Meditations on Death: The Ways of Confrontation with Impermanence in Theravāda Buddhism and Influences on the Kagyu School

The paper begins by shedding light on various aspects of the conception of death in early Indian Theravāda Buddhism and outlines the seemingly paradoxical status of death, which has been identified as the source of all sorts of human miseries on the one hand, and as the most vital part of the soteriological strategies of overcoming all afflictions on the other. The first chapter briefly outlines the Buddha’s confrontation with his own impermanence and the strategies for overcoming the fear of death that are presented in several texts of early Buddhism, while the second chapter is devoted to a more detailed elaboration of the two fundamental meditations on death, maraṇasati and asubhabhāvana, which reflect not only on the inevitability of death and its absolute finality, but also how it gives meaning to the life itself. The discussion in the third chapter is based on a study of selected texts from the Pali canon and Buddhaghosa’s in­terpretations in the Visuddhimagga, which represents a systematisation of the earliest Buddhist meditation methods for cultivating a profound awareness of impermanence. In the last part, the paper addresses the significance of these soteriological methods in the context of the Buddhist eremitic tradition in Buddhism Vajrayāna and the Kagyu school.