Book summary “The Tibetan book of living and dying”: summary

Introduction

Modern industrial society fosters a profound denial of death and rampant materialism that threatens the planet. You live in a culture that hides dying away in hospitals, treating it as a medical failure rather than a natural stage of existence. This avoidance creates short-term thinking, anxiety, and a deep sense of meaninglessness as you chase fleeting pleasures.

Sogyal Rinpoche argues that human existence is a continuous continuum spanning life, dying, death, and rebirth. You can transform your relationship with mortality by recognizing the unchanging nature of your mind through spiritual practice and meditation. Facing death without fear unlocks profound compassion and reveals the self-perfected primordial state known as Rigpa.

The book guides you through the process of living, dying, and helping others across four distinct transitional phases called bardos. You will explore how karma shapes your destiny and how contemplative techniques prepare you for the ultimate transition.

• How can you integrate the reality of impermanence into your daily life?
• What happens to your consciousness during the dying process and the intermediate states?
• How do you apply compassionate practices to help both the living and the dying?

1. Impermanence and the Denial of Death

Modern industrial society fosters a profound denial of death, creating a spiritual desert and short-term thinking that threatens the planet.

By treating death as annihilation or a taboo subject, modern culture avoids preparation for the afterlife, leading to rampant materialism, short-term economic planning, and environmental destruction.

A former Brazilian Minister for the Environment warned that modern industrial society acts like a fanatical religion, plundering the planet and signing financial and ecological debts future generations cannot pay. At age seven, the author witnessed the death of Samten in eastern Tibet. Later, during a journey to Lhasa, he witnessed the extraordinary death of Lama Tseten near the Yamdrok Tso lake. Samten died an ordinary, painful death with the confidence of faith and the master's help. Lama Tseten displayed absolute spiritual mastery by consciously merging his mind with truth and passing away without needing his lama physically present.

The Mirror of Death

While death is absolutely certain, the exact hour and manner of its arrival remain entirely uncertain. People use the uncertainty of death's timing as an excuse to postpone confronting it, hiding behind transient material props and an assumed personal identity. Montaigne observed that people dance and trot through life ignoring death until it strikes unawares, causing storms of passion, fury, and despair.

When Krisha Gotami lost her firstborn child, her blinding grief drove her to seek a cure from the Buddha. He instructed her to fetch a mustard seed from a house that had never known death. Krisha Gotami went from house to house searching for a family untouched by death before realizing the universality of mortality and returning to the Buddha to learn the path of liberation.

Overcoming Distractions

Western laziness manifests not as physical inactivity, but as compulsive over-engagement in petty distractions and responsibilities. People cram their lives with endless trivial tasks and consumer pursuits to avoid confronting deeper spiritual questions, effectively living out housekeeping in a dream. In the story of "The Father of 'As Famous as the Moon'", a poor man killed instantly by his falling grain sack while scheming about future wealth illustrates the folly of elaborate worldly ambitions.

Embracing the universal truth of impermanence paradoxically provides the only reliable foundation and lasting anchor in life. Everything in existence—from physical bodies and subatomic particles to thoughts and autumn clouds—is in a constant state of flux and impermanence. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche noted at age seventy-eight that decades of historic and personal turmoil, wars, and social shifts were ultimately no more real than a dream.

• Remember at every moment that you are dying and treat all beings with compassion.
• Devote every second to the pursuit of enlightenment through the urgent understanding of impermanence.

2. The Nature of Mind and Meditation

Meditation brings the distracted ordinary mind home to the unchanging primordial awareness known as Rigpa.

The human mind consists of two parts. The ordinary, dualistic, discursive mind is known as sem. Beneath it lies rigpa, the pristine, cognizant, and pure awareness that is untouched by change, death, or illusion. Ordinary mind functions through duality, grasping, and emotional turmoil like a candle flame in an open doorway. The direct introduction to the nature of mind requires an authentic master, student devotion, and a lineage method. Sogyal Rinpoche describes how his master Jamyang Khyentse introduced him to the nature of mind in a cave at Lhodrak Kharchu by unexpectedly asking what is mind while ringing a bell and beating a hand-drum. Sogyal Rinpoche was nine years old during the formal introduction in the cave, having been first hugged by Jamyang Khyentse when six or seven years old.

Sem versus Rigpa

Meditation is the practice of bringing the distracted mind back home to its true nature, ending the endless samsaric cycle of confusion and suffering. Up to 13 percent of people in the United States are said to suffer from some kind of mental disorder. Gautama Buddha achieved enlightenment over 2,500 years ago after sitting with immense resolve under a tree in northern India until he conquered ignorance. Three sacred principles make meditation a powerful cause for enlightenment rather than just a source of temporary relaxation:

• Begin with the motivation to dedicate practice and life to the enlightenment of all sentient beings.
• Enter the heart of practice with an attitude of nongrasping and an awareness that all things are dreamlike.
• Bring meditation to a close by dedicating all its merit to the long-term enlightenment and well-being of all beings.

The entire meditation practice can be essentialized into three crucial instructions: bring your mind home, release, and relax. Dudjom Rinpoche compared this state to a man coming home after a long day in the fields and sinking into his favorite chair by the fire.

• Bring your mind home into the state of Calm Abiding.
• Release the mind from its prison of grasping and craving.
• Relax into the true nature of your mind, letting all thoughts and emotions dissolve.

The Heart of Meditation

Maintaining a specific physical posture creates an auspicious environment that automatically inspires meditation and the awakening of Rigpa.

• Sit like a mountain with unshakable majesty.
• Keep the back straight, like an arrow or a pile of golden coins, with relaxed shoulders.
• Cross your legs or sit on a chair with legs relaxed and back straight.
• Keep your eyes open, gazing downwards along the line of your nose at a 45-degree angle.
• Keep your mouth slightly open as if about to say a relaxing Aaaah.
• Rest your hands comfortably covering your knees.

Three effective meditation techniques for the modern world are using an object, reciting a mantra, and watching the breath. The author conducted a workshop for 300 people in Lyons, France, where chanting Padmasambhava's mantra restored his drained energy and transformed the room's heavy atmosphere.

• Rest your gaze lightly on an object of beauty or a sacred image such as Padmasambhava.
• Recite a mantra quietly or aloud to charge your breath and energy with spiritual power.
• Rest your attention lightly and mindfully on the breath, focusing on the out-breath and the natural gap.

Meditation progresses from settling the mind through Calm Abiding to awakening insight and wisdom through Clear Seeing.

• Continuously bring your mind back to the object of meditation whenever you get distracted.
• Allow clarity to arise from one-pointedness to transition into Clear Seeing.

Thoughts and emotions should not be fought; they are simply the natural radiance and expression of the mind, just like waves on the ocean. Jamyang Khyentse told the diplomat Apa Pant while watching a Lama Dance that meditation is prolonging the gap between a past thought and a future thought.

• Allow thoughts and emotions to rise and settle without grasping, feeding, or clinging to them.
• Observe thoughts like an old wise man watching a child play.
• Prolong the gap between a ceased past thought and an unrisen future thought.

Integrating meditation into everyday life through short sessions and mindful breaks is the ultimate purpose of spiritual practice.

• Practice in short sessions of four or five minutes.
• Take a short break of thirty seconds to one minute while maintaining mindfulness and natural ease.
• Mingle your mindfulness with everyday life after sitting without jumping up immediately.

3. Karma, Rebirth, and the Six Realms

Karma operates as an infallible law of cause and effect across beginningless streams of conscious rebirth.

Mind is a continuous, beginningless stream of consciousness rather than a self-created phenomenon or something produced by matter. Just as the material universe traces back to space-particles through cosmic cycles, consciousness traces back through an infinite, beginningless dimension. Mind and matter interact but cannot serve as substantial causes for each other, requiring successive rebirths to maintain the continuity of consciousness.

Every physical, verbal, and mental action plants a seed that ripens when conditions are right. Because results are often delayed across lifetimes, people mistakenly attribute outcomes to chance or good luck. Jikmé Lingpa compared delayed karma to an eagle flying high in a clear sky without casting a shadow until it dives toward its prey.

Evolution and Karma

The karmic fruit of an action is determined entirely by the purity of the underlying intention and motivation. Actions of any scale yield profound results if performed with sincere devotion and a compassionate heart. Developing kindness and a good heart benefits oneself and others automatically.

An old beggar woman named Relying on Joy offered a tiny lamp of oil with pure devotion. Her lamp continued to burn through the day despite attempts by monks and oceans of water to extinguish it.

• Subdue selfish motives like anger.
• Develop kindness and compassion for others.
• Nourish and practice kindness as a primary philosophy.

The Six Realms of Samsara

Buddhism identifies six realms of existence that correspond to human experience and are projected by our own negative emotions. The six realms—gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hells—are driven by the core negative emotions of pride, jealousy, desire, ignorance, greed, and anger. While they exist outwardly beyond our normal karmic perception, they also exist inwardly as latent psychological seeds within our psychophysical system.

Surfers lounging in sunshine and high on meditation represent the god realm. Wall Street rivalry mirrors the demigod realm, and immensely rich people caught in endless greed embody the hungry ghost realm.

4. The Spiritual Path and Dzogchen

Dzogchen reveals the self-perfected primordial state through the guidance of an authentic lineage master.

Lineage serves as an unbroken chain of transmission that safeguards the purity and authenticity of spiritual teachings. In a modern spiritual marketplace filled with charlatans, lineage allows seekers to verify authenticity because a master's legitimacy is known through who their own master was. Patrul Rinpoche wrote in the nineteenth century that ordinary charlatans are expert at behaving like saints.

The outer spiritual master is an external manifestation of the student's own inner teacher and buddha nature. Our buddha nature possesses an active inner aspect that has worked tirelessly through all past lives. When karma is purified, this inner teacher manifests externally as an outer teacher who guides us back to our true nature. The author reflects on how his master Dudjom Rinpoche passed away in France in 1987, realizing the essential nature of the master-disciple relationship.

Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth, rooted in lucid, grounded, and intelligent gratitude. Devotion, or mö gü in Tibetan, means longing and respect. It acts as a magnifying glass that focuses the all-pervading rays of the Buddha's compassion to ignite the flame of blessings within the student. Jikmé Gyalwé Nyugu experienced a surge of devotion upon seeing a cloud move toward his master Jikmé Lingpa's residence, fainting and receiving the full transmission of wisdom. Seekers should rely on the objective message of the teaching and their own wisdom mind rather than the personality of the teacher:

• Rely on the message of the teacher, not on his personality.
• Rely on the meaning, not just on the words.
• Rely on the real meaning, not on the provisional one.
• Rely on your wisdom mind, not on your ordinary, judgmental mind.

Guru Yoga is a powerful practice that merges the student's mind with the enlightened wisdom mind of the master. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche spoke of Jamyang Khyentse at age eighty-two, signing his last letter as the worst disciple to demonstrate endless true devotion. You can engage this practice through a specific sequence:

• Sit quietly and invoke in the sky in front of you the embodiment of truth in the person of your master, a saint, or an enlightened being, visualizing them as alive and radiant as a rainbow.
• Recite the mantra OM AH HUM VAJRA GURU PADMA SIDDHI HUM as the heart essence of Padmasambhava, blending and mixing your mind with his wisdom mind.
• Imagine thousands of brilliant rays of light streaming out from the master's forehead, throat, and heart into your corresponding energy centers to purify your body, speech, and mind.
• Let the master dissolve into light and become one with you, resting in the spacious and carefree ease of your absolute nature in Rigpa.

The Innermost Essence

Dzogchen is not a philosophy or a system of techniques, but the primordial, self-perfected state of our nature that needs no perfecting.

Derived from Samantabhadra and transmitted through Padmasambhava, Dzogchen translates to Great Perfection, though it is usually left untranslated to avoid implying a goal to be achieved. It represents our absolute nature, which is the same as the buddhas' and requires no new creation. Preliminary purification practices are essential to peel away the ordinary mind and make you receptive to the revelation of Rigpa. These Ngöndro practices work systematically to dissolve emotional and intellectual veils:

• Taking refuge in the Buddha, the truth of his teaching, and the example of its practitioners, and so awakening a confidence and trust in our own inner buddha nature.
• Giving birth to compassion and training the mind to work with ourself and others and the difficulties of life.
• Removing obscurations and defilements through the visualization and mantra practice of purification and healing.
• Accumulating merit and wisdom by developing universal generosity and creating auspicious circumstances.

The practical training of Dzogchen is divided into the View, Meditation, and Action, which together reveal, stabilize, and integrate the absolute state. The View is seeing the actual state of things as they are, recognizing that the true nature of mind contains everything in samsara and nirvana as emptiness and appearances. Dzogchen meditation uses the gap between thoughts to recognize Rigpa and allow arising thoughts to self-liberate:

• When one past thought has ceased and a future thought has not yet risen, in that gap, in between, isn't there a consciousness of the present moment; fresh, virgin, unaltered by even a hair's breadth of concept, a luminous, naked awareness? Well, that is what Rigpa is.
• Yet it doesn't stay in that state forever, because another thought suddenly arises, doesn't it?
• This is the self-radiance of that Rigpa.
• However, if you do not recognize this thought for what it really is, the very instant it arises, then it will turn into just another ordinary thought, as before.
• If you are able to recognize the true nature of the thought as soon as it arises, and leave it alone without any follow-up, then whatever thoughts arise all automatically dissolve back into the vast expanse of Rigpa and are liberated.

5. Compassion and the Practice of Tonglen

Confronting mortality breaks through illusions and naturally gives rise to a deep, limitless compassion. When you realize that all sentient beings are dying, you develop an acute sense of the preciousness of each moment.

Sir Thomas More wrote just before his beheading that we are all in the same cart going to execution, asking how anyone can hate or wish harm to another.

Self-grasping and self-cherishing are the hidden root of all personal suffering, negative karma, and harm done to others. Your ordinary actions are driven by the selfish protection of an ego you falsely believe will keep you safe.

Geshe Chekhawa found a text containing the lines giving all profit and gain to others and taking all loss and defeat on oneself. He studied under a master for twelve years and later healed lepers who flocked to his house to practice Tonglen.

The Logic of Compassion

Loving kindness acts as a spring that unseals your hidden capacity for love and feeds the stream of compassion. You can evoke compassion by recognizing that everyone shares the same physical makeup and fundamental desire for happiness.

• Consider others the same as yourself by recognizing everyone shares human flesh, bones, blood, and the desire for happiness.
• Exchange yourself for others by unflinchingly putting yourself in the place of someone suffering and asking how you would want to be treated.
• Use a friend to generate compassion by imagining a dear friend or relative in the place of the suffering person to open your heart naturally.
• Meditate on daily sights of suffering by focusing on the uprush of compassion instead of brushing it aside or slipping into apathy.

The Stages of Tonglen

Taking on the suffering of others through Tonglen destroys self-cherishing and awakens universal compassion.

A four-stage preliminary practice prepares the mind for main Tonglen by working with environmental moods, self-healing, and past wrongdoings.

• Environmental Tonglen: Breathe in unwholesome moods and darkness; breathe out calm, clarity, and joy.
• Self Tonglen: Divide yourself into a whole, compassionate aspect and a hurt, frustrated aspect; breathe in the pain with the compassionate embrace, and breathe out healing love and confidence.
• Tonglen in a Living Situation: Imagine a situation where you acted badly; breathe in responsibility and blame without justification, and breathe out reconciliation, forgiveness, and healing.
• Tonglen for Others: Imagine a close suffering person and breathe in their pain while breathing out warmth, love, and joy, then widen the circle to all sentient beings.

Main Tonglen uses the breath to inhale the suffering of others as black smoke to destroy self-cherishing, and exhale the brilliant light of the enlightened mind.

• Sit quietly, bring the mind home, and meditate deeply on compassion while invoking enlightened beings.
• Visualize someone you care for who is suffering and imagine their pain gathering into a mass of hot, black, grimy smoke.
• Breathe in the black smoke so that it dissolves into the core of your self-grasping at your heart, destroying self-cherishing and purifying negative karma.
• Breathe out and imagine sending a brilliant, cooling light of peace, joy, and well-being to your friend in pain, transforming your heart into a wish-fulfilling jewel.
• Maintain a firm conviction that their negative karma has been purified and feel lasting joy that they are freed from suffering.

Applying Tonglen to dying persons helps them on a profound spiritual level while acting as the ultimate weapon to dismantle your ego.

• Imagine a dying person in place of the friend in pain.
• Inhale the dying person's suffering and fear as a mass of black smoke to destroy your own self-grasping.
• Exhale the light of your enlightened mind to fill the dying person with peace and purify their karma.

6. Helping the Dying and the Process of Death

Establishing unafraid, heartfelt communication and deep listening is the most essential thing when helping a dying person. Visitors should remain natural and avoid over-seriousness. Unmitigated physical pain during dying is unnecessary because modern palliative care can keep pain under control without clouding consciousness.

Providing a peaceful environment, managing pain, and applying phowa ensure a conscious passage through death.

In a hospice, Emily cried alone after her daughter left because her daughter forced her to think positively and refused to accept the inevitability of her death. You must tell a dying person the truth quietly and sensitively so they can resolve their lives.

Unfinished business can be healed through a specific written dialogue exercise.

• Visualize in front of you the person with whom you have the problem, exactly as he or she has always looked to you.
• Consider that a real change takes place so the person is far more open and receptive to listen and share honestly.
• Write on a piece of paper what you would say, stating all your feelings, difficulties, hurt, and regret.
• Immediately begin to write what he or she might say in response, letting the person express their side completely.
• Continue this dialogue until you feel there is nothing more you are holding back or need to be said.
• Ask yourself deeply if you are able to let go of the past wholeheartedly, forgive the person, and say goodbye.
• Read your written dialogue out loud by yourself or to a friend to solidify the reconciliation.

By the Bedside

Attachments and clinging from family members create unnecessary heartache. You can awaken unconditional love by putting yourself directly in the dying person's place. Explicit verbal permissions help dying individuals release their grip on life.

• Stand by the bedside of the person and say with deep tenderness that you love them and that dying is natural.
• Express that you wish they could stay but do not want them to suffer any longer, and cherish the time spent together.
• Give your full and heartfelt permission to die and reassure them they are not alone and have all your love.

The Process of Dissolution

The outer dissolution process involves failing senses and the sequential breakdown of earth, water, fire, and air elements. Inner dissolution progresses through four subtle levels of consciousness where negative emotional poisons cease. You can use phowa, or the transference of consciousness, to merge your mind with an enlightened presence.

• Sit comfortably or assume a meditative posture and relax completely.
• Invoke the embodiment of truth in the sky in front of you as a divine being, saint, buddha, or pure golden light.
• Pray sincerely for the removal of negative karma, the granting of forgiveness, and a peaceful death.
• Visualize rays of light streaming from the invoked presence to cleanse and purify your entire being.
• Imagine your body dissolving into light and merging inseparably with the blissful presence of light, or flash your consciousness like a shooting star into the heart of the presence.

Leave the body untouched and maintain a silent atmosphere for up to three days after clinical death.

7. The Bardos and Helping After Death

The bardos of dharmata and becoming offer profound opportunities for liberation during the forty-nine days after death.

The Bardo of Dharmata

The bardo of dharmata unfolds in four distinct phases of light and energy, offering multiple opportunities for liberation through recognition. Ground Luminosity appears as a landscape of light, while shapes coalesce into deities during the union phase. The five wisdoms appear in the wisdom phase, followed by spontaneous presence where reality displays all possibilities. Unrecognized manifestations lead to fear and delusion.

Forty-two peaceful deities and fifty-eight wrathful deities appear as the natural radiant energy and pure aspects of your own mind. On the third day, a yellow light representing the equalizing wisdom and the Buddha Ratnasambhava appears simultaneously with a dull blue light representing the human realm.

• Listen without distraction to the teachings.
• Recognize the dazzling light as wisdom and the natural radiance of your own Rigpa.
• Have confidence, devotion, and longing toward the light.
• Pray to the buddha or master to be led on the radiant path.
• Do not delight in or look at the dim light of habitual tendencies.

The Bardo of Becoming

The sipa bardo is an intermediate state where the mind takes on a perfect mental body endowed with immense mobility and heightened clarity. This mental body is the size of a child of eight to ten years old and possesses awareness seven times clearer than in life. Thoughts in this state possess immense power, immediately creating reality and driving the vulnerable mind toward its next rebirth.

Spiritual practice for a deceased person is most powerful during the forty-nine days of the bardo of becoming, with special emphasis on the first twenty-one days. Because the mental body has seven times clearer clairvoyance than in life, your thoughts and actions directly affect the deceased. Quarreling or insincere mourning can cause intense anger and draw them into an unfortunate rebirth.

• Give up attachment to people and possessions.
• Abandon yearning for a body.
• Do not give in to desire or anger.
• Cultivate kindness rather than hostility.
• Do not contemplate negative actions.
• Recall spiritual practice and invoke masters or buddhas with one-pointed devotion.

10 Key Ideas

1. Modern industrial society fosters a profound denial of death and rampant materialism that avoids preparation for the afterlife through compulsive over-engagement in petty distractions.
2. Meditation brings the distracted ordinary mind home to the unchanging primordial awareness known as Rigpa by essentializing practice into bringing the mind home, releasing, and relaxing.
3. The human mind consists of the ordinary, dualistic, discursive mind known as sem and pristine rigpa, which remains untouched by change, death, or illusion.
4. Karma operates as an infallible law of cause and effect across beginningless streams of conscious rebirth, where the karmic fruit of an action is determined by the purity of the underlying intention.
5. Dzogchen reveals the self-perfected primordial state through the guidance of an authentic lineage master who serves as an external manifestation of the student's own inner teacher.
6. Confronting mortality breaks through illusions and naturally gives rise to a deep, limitless compassion that overcomes self-grasping and self-cherishing.
7. Taking on the suffering of others through Tonglen destroys self-cherishing and awakens universal compassion by inhaling suffering as black smoke and exhaling brilliant light.
8. Providing a peaceful environment, managing pain, and applying clear verbal permissions ensure a conscious passage through death while healing unfinished business.
9. Phowa, or the transference of consciousness, allows practitioners to merge their mind with an enlightened presence to remove negative karma and secure a peaceful death.
10. The bardos of dharmata and becoming offer profound opportunities for liberation during the forty-nine days after death when the mind takes on a mental body with heightened clarity.