You've been asked what you want to do for a living. You've been asked what you want out of the next five years, probably by someone with a form.
Here is a question nobody has asked you:
In what area do you want to learn perfection and mastery? What are the areas in which you'll particularly wish to contribute to culture and society, the areas in which you'll wish to excel in making a difference to the universe and others?1
Notice the two things that make it different from a career question. It's about mastery rather than achievement, and its beneficiary is somebody else. This page is about the method Bodri gives for answering it — a question set, a time-frame, and one exercise that works whether or not you believe a word of the surrounding cosmology.
The questions arrive in a block, and their sequence is doing work:
With infinite lives ahead of you that you must indeed tread without exception, what do you want to choose as your own personal Bodhisattva vows and aspirations? What are the main dimensions along which you will want to exercise your vital essence with excellence? What will be your self-chosen mission, your personal ideal, your goals and sense of purpose in the universe?1
Then, a page later, the same territory in a harder register:
"What of my efforts will truly last as a legacy and continue onwards to serve as a beneficial effect on society?" … "While I'm healthy and have the opportunity and resources and abilities to contribute to something of importance to others, or even if my contribution can only be a little, what should it be?"2
And the sharpest one, which is really an accusation with a question mark on the end:
"For countless lives you've only been involved in activities that bring benefit to yourself, so what goals can you choose that extend benefits to all beings?"2
Three features of the set are worth naming.
Every question is about a choice, not a discovery. Nothing here asks what your purpose is. All of it asks what you'll select.
The scope is capability, not outcome. What do you want to master rather than what do you want to achieve — which is a much more answerable question, because you can start on a capability tomorrow.
And they're asked of the reader, in the second person, repeatedly. The chapter turns into an interrogation, and it's one of the few places in six hundred pages where the book stops explaining and starts demanding an answer.
The frame is stated before the questions and it's doing something specific:
To answer these questions, your horizons must be extended much further than this one single life so as to encompass the view of many lives to come, for this very life is just like a single step on an endless journey.1
The obvious objection is that this only works if you believe in rebirth. It's worth seeing why the objection is weaker than it looks.
The infinite time-frame is being used to remove an excuse, and the excuse is the one everybody reaches for first:
because there is such a long stretch of road ahead of you, it doesn't matter that you're not yet in a position to perfectly accomplish your compassionate dreams at this very moment, as it's the mental willingness which is important. … you don't have to refrain from deciding upon, or just musing about heroic vows just because you're not yet in a position to carry them out.1
That's the function. Not you have unlimited time so relax — the opposite. It's: your current inadequacy isn't an argument against choosing. The gap between what you can do now and what the vow describes is expected, permanent for a long stretch, and irrelevant to the choosing.
You can do that on a fifty-year horizon as easily as an infinite one. The theory behind it makes it vivid; it isn't what makes it work.
Then the practical instrument, and it's the most portable thing in the chapter:
If your choices still aren't very clear, imagine that you are on your deathbed awaiting the end of this life, and then ask yourself this question: "Now that my life is over, for what efforts do I wish to be remembered?" What meritorious deed do you want others to say you have achieved in this life? What do you hope they would write on your tombstone?
Looking backwards from that imagined moment and surveying this life, what acts that you performed — that helped your family, community, country or world — would you wish to be remembered for? If this becomes clear, then you know where to begin.3
The mechanism is a perspective shift plus a tense change. You move to the end and look back, so the question stops being what should I do — which is a planning problem with too many variables — and becomes what will have been missing — which is a memory problem. And people are much better at those. And the last clause is the one to hold: if this becomes clear, then you know where to begin. The exercise isn't for producing a life plan. It's for producing a starting point, which is a far smaller and more achievable output.
Ten pages later he gives the empirical claim the exercise rests on, and he gives it in an engineer's vocabulary:
I tell you the truth, on their deathbed people rarely complain of the things they did which went wrong. In 99 out of 100 cases, they always look back with regrets on the things they never tried, and the things they never did. As we used to say in engineering school, "minimize your regret function," and do what you've always wanted to do.4
Two things to separate, because they have very different standing. The structural claim is genuinely useful and matches the exercise. Regret concentrates on omissions, not on failed attempts — so the deathbed vantage point is specifically good at surfacing what you did not start, which is exactly what the vow questions are trying to elicit.
The "99 out of 100" figure is not evidence. It is unsourced, it is a rhetorical hundred, and it is presented in the same sentence as I tell you the truth. There's real research on this and the picture is more mixed than the figure suggests. Carried as the source's assertion, not as a statistic. [LOW CONFIDENCE] on the number; the qualitative claim about omission-regret is much better supported and doesn't need it.
One constraint on the answer, and it cuts against how goals are usually set:
you should not limit the merit and skills you set out to accumulate to some solitary field of effort. The reason is because the accomplishment of any great deed will require a conglomeration of cooperative, multidisciplinary skills.5
And the version of the claim aimed at the Buddhas themselves: they "were able to become Buddhas because they developed themselves in a wide variety of directions," and ""to become a Buddha doesn't just require mastering the skill of one factor, but in cultivating an entire host of excellencies over many lifetimes.""5 He then quotes the Flower Ornament Sūtra's enumeration of ten boundless categories by which a Tathāgata's manifestation is accomplished — "it is not due to one condition, to one phenomenon" — and draws the comparison to a universe, which is likewise "not formed by only one condition."5 The practical instruction underneath the cosmology is ordinary and good: a vow names an outcome. And outcomes are produced by portfolios of capability, not by single skills. Which is also why the questions ask about dimensions and areas, plural, throughout.
Sit down with the deathbed question and you'll fail at it the first three times, and it's worth knowing the shape of the failure in advance. The first answer is a job title or a scale — I want to have built something big. That's an achievement answer and the exercise can't use it. Ask again, with the constraint that the answer has to name someone other than you who is different because of it.
The second answer is usually too large and too vague — I want to have reduced suffering. True, unarguable, and no use at all on a Tuesday. Ask what the smallest version of that has been, in the last month, and whether it happened. The third answer, if you get one, is usually embarrassingly specific and slightly too small to say out loud. That's the one.
Then the follow-through, which is where the chapter's real instruction is. Bodri's move after the exercise isn't now plan it. It's now you know where to begin — and beginning means acquiring one capability the vow would require. Not the vow. A capability.
Six months later, a check that keeps this honest. The failure mode of the deathbed exercise is that it produces a good afternoon and nothing else — a clarified intention that becomes a self-image and stops there. The test isn't whether you still believe in the vow. It's whether you can name a skill you didn't have last year that the vow needs. If you can't, the exercise produced a feeling.
This is worth examining as a piece of technology, because it's unusually separable from its setting. The chapter around it is dense with things a sceptical reader won't accept: infinite lives, merit as transcendental wealth, Buddhas who make twelve vows. And the claim that you can accomplish virtually anything once you set your objectives.
The deathbed exercise requires none of it. It requires: one imagined vantage point, one backward glance, and one honest sentence. Nothing in the mechanism depends on rebirth, on merit accounting, or on there being a universe organised the way this book says.
Three consequences.
It travels, and it demonstrably has. The same instrument turns up in Stoic memento mori, in Ignatian discernment, and in modern strategic and design practice as pre-mortem or eulogy exercise. When something gets invented that many times over, it's usually because it works apart from whatever framework it's sitting in.
Its detachability is a data point about the chapter. Bodri's general thesis is that the world's traditions are all describing one process in different vocabularies. Here is an instance where the method survives translation out of its vocabulary entirely — which is a stronger version of his own claim than anything in the four-column concordances, and he doesn't notice it. A technique that works without its the theory behind it is better evidence for a nondenominational path than a state-description that matches across four traditions, because a description can be borrowed and a working method has to be re-derived.
And it exposes what the the theory behind it was actually adding. Strip the infinite lives and the exercise still works, but something goes: the removal of the not-yet-capable excuse. On a one-life horizon, I am not in a position to do that is a live objection. On an infinite one it is not an objection at all. So the cosmology's contribution is narrow and identifiable — it's not motivating the choice, it's disarming one specific reason to defer it.
Which is a fair thing to know about any framework: not is it true, but what work is it doing that the method could not do alone.
Strongest support: the exercise is fully specified and separable. Vantage point, question, backward glance. And a stated output — then you know where to begin.3 Second: the question set consistently asks for capability rather than outcome, which is what makes it actionable.12 Third: the multidimensionality constraint is argued rather than asserted, from the structure of how great deeds get accomplished.5 Tension: the "99 out of 100" figure is presented as fact and is unsourced.4 [LOW CONFIDENCE]
Tension: the chapter demands a choice and the next chapter says life has no purpose but the one you assign it. Those are compatible — the demand is precisely to assign one — but a reader meeting them in the wrong order will find the interrogation strange.
Open question. The exercise asks what you want written on your tombstone, which is a question about how you will be remembered — and this book's own doctrine says that the person who might enjoy being remembered won't be there, and that reputation isn't among the things that transfer. The instrument's motivating force borrows from a self-concern the framework denies. Not addressed in the range read (pp 606–610, 616).
A Bodhisattva Is Anyone Who Acts Selflessly supplies the category this page is recruiting for, and reading the two together sharpens both. That page says the status attaches to acts and lapses with them. This one asks you to choose a direction for those acts, sustained across lifetimes. Neither alone is coherent as a life: momentary status with no direction is a series of good afternoons, and a direction with no act is an intention. The chapter needs both and states them thirty pages apart.
Against The Grass Would Grow Ten Feet Tall, the contrast is the most revealing thing about the chapter's method. That page carries the withholding — the cost of the vow isn't described, because describing it would empty the room. This page carries what is described: the questions, the exercise, the encouragement, the you can accomplish virtually anything. The same chapter withholds the price and supplies the sales process, and it does both openly. Which is either exemplary graded teaching or the ordinary structure of any commitment worth making, and the two are hard to tell apart from inside.
And against Just Start, this page is the upstream half — choose the direction — and that one is the downstream half — the direction can be wrong and you should begin anyway. Bodri's actual position, assembled across the two, is that the choosing matters less than the beginning, which is an odd thing for a chapter of interrogation to conclude and is worth carrying because it defuses the paralysis the questions can produce.
Shame Versus Regret turns on three determinants. And the operative one for this page is what each emotion is about: regret attaches to a choice — a thing done or not done, which could have gone otherwise — while shame attaches to the self. Three in the morning, running the tape, the difference decides whether the night produces information or just damage.6 The deathbed exercise is, structurally, a regret-generation device, and it's important that it generates regret rather than shame.
What acts would you wish to be remembered for points at choices and omissions. It doesn't ask what kind of person you've been. The output is a list of things not started, which is actionable, rather than a verdict on a self, which isn't.
What the pairing produces is a warning the exercise needs and doesn't carry. Run at the wrong angle, the same imagined deathbed produces shame instead of regret, and shame produces avoidance rather than action — which is exactly the outcome this chapter is trying to prevent. The tell is grammatical: an answer beginning I should have been has gone to shame; I never did has stayed in regret. The distinction is invisible while you're doing the exercise and decisive for what it yields, and it's worth writing down before you start.
Create a Niche, Do Not Pick One refuses one verb. You don't pick a niche from a list of available ones; you create one, because a niche selected from what already exists puts you in competition inside somebody else's category.7
The same refusal turns up at p 608, and the wording is startling:
Various Buddhas have chosen each of these abilities and others as their own vows, but none of these Buddhas are as important as you are. What's important is not what someone else has done, but what you choose to develop as your special universal functions, for you are a Buddha, too.8
None of these Buddhas are as important as you are. In a devotional literature, that's close to heretical, and it's doing exactly the work Brunson's verb does: the existing catalogue is a set of examples, not a menu.
The structural correspondence holds at three points. Both frameworks present an impressive list of what others have specialised in. Both then say the list is the wrong object of attention. And both give the same reason — that the value of a specialisation comes from its fit to the person holding it, not from its position in an established classification.
The insight the pairing produces runs against the grain of both fields' popular versions. Devotional practice and career advice both default to emulation — find the exemplar, follow the path — and both of these sources say emulation is the error. Not because the exemplars are bad, but because a role that already has an occupant is a role you'll occupy badly. Which reframes what a pantheon of specialised Buddhas is for: not a set of models to imitate, but a demonstration that the category admits arbitrarily many distinct entries, including one that doesn't exist yet.
Sharpest implication. The chapter's central question is not what's my purpose — a question with no answer — but what will I select, given that nothing selects it for me, and the deathbed exercise is a device for making the second question answerable by someone who can't answer the first.
Generative questions.
If the exercise works without the cosmology, what's the cosmology for? This page's answer is narrow. It disarms the not yet capable excuse — but that may be the general shape of what the theory behind it contributes to practice: not motivation, but the removal of specific, otherwise-reasonable grounds for delay. And: can an exercise that motivates through being remembered survive a doctrine in which there is nobody to be remembered? Every version of memento mori smuggles in a spectator. Is the smuggling load-bearing?