

Which is why these two do not combine, and why the attempt to blend them usually produces something weaker than either. The Southern method works by removing every assumption you have about your death — no fixed sign, remember: not the time, not the cause, not the place, not the destination. The Northern method works by supplying exactly one assumption and asking you to stake everything on it. You cannot practise both on the same afternoon.

The honest thing to say — and this course will not say more than this — is that both are addressed to the same failure, both have very large numbers of practitioners who report them working, and neither has ever persuaded the other.

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