The Buddha in the daily subject for contemplation said every practitioner should constantly reflect,

I am subject to aging illness and death. I will be separated from what is dear to me.

My life is entirely shaped by my actions.

So Marana Sati, which is the reflection on one's death,

one's mortality, one's frailty,

the Buddha was at the center of the Buddha's quest for liberation.

It said that up until he was 28, he lived in the splendor of his palace near Kapalevatsu, and then around age 28, while traveling Kupli Vatsu he came up close to first someone who was very old, someone was very sick, and finally a corpse. And this confrontation with life's inevitable

outcomes deeply shook him and essentially motivated, impelled his leaving home and his

quest for unconditional peace of mind. So I'm going to read from the Polycannon for a moment where he

talks about that. He says, while I was rich and surrounded by splendid objects and beautiful people. I was living in

ignorance for though I am mortal and not immune to death when I saw a corpse I like so many others, was horrified, as if I was oblivious to the fact that I too would die.

To be so easily horrified means I was living in an undignified way.

So I sat forth to seek liberation.

So straightforwardly, the Buddha is saying this kind of visceral disgust of death, this aversion to it, means that he was in some way delusional, as is anyone who has that kind of visceral repulsion of it

because we are all on our way to that state and in fact we are probably the only species that lives with this

narrative contemplation of our own finality. So what makes us in a way very special as a species

is the fact that we live in the shadow of our own demise.

In another suta called a Marana saithi suit, the Buddha,

it's one of my favorites, the Buddha says,

so to a gathering of practitioners,

he says, how often do you reflect on your own death?

And one practitioner says, oh, I do it at least once every day.

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