Maraṇasati

Later Buddhist schools have expanded the meaning of 'maranasati' to include various visualization and contemplation techniques to meditate on the nature of death. The cultivation of Maranasati is said to be conducive to right effort, and also helpful in developing a sense of spiritual urgency (saṃvega) and renunciation (nekkhamma).

Theravada Buddhism

Mindfulness of death is a common practice in Southeast Asian Buddhist monasteries. Buddhist monasteries such as Wat Pah Nanachat will often have human skeletons on display in the meditation hall.

In the Pali Canon

Mindfulness of death

In the Paṭhama-maraṇassati Sutta (AN 6.19), the Buddha advises developing mindfulness of death diligently (appamāda) and with urgency at every moment, even in the brief time it takes to draw a single breath. Failing to maintain this constant contemplation means one is said to 'live negligently.'

According to the Dutiya-maraṇassati Sutta (AN 6.20), a monk should reflect on the many possibilities which could bring him to death, and then turn his thoughts to the unskillful mental qualities he has yet to abandon. "Suppose your clothes (turban) or head were on fire. In order to extinguish it, you’d apply extraordinary enthusiasm (chanda), effort (vāyāma), zeal (ussāha), vigor (ussoḷhi), perseverance (appaṭivāni), mindfulness (sati), and situational awareness (sampajañña) in order to give up those bad, unskillful qualities."

Charnel ground contemplations

The Satipatthana Sutta (MN 10) and the Kayagata-sati Sutta (MN 119) include sections on cemetery contemplations which focus on nine stages of corpse decomposition (Pali: nava sīvathikā-manasikāra). These are:

1. A corpse that is "swollen, blue and festering."
2. A corpse that is "being eaten by crows, hawks, vultures, dogs, jackals or by different kinds of worms."
3. A corpse that is "reduced to a skeleton together with (some) flesh and blood held in by the tendons."
4. A corpse that is "reduced to a blood-besmeared skeleton without flesh but held in by the tendons."
5. A corpse that is "reduced to a skeleton held in by the tendons but without flesh and not besmeared with blood."
6. A corpse that is "reduced to bones gone loose, scattered in all directions."
7. A corpse that is "reduced to bones, white in color like a conch."
8. A corpse that is "reduced to bones more than a year old, heaped together."
9. A corpse that is "reduced to bones gone rotten and become dust."

The Satipatthana Sutta instructs the meditator to reflect thus: 'This body of mine, too, is of the same nature as that body, is going to be like that body, and has not got past the condition of becoming like that body.'

In Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga

According to Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga, there are eight ways of meditating on death:

1. meditating on death as a murderer, since it takes away life;
2. meditating on it as the ruin of success;
3. viewing it by comparison with famous persons, reflecting that even these great ones eventually died, even the enlightened ones themselves;
4. meditating on the body as the abode of many--many worms as well as the target of many others;
5. meditating on the difficulty of keeping alive;
6. meditating on it as without occasion, since beings die unpredictably;
7. meditating on the shortness of a lifetime;
8. meditating on the fact that, properly speaking (in an ultimate sense), the lifetime of a being is a single moment of consciousness, that one dies every moment, so to speak.