![]() If we live our life with that kind of awareness, then when we die, we have no regrets about wasting our time or doing negative actions or things like that. When we remember death, it helps us distinguish what’s valuable from what’s not valuable in our life, what’s important and what’s not important. Why? Because we’ll have made our life very meaningful. The skull beads again remind us that what’s so critical is to be aware of death while we’re alive, because if we’re aware of death while we’re alive, then death won’t be a frightening thing. I wouldn’t take any of them to make earrings out of if they were meant for spiritual practice. But some people have prayer beads where each bead is carved into a skull. Your rosary or prayer beads can just be made of regular, rounded beads. VTC: That’s reminding us of mortality and impermanence, transience and death. Being held within that and being constantly reminded of our own mortality-that, to me, is what Yama, the Lord of Death, represents.Īudience: What about the Tibetan skull beads? I’ve seen some people taking these beads from their rosaries to wear as ornaments, such as earrings. I personally prefer the more symbolic interpretation, because to me it seems like really, our life is always overshadowed by death in the sense that we don’t have the choice to live forever. ![]() It’s interesting-the Tibetans talk about a lot of these things in a very literal way as well as in a very symbolic way. I think that’s symbolizing that death isn’t our favorite thing. Questions and answersĪudience: The Lord of Death looks very malevolent. In the upper right-hand corner, you have a picture of the Buddha pointing: he’s pointing the way to practice, pointing the way out of cyclic existence. This is showing that it’s possible to be reborn in a pure land, whereby we’re out of cyclic existence and we have all the good conditions around us to be able to practice. In the upper left corner is the pure land, and I believe the figure is Amitabha Buddha. So in a pictorial way, what we’re seeing here is that, encircled by the Lord of Death and the four tragedies of birth, old age, sickness and death, we go through this system of the 12 links, taking one rebirth after another in the six realms, sometimes going up, sometimes going down, depending upon ignorance, anger and attachment. Wheel of Life (Sanskrit: The bhavacakra Tibetan: srid pa’i ‘khor lo). The pig represents ignorance, and what’s coming from it is attachment and anger- attachment being the bird or the chicken, and anger being the snake. In the very center, you have a pig, and in its mouth, it’s holding a chicken and a snake. ![]() This shows that some beings are going to lower realms and some beings are being reborn in upper realms. ![]() And then the ring inside of that, you have some beings going down and some beings coming up. The next rim in, you’ll see it’s divided into six sections. The outermost rim is a pictorial representation of the 12 links, and I’ll get into explaining all of those next time. So it shows we’re really caught in this cyclic existence. The four limbs are birth, sickness, old age and death. Yama’s four limbs and fangs hold a wheel, which represents samsara, the five aggregates of body and mind, this thing of taking one rebirth after the next. This big demon-like figure that we see here is the Lord of Death, Yama. If you see that before going into the prayer room, it gives you some energy to concentrate when you’re doing the prayers. This drawing is really explaining samsara or cyclic existence-death, rebirth, death, rebirth, and all the confusion in the middle. ![]() This drawing is called the Wheel of Life, and it often appears on the doors to the prayer rooms in the Tibetan monastery. ![]()
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