Death and Dying in the Vedic Tradition

SPIRITUALITY, 22 Apr 2024

Giriraj Swami – TRANSCEND Media Service

A talk by Giriraj Swami to the doctors and nurses of San Diego Hospice and The Institute for Palliative Medicine in 2005.

It is a great pleasure for me to address you all here, especially because this hospice is recognized as one of the best and largest in the world and as the global leader in hospice education.

yam yam vapi smaran bhavam
tyajaty ante kalevaram
tam tam evaiti kaunteya
sada tad-bhava-bhavitah

“Whatever state of being one remembers when he quits his body, O son of Kunti, that state he will attain without fail.” (Gita 8.6)

anta-kale ca mam eva
smaran muktva kalevaram
yah prayati sa mad-bhavam
yati nasty atra samsayah

“And whoever, at the end of his life, quits his body remembering Me alone at once attains My nature. Of this there is no doubt.” (Gita 8.5)

In 1969, when I was a student of psychology at Brandeis University, I met my spiritual teacher, Srila A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. In 1970, after studying with him for a year and a half, I went with him to India, and I was based there for the next thirty years. And in 1977 my spiritual master, as our instructor, taught us by his example how to leave the world in proper consciousness. He retired to Vrindavan, a holy place in India, and surrounded himself with devotees who were always chanting or reading to him from sacred literature. Being in such a holy place was itself conducive to spiritual consciousness, to God-consciousness. And the atmosphere was enhanced by loving disciples singing songs of the Lord and reading books about Him.

Some years later, one of my students, who was older than I, was diagnosed with cancer. She was a renowned artist from South Africa who would travel all over the world to find subjects for painting. At one point, she decided that she wanted to combine her spiritual interests with her artwork, so she bought a plot of land in the same holy place, Vrindavan, to establish a studio, and she was kind enough to build a floor upstairs for me, for when I would visit. Although the doctors had given her six months, she actually lived for three years. For the last two or three months of her life, I was with her almost constantly because the goal—not just in the Vedic tradition but in others as well—is to think of God, or to chant the name of God, or at least to hear the name chanted, at the time of death, and I wanted to help her do that.

During the years when I was based in India, I would travel frequently to Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and in Pakistan I came across a book called The Ninety-nine Names of Allah. There is a similar work in Sanskrit called The Thousand Names of Vishnu (another name for Krishna), the Vishnu-sahasra-nama. In The Ninety-nine Names of Allah there is a section about how a pious Muslim should meet death. The best thing a dying Muslim’s friends and relatives can do, the book states, is chant the names of God and help the loved one to either chant or at least hear others chant the name of God at the final moment. There is a similar tradition in the Jewish religion, in which the ideal is that at the time of death the family and friends are chanting the name of God, or reciting a prayer that contains the name of God. So I saw that the same tradition we have in Vedic philosophy, in Krishna consciousness, is also there in Islam and Judaism, and it is there in other traditions as well.

So, with my student we followed the same practice that we had seen our spiritual master follow, and devotees would come and chant. The chanting can be done individually in a quiet, meditative way or communally and more loudly, with musical instruments. The whole idea is to help the person fix his or her consciousness on the Supreme and keep it fixed in the Supreme at the time of death. And along with the chanting is the reading and talking about God-consciousness.

In Vedic culture the time of death is considered the final test. In school we attend lectures, complete assignments, take quizzes, and write the mid-term, but whether or not we graduate depends on whether we pass the final examination. So, in life, the time of death is considered the final examination, and passing the final examination means thinking of God. That is why the whole focus at the time of death is to help the person remember God. And the other activities we perform during our lives, besides freeing us from activities that will result in our taking birth again, are practice for thinking of God. And we get little tests along the way—sicknesses, setbacks, and various hardships. When we face them, do we remember God, or do we look only for material solutions? These are the tests along the way. And then the time of death is the final examination, and if we can remember God then, we graduate. We are free: no more material bodies, no more repetition of birth and death.

Lady (1): In the work we do we are often looking at physical pain. Should medication to alleviate physical pain and suffering be discouraged? Would it interfere with consciousness at the time of death?

Giriraj Swami: Very good question. The goal is to remember God at the time of death. So our general approach is that we want to take enough medication so that the pain is not so excruciating that our consciousness is just absorbed in the pain. But at the same time, we do not want to take so much medication that it dulls us to the point that we cannot really think of God. That is the delicate balance we try to achieve.

Gentleman (1): Is remembering God just saying the name or thinking the name of God, or is it something else—coming back into a state of divine consciousness where one actually feels a connection with God?

Giriraj Swami: Okay, so what do we mean when we talk about remembering God? God is a person. That is the first point. He is not a person like you and me, who have bodies made of flesh and bone. He is transcendental. But He is a person. The Bible says, “Man is made in the image of God.” We are persons, and so our supreme father or mother must also be a person. This is a difficult point, because we are so conditioned by the material concept of personality that when we hear about God’s personality we think in terms of our material conception. Sometimes people think, “If you say that God is a person, you are limiting Him.” For example, I am sitting here. Because I am sitting here, I cannot be in the temple at Pacific Beach; I cannot be at my ashram in Santa Barbara. But God—He is a person, but He is in this room, He is in the temple in Pacific Beach, He is in Santa Barbara, He is in our hearts, He is in every molecule and every atom. But He is still a person.

Here I would like to use the example of a person who holds a high office, but today’s politicians are all so controversial that it is hard to come up with a good example. So let us imagine a country,the president of a country. The term president describes his office. But there is also the person who occupies the office. And that person has a name, an appearance, and personal qualities; the person engages in certain activities. So when we remember the president . . . yes, there are things about the office that we consider, but to really remember the president means to know his name, his form, his features, his qualities, his activities, his associates. So, God, too, has a name—He has many names. And He has a form—many forms. And He has many qualities and engages in many activities.

The real goal is to love God, because when you love God, you will naturally think of Him. Anytime you love someone, you will naturally think of him or her. So that is the goal—to develop love for God. And out of love, you will be thinking of His beautiful form, His sublime qualities, His wonderful activities. You will like to repeat His name, just as one would repeat the name of a loved one, and you will think how best you can serve Him and please Him.

But how can we know God well enough that we can actually come to love Him? Well, one distinction between Vedic literatures and other scriptures is that the Vedas give more details about the Personality of Godhead. They describe not just that He is the supreme authority, the creator, the maintainer, the destroyer, and the protector, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent—which He is—but also His personal attributes: His names, His forms, His qualities, and His activities. And when one comes to know Him in a more personal way and develops affection and attachment—love—for Him in a personal relationship, it is very easy to think of Him all the time, and very natural to think of Him at the time of death.

Gentleman (2): As hospice workers, we work with the families of patients and deal a lot with the grief, the loss of the soul in this body that they have enjoyed in the physical context. It seems that after a loved one’s death, a family member could hear the name of God or think of the name of God, but because we’re outside of that person, we don’t know what he or she is actually feeling. So in what ways can we bring comfort and assurance to the family members? How can we support them in their grief and the loss of their loved one?

Giriraj Swami: The first instruction of the Bhagavad-gita, which is also a central principle in many other traditions, is that the person is not the body. The person is the soul living in the body. When the person leaves the body, we say that the person is dead, but actually the body was never really alive; it was just animated by the presence of the soul. At the moment the soul leaves the body, all the elements of the body are still there, lying on the bed. You may lament: “Oh, my husband is gone.” “My wife is gone.” But why do you say they are gone? The body is lying on the bed. You might have thought that the body was your husband or your wife or your father or your mother, but when they pass away, you say, “Oh, my father is gone.” “My mother is gone.” But the body is still there. So why do you say they are gone? Intuitively, we know that the person was not the body. That loved one is something other than the body that he or she now has left; that person is the soul.

When a person has led a good life, and even more so when he or she has tried to develop a relationship with God and to hear the name of God and think of God at the time of death, we can be assured that the person will go to a better destination. So there are many emotions. There is the sense of personal loss, that the person whom we loved and with whom we shared so many good times is gone. Out of love, there is also concern. Where is the person now? But if we know that the person has gone to a better place, we feel solace. And in painful illnesses such as cancer, we may also think, “All right—the soul has left this body, and I am sad about that, but this body had become very difficult. It had become a painful place for the soul to inhabit, so it is actually better that the person has gone elsewhere.” The person, the soul, continues to exist. He or she has gone to live somewhere else, where there will be less pain and suffering.

Still, we do not deny the sense of personal loss. Even among transcendentalists there are various emotions. When a perfect yogi leaves the body, we know that the person is qualified to enter the kingdom of God, so we are happy. We are both—happy and sad. We are happy because we know that the person has gone to God, to serve God, but we are sad because we will miss his or her association. Still, such departed souls, we believe, can inspire and guide their loved ones who remain behind.

Then there is also the idea that God is responsive to prayer. So if a loved one leaves the body, we know that the soul exists somewhere. We don’t know where, but we want to help the soul, because we love that person. So we can pray to God, “Wherever my mother is now”—or “my father” or whoever—“please be merciful. Please help her come closer to You.” And I believe that those prayers will help the departed soul, and they will also give us a chance to continue our relationship with our loved one and to try and help our loved one even after he or she has left the body.

Then there are the bereaved’s own spiritual practices—chanting or meditation or prayer or whatever. Yes, we are attached to our loved one and we are sorry because we will miss our loved one, but through chanting or prayer or meditation we come in contact with God. Of course, in the initial stage the bereaved may be too distraught. But then when we do engage in some practice that will bring us in touch with God, we feel, “God is there. It is all right. God is taking care. My real relationship is with God. By God’s grace I can gain His shelter in the future.”

Dr. Bharadwaj: Many patients ask, “Why is this happening to me? Is God punishing me?” and this causes a lot of spiritual suffering. How would you approach this?

Giriraj Swami: If someone is suffering from a terminal disease, I would not get into the idea that God is angry with the person or is punishing him. Rather, I would say, “Anyone who takes birth in a material body has to die.” That is the point. “Birth, disease, old age, and death are inevitable for every conditioned soul. It may be this disease or that, it maybe this symptom of old age or that, or it maybe this or that way to death. But these factors are there for everyone. And now that you are in this position, you should use what time you have to develop your relationship with God, so that you do not have to take birth in another material body and suffer through the same cycle again.”

As for the issue of suffering, on the material platform its value is that it burns up bad karma. That is why many Hindus prefer to tolerate rather than protest, because they know that by tolerating their suffering they are exhausting their sinful reactions, and they feel that they would rather get it over with than try to postpone it and then have to suffer their bad karma later in another form. That is on the material platform. On the spiritual platform, the benefit is that suffering can serve to make us more detached from the body and from the world. We are trying to become transcendentalists, but we still have material attachments. So when there is some upheaval or calamity we think, “Yes, actually the material world is not a happy place. I should not be spending my energy trying to make it happy, because by nature it is not a happy place. I should be using my energy to realize God and get out of here.” Lord Krishna confirms in the Bhagavad-gita, duhkhalayam asasvatam: “This material world is a place of misery, and it is temporary.”

Dr. Bharadwaj: A lot of patients fear that bad karma is causing their suffering.

Giriraj Swami: Well, it may be. Our teacher gave the example of someone drowning and another person coming along in a boat to rescue him. The drowning person says, “Now, wait a minute. How did I get here in the first place?” But that is not the point here.The rescuer would say, “Don’t worry about the past; we can talk about that later. You are drowning. Just get in the boat!” So we are drowning in this body, in this samsara, this ocean of repeated births and deaths. Let us not worry how we got here. Let us try to get out. And it is never too late. That is power of God’s name and God’s mercy. It is never too late. There are stories in the Vedic literature of people who were very sinful but at the last moment chanted God’s name and were delivered. So it is never too late. That is the main point.

Lady (3): A lot of our patients never make it to old age, and it’s very difficult for everybody—the patient’s family and us—when they seem to not complete, in our perception, their life. What’s the approach to that?

Giriraj Swami: Their destiny is caused by their activity, their karma. For whatever reason, they did something that is causing them to leave the body before the normal time. But the positive side—we always have to see the positive, the spiritual side—is that, depending on the circumstance, a younger person may be better equipped to think of God at the time of death than an older one who has lost more of his or her faculties. In fact, there is a Sanskrit prayer:

krsna tvadiya-pada-pankaja-panjarantam
adyaiva me visatu manasa-raja-hamsah
prana-prayana-samaye kapha-vata-pittaih
kanthavarodhana-vidhau smaranam kutas te

This may seem contrary to our Western, materialistic culture, which is so preoccupied with pampering and preserving the body, with staying in the body as long as possible squeezing out of it the last possible drop of pleasure. This prayer, in opposition to that mad pursuit, offers a more philosophical perspective. In it the devotee prays to the Lord, “My dear Krishna, please let me die immediately so that the swan of my mind may be encircled by the stem of Your lotus feet. Otherwise, at the time of my final breath, when my throat is choked up, how will it be possible for me to remember You and chant Your holy name?” That is another perspective on dying before old age—one that is positive and spiritual.

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From Back to Godhead Magazine

Giriraj Swami, born 17 Sep 1947 in Chicago, graduated in psychology from Brandeis cum laude and wrote (among other books), Life’s Final Exam: Death and Dying from the Vedic Perspective. In 1972, he led the development of the Vrindavan Institute of Palliative Care in Vrindavan, India, for ISKCON.

Go to Original – iskcondesiretree.com

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