There is a lot I could say about the Visuddhimagga. For our purposes, I’ll keep it simple: It’s a meditation manual that covers the entirety of the monastic Theravadin Buddhist path as it was laid out in fifth-century Sri Lanka. The death contemplations presented seem to be adapted from another ancient meditation manual, the Vimuttimagga (Path of Freedom). I first encountered the Visuddhimagga and these contemplations while living at the Bhavana Society in the summer of 2002 and they had a profound impact on my life at the time. That said, many people find these contemplations hard to penetrate and find the details of them confusing and distracting. What’s all this about worms, after all?
When I first was considering this project, it was clear that I’d need to make these contemplations more accessible to a modern lay audience in the West. My intent has been to take the pith of each contemplation and present it in a way that my contemporaries would easily be able to “get” and run with. It’s worth saying that I don’t have the final word on this – it’s possible that you will connect more with the original forms of the eight contemplations than you will to mine. Or it’s possible that you’ll find a better way to present them. (And if you do, I’d love to hear about it!) Most of my changes have been relatively minor. I’ve rearranged the contemplations’ order slightly, broadened the scope of the first contemplation, and retooled the fifth to be about more than internal sharing of death. I’ve focused the fourth contemplation to include the traditional five elements to make its complexity more organized, and presented the eighth with an angle toward mindfulness. It’s my hope, as I say above, that these contemplations will be beneficial to you and to our planet.