Improving Western understanding of death

Ever since Sogyal Rinpoche began teaching he understood that one of the greatest lacks for a Western audience was any true understanding of death. He understood that the bankruptcy and impoverishment of the West's attitude was no more clearly expressed than in the dreadful lack of care for the dying. He was especially astonished by this when he first came to the West, because in Tibet where he had grown up he had seen people dying and being cared for by the whole community, especially by the Masters. He had seen, as he describes at the beginning of the book, several people die in extreme peace and calm. He was very struck when he first came to the West at the complete lack of spiritual understanding and the almost complete lack of care. So he decided very early on in his mission to concentrate on death and dying. It is one of the most important things that he and his tradition can do.

His teachings are based on 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead' which is a unique book of knowledge, a kind of guide book, a travelogue if you like, of the after-death state - designed to be read by a Master or spiritual friend to a person as the person dies, and after death.

Tibetan Buddhists claim that there are five methods for obtaining enlightenment without meditation. One is seeing a Master or sacred object, another is wearing specially blessed drawings of mandalas or sacred mantras, another is tasting sacred nectars consecrated by Masters, another is remembering the transference of consciousness, the phowa, at the moment of death, and the last is hearing certain profound teachings such as the Great Liberation Through Hearing the Bardo.

Sogyal Rinpoche's book 'The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying' is the complete, lucid unfolding of all the background that you would need to understand the instructions of 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead', to understand the different states that the book is describing and to understand the entire culture from which the book arises.

Sogyal Rinpoche's book is necessarily about living as well as dying; it is about meditation and the essential nature of mind, about the nature of this life and the extreme importance of practising in this life so as to be able to go through death with the calm concentration necessary.

One of the dangers of the modern research in the Near-Death Experiences is that it tended to make them romantic, to assume that whoever you are and whatever you have done in your life, when you die you will see the light and be taken into it. It does depend very much on how deeply you have learned to meditate and to stabilise the recognition of your essential mind.

The last part of the book is all about the very amazing parallels between modern scientists' understanding of the universe as arising out of a central ground of silence and light, manifesting in energy and condensed and crystallised in matter. This corresponds exactly with the Buddhist vision of the Absolute as the void, the light, as the energy of manifestation that arises from that void, the shining of that energy, and the crystallisation of that energy into matter.

Editorial postscript: My favourite passage in this encouraging book is where Sogyal Rinpoche advises helping your dead friend and the healing of your own grief by invoking, perhaps with a mantra, any enlightened being who inspires you, and imagining tremendous rays of light streaming out towards you from that being, filling up your heart. And then: 'Imagine you are sending this blessing, the light of healing compassion of the enlightened beings, to your loved one who has died.'

Rigpa, the Tibetan Buddhist centre founded by Sogyal Rinpoche, offers occasional courses on death and dying: 330 Caledonian Road, London N1 1BB (tel 071 700 0185).