The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

In a culture that avoids death, this landmark book reveals it as the key to a richer life. It is a powerful invitation to live fully, without regret, and to face death with serenity and confidence.

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Welcome to our summary of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. This landmark work of spiritual guidance masterfully bridges ancient Tibetan Buddhist wisdom with the needs of the modern world. Rinpoche’s purpose is to demystify the universal experiences of life, dying, and what lies beyond. With profound compassion and clarity, he presents death not as a failure or an end, but as a sacred opportunity for spiritual transformation. The book serves as a comprehensive manual for living with meaning and facing mortality with courage, peace, and a truly awakened heart.
Part One: Living
In our modern world, we have become masters of distraction. We are experts in one thing above all else: not looking. We do not look at our lives, we do not look at our own minds, and most especially, we do not look at death. Yet death is the one certainty we all share, a secret advisor whispering over our shoulder, a truth we try to muffle with the clamor of our busy, important lives. What a great and tragic irony it is that we are taught how to accumulate, how to achieve, how to live, but no one ever teaches us how to die. And because we do not know how to die, we find, to our astonishment, that we do not truly know how to live.

The great masters of Tibet understood this with a clarity that can be shocking to our conditioned minds. They tell us to look directly into the mirror of death, not to be morbid, but to be truly, vibrantly alive. When you hold this mirror up to your life, what do you see? The face of impermanence. Everything you hold dear—your relationships, your possessions, your very body and the thoughts you believe are ‘you’—is transient. It arises, it abides for a while, and it will dissolve. This is not a sad story; it is a universal law, as natural as the changing of the seasons. To recognize this fact, to truly take it to heart, is not to become melancholic. It is to be galvanized. It is the most powerful catalyst for spiritual practice, for it asks you the most urgent question: ‘What is truly important? What is the real meaning of this fleeting life?’

To answer this question, we must look to the source of all our experience: the mind. Yet, when we speak of the mind, we are often speaking of two very different things. There is the mind that we know, the one that never stops talking, judging, planning, and worrying. This is what the teachings call Sem. It is our ordinary, thinking mind, a chaotic and almost unceasing monologue. It is like a candle flame flickering wildly in the wind, unstable and unreliable. This Sem is the architect of our confusion, our suffering, and our fear, for it is dualistic, forever splitting reality into ‘I’ and ‘other,’ ‘like’ and ‘dislike,’ ‘birth’ and ‘death.’ We are so identified with this chattering, restless mind that we believe it is who we are. We are like a person who has spent उनका entire life in a windowless room, believing that room to be the whole world.

But there is another dimension to the mind, its ultimate nature. The masters call this Rigpa: a primordial, pure, and stainless awareness. It is not something we have to create; it is our innermost nature, what we have been from the very beginning. Rigpa is like the vast, open, and unchanging sky. Our thoughts, emotions, and perceptions—our Sem—are like the clouds that drift across it. The clouds may be dark and stormy or light and fluffy, but they never stain or change the nature of the sky itself. The sky is always there, boundless and serene. Our tragedy is that we spend our lives chasing and identifying with the clouds, completely forgetting the infinite sky that is our true home.

So how do we part the clouds? How do we find our way back to the sky? The method, the path, is meditation. People hear the word ‘meditation’ and they think of something very complicated, of sitting in a painful posture and forcing the mind to be blank. This is a misunderstanding. Meditation, in its truest sense, is simply ‘bringing the mind home.’ It is the process of taming the wild mind and allowing it to settle in its own natural state of peace. It begins with mindfulness, the simple, non-judgmental act of being present with your experience. When you sit, you just sit. When you breathe, you just know that you are breathing. You are not trying to stop your thoughts, which is impossible; you are simply allowing them to arise and dissolve without chasing after them, like watching clouds drift through the sky.

From this practice of mindfulness, a deeper state of calm and stability arises, which is called Shamatha, or ‘calm abiding.’ As you practice, the ‘muddy water’ of your mind, stirred up by the constant agitation of Sem, begins to settle. And as it settles, its own innate clarity begins to shine through. You begin to have glimpses of Rigpa, moments of spacious, non-dual awareness. This is the beginning of a profound homecoming, the rediscovery of a peace and confidence that does not depend on external circumstances.

This journey of mind is not confined to one life. Our present experience is shaped by a universal law of cause and effect, which we call Karma. Karma is not a system of divine reward and punishment. It is a natural process, like planting seeds. Actions born from aggression and greed will ripen into experiences of suffering, just as a poisonous seed will grow a poisonous fruit. Actions born from kindness and wisdom will ripen into experiences of happiness and peace. Every thought, word, and deed is a seed we are planting, and our life is the garden where they grow. This understanding brings with it an immense sense of personal responsibility, but also of great empowerment. Our future is in our own hands.

This very life, which we take to be so solid and real, is itself an intermediate state, a bardo. The masters call it the ‘natural bardo of this life.’ It is a precious, fleeting opportunity, a gap between a past birth and a future death, in which we have the incredible chance to recognize the nature of our mind and change the entire course of our destiny. To waste this opportunity, to live in distraction until death comes as a shocking surprise, is, as one master said, like returning empty-handed from an island of jewels. This life is that island. The jewel is the recognition of our own true nature.
Part Two: Dying
If this life is a preparation for death, then one of the most profound ways we can prepare is to learn how to help others as they pass through that great transition. In our culture, the dying are often hidden away, their experience medicalized and sanitized, their deepest spiritual needs ignored. This is a poverty of the heart. What the dying need most is not complicated; it is love. To be present for someone who is dying is one of the most sacred duties we can perform. It requires us to put aside our own fears and simply offer them an atmosphere of unconditional, boundless love. Create a peaceful environment. Speak to them with gentleness and honesty. Help them resolve any unfinished business, to forgive and be forgiven. Let them know they are not alone. Your calm and loving presence is a lifeline, a sanctuary in the midst of their fear and confusion. This is the essential heart advice.

To truly cultivate the strength of heart needed for this work, we can rely on one of the most powerful practices in the entire Tibetan tradition: Tonglen, the practice of ‘taking and sending.’ It is a practice that completely reverses our ordinary, self-cherishing logic. On the in-breath, you visualize yourself taking in all the pain, suffering, and fear of the dying person—and of all beings who are suffering. You imagine it as a thick, hot, black smoke that enters your heart. At your heart, it strikes the core of your self-grasping, your ego, and completely destroys it. In the space that opens up, you breathe out, sending all of your happiness, your well-being, your peace, and your joy. You imagine it as a cool, brilliant, healing white light that radiates out, soothing their pain and bringing them peace. Tonglen is compassion in action. It is a fearless alchemy that transforms suffering into love, and in doing so, it opens our hearts to a courage and compassion we never knew we possessed.

To help the dying, and to prepare for our own death, we must also understand the process itself. The masters describe death not as a single event, but as a sequence of dissolutions, as the components of our body and mind unravel. First is the ‘outer dissolution,’ where the five elements that constitute our physical body fall apart. The earth element dissolves into water: you lose all strength, you feel as if you are being crushed by a great weight, and you can no longer support your own body. The water element dissolves into fire: your mouth and nose become dry, you feel intensely thirsty, and the fluids of your body begin to dry up. The fire element dissolves into air: the heat of your body drains away, usually from your limbs towards your heart, and you feel a coldness creep over you. Finally, the air element dissolves into consciousness: your breathing becomes ragged and difficult, you gasp for air, and with a final, long exhalation, the outer breath ceases. At the same time, your senses are failing. The world of form, sound, smell, taste, and touch fades away like a television being turned off.

As the outer world dissolves, a profound ‘inner dissolution’ begins. This is the unraveling of the layers of consciousness. Our more coarse thought states and emotions, fueled by anger, desire, and ignorance, dissolve. The conceptual mind, Sem, with all its projections and dualistic clinging, finally falls silent. This can be a terrifying experience for one who has only ever known the chatter of their own mind. But for a practitioner, this is the moment they have been waiting for. As the clouds of Sem part for the last time, a stupendous, brilliant light dawns. This is the dawning of the fundamental nature of mind, the Ground Luminosity. It is the ultimate nature of everything, the unconditioned, timeless, and radiant essence of reality itself.

ested practices can guide us through this awesome and powerful process. The most famous of these is Phowa, the transference of consciousness. Phowa is a practice mastered during one’s lifetime, which prepares the practitioner to eject their consciousness from the body at the very moment of death. With a focused mind and a powerful cry, they direct their consciousness out through the crown of their head, sending it directly to a realm of enlightenment, a pure land, or, at the very least, toward a favorable rebirth where they can continue their spiritual path. Phowa is considered a kind of spiritual insurance, a method that offers liberation without a lifetime of arduous practice. It is a supreme act of confidence, a way of transforming the moment of death from an ending into a triumphant and conscious departure.
Part Three: Death and Rebirth
At the precise moment of death, as the inner breath ceases, we are faced with the greatest and most fleeting opportunity for liberation. The Ground Luminosity, or the Clear Light, dawns for every being. It is described as a light more brilliant than a thousand suns, yet it is not an external light. It is the naked, unadorned, sky-like nature of your own mind, Rigpa, revealing itself in its full splendor. It is the ground of all being, reality-as-it-is, uncreated and deathless. The masters say that if, in that moment, you can recognize this luminosity as your own true nature—if you can merge with it, like a child running into its mother’s lap—you are instantly and completely liberated. There is no bardo, no rebirth, only the final and absolute homecoming.

For most of us, however, conditioned by a lifetime of ignoring our true nature and identifying with our ego, this experience is overwhelming. The sheer brilliance and vastness of it can be terrifying. We recoil from it, and we faint into unconsciousness. When we awaken, we find ourselves in the second after-death state, the Bardo of Dharmata. Here, the intrinsic radiance of our own mind begins to unfold in a fantastic display of light, sound, and color. These energies then crystallize into visionary forms: a mandala of one hundred peaceful and wrathful deities. The peaceful deities appear in the first days, bathed in soft, dazzling lights, representing the pure aspects of our own consciousness. But if we fail to recognize them, we are propelled by our fear and negative karma into the later visions of the wrathful deities. These are terrifying, monstrous figures, drinking blood from skulls, brandishing weapons, and emitting deafening, thunderous sounds.

Here lies the crucial point, the secret key to this bardo: all of these visions, both peaceful and wrathful, are not external entities. They are nothing other than the natural, spontaneous play of your own mind’s awareness. They are your own projections, the archetypal energies of your own psyche appearing before you. The peaceful deities are the radiance of your own purified emotions; the wrathful deities are the terrifying masks of your own anger, greed, and delusion. If you can recognize this—if you understand that you are only meeting yourself—they all dissolve back into the light of your own awareness, and you are liberated. But if you see them as separate, external beings who are there to judge or attack you, you are filled with terror and flee, propelled by your karma into the next bardo.

This is the Bardo of Becoming, the karmically driven journey toward a new birth. Having failed to recognize the nature of mind in the previous bardos, you now possess a subtle ‘mental body,’ which has all its senses intact and is extremely light and mobile. Your mind in this state is seven times clearer than in life, but it is also highly unstable and suggestible, like a feather in the wind, blown about by the slightest breeze of thought and karmic habit. You re-experience events of your past life, and you are tormented by a great sense of yearning and a desperate search for a body, any body, to inhabit. The power of mind here is immense; a single negative thought can hurl you into a lower rebirth, while a single positive thought can lead you to a higher one. This is why the prayers and spiritual practices performed by the living for the deceased are so critically important during the forty-nine-day period of this bardo. The focused, loving thoughts of the living can act as a guide, a beacon of light, for the confused consciousness of the deceased, helping to steer them toward a fortunate rebirth where the path to enlightenment can be continued.

It is fascinating to note how these ancient and detailed descriptions of the after-death states resonate so strongly with modern accounts of the Near-Death Experience (NDE). People from all cultures who have been declared clinically dead and then revived report strikingly similar experiences: passing through a tunnel, seeing a great light, meeting beings of light, and undergoing a life-review. They often speak of an overwhelming feeling of peace and love. From the Tibetan Buddhist perspective, these NDEs are glimpses into the bardo process. The experience of the great light is a brush with the Ground Luminosity. The beings of light are a foretaste of the peaceful deities. The life-review is a part of the judgment that takes place in the Bardo of Becoming. These modern testimonies serve as a powerful confirmation that what the masters have described for centuries is not myth, but a universal map of consciousness and its journey through death and beyond.
Part Four: Conclusion
When we study these teachings on the bardos of dying and death, it is easy to think of them as something exotic and far-off, relevant only for a future event. But this is to miss their most profound and practical meaning. The bardo principle is a universal process. It is not just about what happens after we die; it is about what is happening in every moment of our lives. A bardo is an ‘intermediate state,’ a gap, a transition. The space between this life and the next is a bardo. But so is the gap between yesterday and tomorrow. The gap between sleeping and waking is a bardo. Even the gap between one thought and the next is a tiny bardo, a momentary flash of pure awareness. Our entire existence is a dance of continuous birth and death, a series of transitional states. By familiarizing ourselves with the bardo teachings, we are not just preparing for death; we are learning how to navigate the shifting, impermanent landscape of life itself. We learn to see every moment of change not as a threat, but as an opportunity for awakening, a gap in our conceptual mind through which the light of Rigpa can shine.

This is the ultimate fruit of this path. The goal is not simply to have a ‘good death,’ but to live a good life. It is to arrive at a state of inner freedom where we can truly embrace both life and death. To live fully, without clinging and attachment, knowing that everything is impermanent. To live without fear of the future, because you have found within yourself a confidence and a peace that is unconditional and deathless. When you have recognized the sky-like nature of your mind, you are no longer terrified by the clouds of thought or the storms of life and death. You can die with confidence and peace, not as a failure or a defeat, but as a final, glorious moment of transition, a conscious return to the luminous ground of your own being.

In this dark age, when the world is torn apart by greed, aggression, and a fundamental misunderstanding of who we are, there is no more urgent task than the one set before us by these teachings. We are called to become spiritual warriors, but not warriors who fight others. We are called to be warriors who bravely fight the inner enemies of our own ignorance and ego-clinging. We are called to undertake the journey of self-transformation, to tame our minds and open our hearts. For it is only by transforming ourselves that we can ever hope to transform the world. Each one of us who embarks on this path, who cultivates a little more wisdom and a little more compassion, becomes a source of healing and sanity. You become, in your own way, a servant of peace. Let us not wait for death to be our teacher. Let us begin now, in this very moment, in the midst of this very life. Let us bring our minds home, realize our own enlightened nature, and dedicate our lives, and even our deaths, to the benefit of all sentient beings.
Ultimately, the book’s enduring impact is its transformation of death from a source of terror into a profound spiritual opportunity. The central, crucial teaching reveals the bardos—the intermediate states between death and rebirth. The ultimate spoiler is not a plot point, but a spiritual one: at the moment of death, we encounter the brilliant, luminous Clear Light, which is the true nature of our own mind. Recognizing it leads to liberation. If we don’t, our karmic imprints guide us through subsequent bardos toward our next rebirth. The book’s unparalleled strength is providing a compassionate and practical roadmap for this journey, empowering us to live and die consciously. It is a timeless guide for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of life itself. We hope you found this summary insightful. Please like and subscribe for more content like this, and we will see you for the next episode.