In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

In this intimate and stirring memoir, Mingyur Rinpoche (The Joy of Living), a Tibetan master of the Karma Kagyu and Nyingma traditions, recounts the painful realizations about his own consciousness that arose from an illness during a spiritual retreat in 2011. The goal of the retreat was to cast off all labels, identities, and expectations in order to make himself unfamiliar even to himself. He becomes a wandering ascetic and nearly dies from food poisoning just days after the start of his retreat. Mingyur Rinpoche meticulously recounts his states of mind and his discomfort, reporting the many subtle ways he expected his mind to function because he was considered an authority in the Buddhist community: “I needed to reexperience the continuity of change, to remember that every moment holds a chance to transcend the fixed mind.” Viewing his experience through the Tibetan doctrine of the bardos (intermediate states of life and death), he explores the ways that human beings find themselves always in a state of transition, and the idea that it is the inability to let go of attachments to the self that causes suffering. By showing that even a Tibetan master struggles with everyday suffering and the fear of death, Mingyur Rinpoche’s memoir instructs by frank and humbling example. (May)