Peaceful Death, Joyful Rebirth
A Tibetan Buddhist Guidebook
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- $37.99
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- $37.99
Publisher Description
The author of The Healing Power of Mind draws on Buddhist scripture, firsthand accounts, and other sources to present an overview of Tibetan Buddhist teachings on facing death with openness and insight
Buddhism teaches that death can be a springboard to enlightenment—yet for all but the most advanced meditators, it will be the gateway to countless future lives of suffering in samsara. Tulku Thondup wrote this guide to help us heal our fear and confusion about death and strengthen our practice in anticipation of this transition, and to help us realize the enlightened goal of ultimate peace and joy—not only for death and rebirth, but for this very lifetime. In simple language, he distills a vast range of sources, including scriptures, classic commentaries, oral teachings, and firsthand accounts. The book includes:
• An overview of the dying process, the after-death bardo states, and teachings on why, where, and how we take rebirth
• Accounts by Tibetan "near-death experiencers" (delogs), who returned from death with amazing reports of their visions
• Ways to train our minds during life, so that at death, all the phenomena before us will arise as a world of peace, joy, and enlightenment
• Simple meditations, prayers, and rituals to benefit the dead and dying
• Advice for caregivers, helpers, and survivors of the dying
By becoming intimate with this practice while we're alive, we can alleviate our fear of death, improve our appreciation of this life, and prepare for death in a very practical way, while planting the seeds for rebirth in the Pure Land.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hoping to "help us realize... ultimate peace and joy... for death and beyond," Thondup, a Tibetan-born teacher, translator and former visiting scholar at Harvard, offers a remarkably lucid distillation of Tibetan Buddhist teachings on how the state of our minds in life affects the nature and quality of our experiences in death. Thondup opens the book with a discussion of some fundamental Buddhist concepts such as impermanence, karma and the importance of meditation for altering our mental habits. He then deconstructs the actual experience of dying (the "crucial hour of life"), a process of distinct stages, including glimpsing the "true nature of the mind" and dwelling in the bardo, a transitional period before rebirth. He even includes lengthy reports of death experiences by delogs, devout Tibetan Buddhists resurrected from the dead for the purpose of explaining how to negotiate the bardo. Thondup rounds out the book with discussions of reincarnation and the importance of and practical instructions for performing rituals for the dead. While the teachings can become sophisticated, Thondup's great strength is his consistent focus on a thesis equally accessible to novices: how we train our minds in life will profoundly influence our "afterdeath" experiences. The result is a provocative and surprisingly compelling work that will appeal to beginners and advanced practitioners alike.
