Sit or lie down, and give up absolutely everything, as if you were dead.1 That's it. No remaining concern for your body, none for your mind, nothing held back.1 Do that and you'll eventually get some mental emptiness, and eventually the absorbed stillness the tradition calls samādhi.1
It's described as easy to do — and hardly anybody will practise it, because almost everybody is afraid to die.2 Which sounds silly when you say it out loud, and the text says so: it sounds silly to hear that people are afraid to pretend they can give everything up.2 But it's true, and it's why one of the quickest roads to the highest stages sits there unused.2
This is number ten of ten. Shakyamuni sorted the world's practice methods into ten broad classes, and mindfulness of death is the last of them.3 And then the correction, which is the whole reason for this page: it should actually be the first and foremost, because it contains all the crucial elements of an exercise that leads to real attainment.3
So a scheme puts a method last, and the same passage says the ordering is wrong. That's an unusually direct thing for a tradition to say about its own inherited list, and it isn't hedged.
Here's where the method is most likely to be got wrong, and the distinction is exact. You do not engage your imagination. You don't picture yourself dead, because imagining you're dead means holding onto a mental image, which is what mandala and visualisation exercises do.4
What you do instead: you sit or lie there discarding body and mind altogether, and you ignore all the mental and physical changes that end up happening — because they don't belong to you any more and aren't relevant.4 You're dead, so you don't need to pay attention to any of it for any reason.4 You're free of the body and of your past life of concerns and worries, so none of it matters now.4
The difference matters because the two look similar from outside and are opposite inside. A visualisation gives the mind an object and asks it to hold on. This asks it to let go of every object including the one it would use to do the holding. In practising that you're dead, you can abandon everything without keeping any attachments at all.4
There's a second argument for the method, and it's about what the practice requires you to believe rather than what it does. This road involves no preconceptions of God, of karma, of chakras, or even of right and wrong.5 It doesn't involve any artificial creations and doesn't presuppose any kind of knowledge. It's nothing but resting and staying natural.5
You mentally drop everything, absolutely everything, and see what everything turns out to be.5 Without any preconceptions, you abandon it all so as to arrive at the truth.5 That's what makes it usable by anybody. Every other method on the list of ten needs something installed first — a Buddha to be mindful of, a teaching to analyse, a teacher to model, a deity, a heaven, a breath technique. This one needs nothing, so there's nothing in it for a person's beliefs to collide with.
The Zen instruction is the same sentence in fewer words: just drop everything and see what it all turns out to be.6
The claim about results is specific, and it's a list of things that other schools spend years trying to produce deliberately. Somebody who can actually do this — abandon holding onto absolutely everything in their mind — will soon experience the kundalini rising, the chakras opening, and all the other changes the tradition files under gong-fu.7
And here's the part worth pausing over: they'll get all of it without ever having resorted to special mantras or hand positions, forced circulations of energy, ceremonies, secret prayers, strange postures, or any other external manipulation or forceful technique.7
Which sets up the definition that follows. Meditation doesn't mean sitting in a special posture. It means concentrating the mind by emptying it — totally resting the mind by relinquishing everything it clings to, while keeping its original awareness.8 Then a line that reads like a small confession on the reader's behalf: nobody may ever have told you this, but that's true meditation, and that's true spiritual or religious practice.8
The method is not sold as complete, and the limit is stated plainly. When you can do this, you'll easily reach the mental emptiness that Christianity calls selflessness or non-ego, and you'll start progressing through the stages.9 Nevertheless you must still set yourself to cultivating prajñā — the direct wordless knowing — and insight.9
So total relaxation gets you the stillness and does not get you the wisdom. That's the same ceiling every method in the ten-fold list runs into, and this one is not exempted from it just because it's the least encumbered.
There's a related caution attached to the same territory. When people who don't understand emptiness try to block or suppress their thoughts to reach the state, that won't produce anything.10 Suppression is effort, and effort is the opposite of what's being asked for here.
The text does something unusual with this method: it diagnoses why nobody uses it, and then proposes a rename. Perhaps it would be more popular if it were called mindfulness of total relaxation — because the meaning is essentially the same thing.11
The method is unchanged by that. So is the instruction, and so are the results. What's blocking uptake is the word death in the title. And the tradition's response isn't to argue people out of the fear — it's to change the label.
So here's a method described as one of the quickest roads to the highest stages, needing no equipment, no beliefs, no posture and no teacher — sitting at number ten of ten and going unpractised. Not because anybody disputes that it works. Because of what it's called.
There's also a second-order point in the recommendation. Nobody suggests renaming it to something inaccurate — total relaxation genuinely is what the exercise consists of, since discarding body and mind without holding anything is exactly a complete letting-go. The old name described the model. The proposed one describes the action. Both are true, and only one of them empties the room.
It's late and you're too tired to do your usual sitting well. You know from experience the session will be a grind, and you're going to spend forty minutes bringing your attention back from wherever it keeps going. So do this one instead. Lie down. The whole instruction is: you're dead. Not imagining being dead — that's a picture and you'd be holding it. Just: this body's affairs are no longer yours. Your knee aches; that's not your problem now. There's a conversation from this afternoon still running; also not yours. Bills, plans, the thing you meant to say — all of it belonged to somebody whose concerns have ended.
You'll notice the mind reaching for something to do. That reaching is the practice, and the answer to it is always the same: nothing needs attending to, because you're not here to attend to it.
Things will start to happen in the body and you'll want to check on them. Don't. The instruction covers this explicitly — the physical and mental changes are ignored, because they don't belong to you any more. Attending to a sensation is exactly the holding you've just put down.
Two things not to expect. It won't feel spiritual — it'll feel like lying down. And when the stillness does come, that isn't the finish, because the wisdom half is a separate job and this method doesn't do it for you.
If you can't manage the letting-go, don't force it. Forcing is suppression wearing a different coat, and suppression is named here as producing nothing at all.
🚩 SINGLE SOURCE for the reordering claim — that this should be first rather than tenth is this corpus's judgement, not something attributed to Shakyamuni. The ten-fold list itself is presented as his. [POPULAR SOURCE].
The strongest support is the no-preconceptions argument, because it doesn't depend on the tradition being right about anything else. Whatever is actually true, a method that installs no assumptions can't be biasing the result — and that reasoning holds for a sceptic as well as for a believer.
The tension inside the subject is about how much the method is claimed to deliver. One passage has kundalini, chakras and the whole machinery of gong-fu arriving without mantras, mudras or forced circulation — which, if true, makes most of the corpus's technical material optional. Another passage says you must still cultivate wisdom afterwards, which is the standard ceiling. Both are consistent on their face, and together they make an odd offer: the whole physical path for free, and the part that actually matters still to be paid for.
Open: no duration is given. Nothing says how long the discarding must be sustained, or how often, or what the intermediate signs are — which is a conspicuous absence in a corpus that supplies counts and markers freely elsewhere.
Follow the method as described and the practice life is almost empty. There's no equipment, no sequence, no posture that matters, nothing to learn and nothing to get better at in the ordinary sense. You lie down and stop. A person doing this has no way to measure their progress and nothing to compare with anybody else, and after two years they'd have acquired no skill they could name.
Follow the rest of the corpus and the picture is the opposite. Channels, chakras, jing and chi and shen, breath retention, the fullness signs, a body map with twenty-four correspondences on it. An enormous quantity of things to know, and a long apprenticeship in knowing them.
The claim here is that the first road produces the second road's results. That's a strong thing to say inside a book that spends most of its length on the technical material, and the text doesn't withdraw it or soften it — it states that the changes arrive without any of the machinery and moves on.
Where the two meet is the wisdom requirement, and it's the same for both. Neither the elaborate road nor the empty one gets you the direct knowing. So the difference between them turns out to be about the cost of reaching the halfway point, and not about where the path ends.
The Error of Naturalism — that page rules out the modern instruction to simply rest in present awareness, which sounds very like this one. The pairing forces the distinction, and it's worth having precisely because it's fine. Naturalism keeps a resident: somebody is present, being aware, going along with what arises. This method removes the resident first — you're dead, the changes aren't yours — and the letting-go is total rather than attentive. What the connection produces is a usable test for anyone who thinks the two are the same practice: ask whether there is still somebody in the room noticing how it's going.
Conscious Dying Practice — that page handles actual death and what to do in it; this one borrows the posture of death as a technique for the living. The transfer isn't decorative. If the real event requires letting go of body and mind completely, then a life spent rehearsing exactly that is training rather than metaphor. And it gives a reason this method might genuinely belong first rather than tenth: of the ten roads, it's the only one whose daily practice and whose final examination are the same action.
Sharpest implication. A method described as one of the quickest roads to the highest attainments, needing no belief, no equipment, no posture and no teacher, sits tenth of ten and goes unpractised — and the diagnosis offered is not that anybody doubts it works. It's the name. The proposed fix is to relabel it, which concedes that what governs the uptake of a spiritual technique is not its efficacy.
Generative questions.
If the whole physical side arrives without mantras, mudras or forced circulation, what are the technical schools actually buying with all that equipment? The most generous answer is speed, and nothing here claims it.
The instruction forbids imagining you are dead while requiring you to behave as though you were. What is the felt difference between those two, from inside, in the first ten minutes?