The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is a contemporary spiritual classic (sometimes falling within the New Age denomination) that bridges ancient Tibetan Buddhist wisdom with modern existential questions. This seminal work, originally published in 1992, builds on an already established tradition of Buddhism in the West.

Buddhism started arousing curiosity in the West in the mid-19th century, with prominent thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Sir Edwin Arnold, and in the 20th century, with Herman Hesse drawing inspiration from Buddhist texts. As Damien Keown notes in Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction, starting in the middle of the 20th century, a number of books accelerated the popularization of Buddhism in the West:

In the post-war years Jack Kerouac’s novels The Dharma Bums and On the Road were popular with the Beat generation and provided inspiration for the countercultures of subsequent decades. The eclectic thinker and philosopher Alan Watts wrote a number of books on Zen which attracted a popular readership, but perhaps more than any other single work Robert M. Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)—although more concerned with Western philosophy than Zen—has ensured that this school of Buddhism is widely known in the West, at least by name (Keown, Damien. Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd. ed., Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 282-3).

While Zen and Theravada (practiced mainly in Sri Lanka) Buddhism were previously known in the West, Tibetan Buddhism was introduced to the West only after the exile of the Dalai Lama, following the annexation of Tibet by China in the 1950s. It only became popular through political activism, aided by Dalai Lama’s being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989 and subsequently through several books. Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, along with the spiritual institution he established, called Rigpa, played a huge role in popularizing Tibetan Buddhism in the West.

Rinpoche’s book draws from the teachings of the Nyingma school, the oldest of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. It synthesizes teachings from several Tibetan Buddhist texts, most notably the Bardo Thodol, commonly known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Some notable Buddhist concepts that are widely used in popularizing literature and particularly in Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying are samsara, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth; karma; the master-disciple relationship; bardo; and nirvana. These concepts are not particular to Tibetan Buddhism but appear, in one form or another, in all schools of Buddhism.

In recent years, after being plagued for decades by accusations of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, as well as corruption and misuse of funds, the Tibetan Buddhist community is slowly changing. The Dalai Lama has admitted publicly that he was aware of the abuse allegations, which he condemned. There have also been numerous discussions in the Buddhist communities all over the Western world regarding the integration of Buddhist practices in a Western context, giving rise to such phenomena as, for example, the Western Buddhist nun, resulting in an intersection of Western and Eastern ethical concepts. All these are steps towards the reconfiguration of a traditional dynamic that—due to the rigid structures and relationships that have defined it in the past—has led to an imbalance of power.