A very committed seeker called Mogharāja addressed the Nikāya Buddha:

“So, because of your insight into excellence, I have come to ask you about this. What is the best way for a person to regard the world so that the King of Death won’t see him?”

The Master replied:

“If you are always aware, Mogharāja, you will look at the world and see its emptiness. If you give up looking at yourself as a soul [as a fixed and special identity], then you will have given yourself a way to go beyond death. Look at the world like this and the King of Death will not see you.”

– Saddhatissa, H. (Trans): The Sutta-Nipāta: A New Translation from the Pali Canon, verses 1118-19, (p. 129).

I have been curious lately, about the power of mindfulness in relation to death. While the energy-centre meditations, and visualisations, and the dissolution of the elements meditation are inherited from later streams of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, there is nothing like this in the early teachings. Indications are that the historical Buddha taught much a much simpler method of defeating Mara, the king of death. In the above passage from the Sutta-Nipāta, it is mindfulness and insight into emptiness that enable one to bring about the death of death, in this very life. Here are a few more passages from Saddhatissa’s translation of The Sutta-Nipāta. It’s a fiercely simple path:

“Look at beings who are facing death, who are living out the results of their previous deeds; people are terrified when they see that they are trapped by death.”

– verse 587.

“Therefore, the monk, realizing this, should not grasp at anything, being mindful. He should see the beings that are creatures of attachment as tied to the power of death.”

– verse 1104.

“An absence of wanting — questions and doubts disappear in knowledge and he plunges into the absence of death; this is what “brahmin” means.”

– verse 635.

“There is an island, an island which you cannot go beyond. It is a place of nothingness, a place of non-possession and of non-attachment. It is the total end of death and decay, and this is why I call it Nibbāna [the extinguished, the cool].

“There are people who, in mindfulness, have realized this and are completely cooled here and now. They do not become slaves working for Māra, for Death; they cannot fall into his power.”

– verses 1094-1095.