PEACEFUL DEATH, JOYFUL REBIRTH: A Tibetan Buddhist Guidebook

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. (May 24)