Cover of Big Love: The Live and Teachings of Lama Yeshe

How to deal with and prepare for the death of a loved one, and how to take care of a dying person—including oneself—are topics both Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave several teachings on over the years, and they both stressed that death education is essential learning and practice for all of us. 

Adele Hulse, the author of Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe, and a popular journalist, recounted how the news of her father’s death brought her to a clear awareness of impermanence. Today we share this profound excerpt from Big Love (Volume 1, pp. 333-334), which gives insight into Lama Yeshe’s unique style of reaching students around the topic of death: 

In early March [1974] the lamas returned to Nepal and met the Australian journalist Adele Hulse. She had been in Boudha, the area around the monumental stupa located a forty-minute walk from Kopan hill, since before Christmas. “Having spent eleven years in Catholic boarding schools in Australia,” Adele explained, “religion was the last thing on my mind. I wasn’t keen on Californian ‘Boodhists’ jangling their beads and mumbling about their ‘gooroo.’ Then a telegram arrived with the news of my father’s death. Standing outside the Kathmandu post office I suddenly realized I too was going to die one day. The words exploded in my brain: ‘He’s dead. You’re next.’ I looked around me at the people in the street and saw that they too would die.

“I returned to the house full of the ‘sophisticated’ hippies I hung around with, but now they seemed childish—they just wanted me to smoke opium and forget about it. I didn’t want to forget about it. I yearned to talk to someone sensible and knew the ‘gooroo’ on Kopan hill spoke English. On my way up there I ran into the English girl everyone said was crazy. I had met her before in a tea shop and she seemed fine to me. She asked me why I was crying and when I explained she clapped her hands and said, ‘Perfect! The lamas can do puja for him and transfer his mind into a pure realm.’ What?

“When I arrived at Kopan, Yeshe Khadro took me to Lama Yeshe’s room. ‘Tell me about your father,’ he said. I explained he was a truly wretched war-damaged alcoholic who had singled me out for consistently vicious treatment all my life. ‘You want to help him?’ he asked. I said I did, and the girl everyone called crazy had said something about pujas and mind transfers but I didn’t believe in such stuff. ‘Doesn’t matter you believe or you don’t believe,’ he said. ‘Fact is, you are his daughter and you want to help. That’s all we need. But it should happen on a special day, an auspicious day, so we should do later. Now you tell me—can you visualize your father?’ He said ‘bisualize.’ I certainly could—that huge red and purple head, the stink of alcohol, the ever-present threat of abuse and violence.

“So, you should try to see him in the worst suffering aspect, most drunk, most angry, that one. Put that picture in your heart. Then think that through a hole in the crown of your head comes white radiating light from Lord Buddha; it comes down through your heart and washes your father, purifying him of all negativities and sufferings. You think you can do that? Good. So you practice that now as much as possible and come back in four days and we’ll do puja. You will need to pay for small offerings. Yeshe Khadro, she will tell you. OK, dear, goodbye for now,’ he said.

“Considerably cheered, I went to see Yeshe Khadro again. She said that when she told Lama my father had died and I wanted to see him, he had said, ‘Yes, dear, everything that is born must die.’ That was exactly what I had realized when I had read the telegram. I had met my guru and I wasn’t even looking for one.

“Four days later I came back with some money in white envelopes for the officiating lamas and more to pay for tea and ‘gompa buns,’ as they were called. It all cost very little. The gompa was full of boys and Injis. Lama Lhundrup was umdze and Lama Zopa Rinpoche sat on the throne. Lama Yeshe had a big bundle of burning incense in his hand and walked around throughout the ceremony. I thought it was what he always did, because it was my very first puja. I later learned it was most unusual. While cymbals crashed and the incomprehensible rhythmic chanting went on and on, I just sat and did the ‘bisualization’ thing Lama Yeshe had taught me. I didn’t understand anything but felt so comfortable there—and afterward so happy and, somehow, useful. I decided to do the course that was coming up, not because I thought Lama Yeshe was nice, not because I wanted to be a Buddhist—I was busy enough trying not to be a Catholic—but because I knew it required mental discipline and would help me decide if there really was anything more exciting in life than acid and black Nepalese temple ball hashish.

“Over the next two weeks I continued to visualize my father as instructed and noted that he seemed to appear younger, healthier. He was back to looking as he had in his wedding photos. Was I imagining all this? By this time I’d been at the course for a while and discovered I had almost no powers of concentration. Then one day I couldn’t conjure him up. No matter how hard I ‘bisualized,’ he didn’t come back.

“I never had to seek out Lama Yeshe as he always just appeared in front of me whenever I felt like talking to him. When I told him my powers of concentration had completely deserted me, he looked deeply into my eyes, bumped his forehead against mine and said, ‘Gone now. Reborn.’ So I stopped trying. I didn’t know what to make of it all but felt good about my father for the first time in my life.”

Excerpted from  Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe by Adele Hulse. Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive, 2020, pp. 333-334.

Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe is published as a set of two 700-page hardcover volumes in a slipcase with over 1,550 photographs, maps and other illustrations, full color throughout. This is essential reading for FPMT history! 

Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche with Yeshe Khadro (Marie Obst) as their attendant blessing the prayer-flag pole, Chenrezig Institute, Australia, 1976. Adele Hulse is pictured directly to the left of Lama Yeshe. Photo courtesy of the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche on the Importance of Death Education

In 1983, Lama Yeshe gave one of his most direct teachings on impermanence, shortly before he passed away the following year. During the seminar in Geneva called Life, Death and After Death, from which a free e-book has been published by the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive, Lama highlights how important it is to understand how the mind works, including during the process of dying:

“It’s essential that you educate yourself in this. If you do, you’ll have no fear that dying is horrible, like falling into a black hole; that death’s a black hole that’s going to suck you in and eat you up. From the moment we were born we’ve been destined for death. We think that dying is a big deal, worse than losing a job, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, husband or wife. That’s the wrong attitude. We think that dying is negative, but that’s just our projection Death is better than a flower, for example. A flower cannot give you tremendous peace and bliss. It can give you something, but not that. Death, however, can give you both: tremendous peace and tremendous bliss. Death is better than your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife because they give you very little bliss. They cannot truly solve your problems. They can alleviate emotional anxiety momentarily, perhaps, but not for long. At the moment of death, however, all anxiety and other emotional problems are totally cut off for a long period of time.”

Lama Zopa Rinpoche also emphasized: “that a complete education about death is the most important education we can have. What death is, how we die, what minds we need at death, and what happens after death—only by knowing about death and rebirth can we actually fully understand what life is and so learn how to live fully. In the West, such questions are generally not studied. What happens at the very beginning of this life and at the end are like two big black holes; there is no clarity. Even if there are some scientific explanations, these are based on hypotheses, not on personal experience. It seems that if scientists cannot verify something with their instruments, it doesn’t exist for them. They can explain how, at death, the cells break down and the brain stops functioning, but they cannot go beyond that, and they can never address the real question of what happens to us at death.” From How to Live and Die: The Transformative Power of Meditating on Impermanence by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Wisdom Publications, 2025.

Please explore more resources about death available to you: https://fpmt.org/death/

Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), is a Tibetan Buddhist organization dedicated to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation and community service.