The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying: The Spiritual Classic & International Bestseller: Revised and Updated Edition

To learn how to die is to learn how to live; to learn how to live is to learn how to act not only in this life, but in the lives to come. To transform yourself truly and learn how to be reborn as a transformed being to help others is really to help the world in the most powerful way of all.

Don’t let us half die with our loved ones, then; let us try to live, after they have gone, with greater fervor.

One way of comforting the bereaved is to encourage them to do something for their loved ones who have died: by living even more intensely on their behalf after they have gone, by practicing for them, and so giving their death a deeper meaning.

Think, then, of the moment of death as a strange border zone of the mind, a no-man’s land in which on the one hand, if we do not understand the illusory nature of our body, we might suffer vast emotional trauma as we lose it; and on the other hand, we are presented with the possibility of limitless freedom, a freedom that springs precisely from the

To train in compassion, then, is to know all beings are the same and suffer in similar ways, to honor all those who suffer, and to know you are neither separate from nor superior to anyone.

We need to make a very clear distinction between what is in our ego’s self-interest and what is in our ultimate interest; it is from mistaking one for the other that all our suffering comes.

Self-grasping and self-cherishing are seen, when you really look at them, to be the root of all harm to others, and also of all harm to ourselves.1

Compassion is not true compassion unless it is active.

To feel the full force of your mortality, and to open your heart entirely to it, is to allow to grow in you that all-encompassing, fearless compassion that fuels the lives of all those who wish truly to be of help to others.