Peaceful Death, Joyful Rebirth--A Tibetan Buddhist Guidebook

By Tulku Thondup
Shambhala Publications, May 2005

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According to Buddhism, the end of life marks an all-important transition. There are ways we can prepare ourselves for that time, and help others to prepare as well. This book provides practical advice for anyone facing or contemplating the dying process. Whether you are a health care provider, an older or ill person, or simply thinking about that time of life, Peaceful Death, Joyful Rebirth will serve as a source of sound advice and deep inspiration.

From Sogyal Rinpoche

Another healing treasure from Tulku Thondup: a clear, complete and compassionate guide-book to the journey through life, dying, death and beyond. Accessible and authentic as always, he brings to the ancient Buddhist teachings his deep and gentle understanding of the modern world. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, including the Tibetan near-death experiences, he shows to what extent the quality of our life, death and rebirth all depend upon the mind. By following the spiritual practices and straightforward practical guidance given here, any one of us can learn to transform not only our life, not only our dying and death, but also our future lives, and so even the future of humanity.

	Author Tulku Thondup is a highly respected Buddhist teacher and scholar

From Publishers Weekly

Hoping to "help us realize... ultimate peace and joy... for death and beyond," Tulku 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. Tulku 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.

Tulku 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. This review is copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Reader's review

By Philip Richman (New York, NY, USA)
Tulku Thondup speaks about the most subtle and crucial factors in the process dying and what comes after death. Remarkably, his audience is neither the scholar, the dilettante nor even the serious spiritual seeker. Rather he speaks directly and personally to each of us in that we ourselves will have to go through this passage. His message is that the attitude we bring to death is all important and it is a major mistake to hide from, ignore or fail to prepare for our own death. In spite of this, the tone of the book is completely positive, healing and comforting. Tulku Thondup's language and references are contemporary and up-to-date, but his sources of authority and training are steeped in the highest traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. This work also contains a brilliant survey of the biographies of delugs, Tibetans who "died" for many days and came back to reveal their experiences in the bardo. Thoroughly scholarly, yet completely accessible, this work is a breakthrough which expands the dimensions of self-help literature beyond the obsession with health while providing new material for scholars of all religions.

Related links

• Homepage for this book at Amazon.com
• Review of Boundless Healing, Tulku Thundup's previous book
• The Buddhist Approach to Healing, an article by Tulku Thondup