The Essence of Faiths
Whispers from everywhere
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Although everyone knows that they will die most people are unwilling to go - and this has unfavourable results. Proverbs 23,7 notes that, ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is’ - and there is freedom to choose how you think in your heart.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a guide to knowing and choosing how you think in your heart. It says that nobody can learn how to live without knowing how to die. Modern Tibetan religion is a blend of the ancient Bon and the more recent Buddhism. The essence of the teaching is captured in the following quote:
Free yourself from life-lust, from beliefs, from ignorance, and from your thirst for worldly distractions. Having cut those bonds you will be free from all suffering. Unlock the chains of birth and death by knowing what they mean. Thus, free from desire and craving in this earthly life, you will pass on calmly and serenely. (Psalms of the Early Buddhists 1,56)
Many of the American Indian traditions had mastered the art of living and dying. Before a battle the warriors were calm and could say with great peace of mind, ‘Today is a good day to die’. But how can we ordinary people ‘unlock the chains of birth and death by knowing what they mean?’
We have to contemplate mind and come to know the nature of knowing. We must come to know that there is more to birth and death than our traditional earthly understanding would have us believe. We have been taught to think of a separate, individual ‘I’ with a time-bound beginning and end; but this is illusion and ignorance. There are other ways to think. It is said:
All that we are is a result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of thoughts. (Dhammapada 1,1)
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is read to those who are soon to die so as to calm their minds and prepare them for what is to come. But it was originally written as a guide not only for the dying but also for the living. Those who know how to die well and those who know how to live.