BOOK SUMMARY: THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING

By:  Sogyal Rinpoche

1.      Believing fundamentally that this life is the only one, modern people have developed no long-term vision.  So there is nothing to restrain them from plundering the planet for their own immediate ends and from living in a selfish way that could prove fatal for the future.  How many more warnings do we need, like this one from the former Brazilian Minister for the Environment, responsible for the Amazon rain forest?
•       Modern industrial society is a fanatical religion.  We are demolishing, poisoning, destroying all life-systems on the planet.  We are signing IOUs our children will not be able to pay…We are acting as if we were the last generation on the planet.  Without a radical change in heart, in mind, in vision, the earth will end up like Venus, charred and dead.
2.      Our society is obsessed with youth, sex, and power, and we shun old age and decay.  Isn’t it terrifying that we discard old people when their working life is finished and they are no longer useful?  Isn’t it disturbing that we cast them into old people’s homes, where they die lonely and abandoned?
3.      How sad is it that most of us only begin to appreciate our life when we are on the point of dying.
4.      Our lives are monotonous, petty, and repetitive, wasted in the pursuit of the trivial, because we seem to know of nothing better.
We smother our secret fears of impermanence by surrounding ourselves with more and more goods, more and more things, more and more comforts, only to find ourselves their slaves.  All our time and energy is exhausted simply maintaining them.
5.      The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.
Discipline is to do what is appropriate or just; that is, in an excessively complicated age, to simplify our lives.
Peace of mind will come from this.
6.      There are things that every person is sent to earth to realize and to learn.  For instance, to share more love, to be more loving toward one another.  To discover that the most important thing is human relationships and love and not materialistic things.
7.      Difficulties and obstacles, if properly understood and used, can often turn out to be an unexpected source of strength.  In the biographies of the masters, you will often find that had they not faced difficulties and obstacles, they would not have discovered the strength they needed to rise above them.
8.      In our culture we overvalue the intellect, we imagine that to become enlightened demands extraordinary intelligence.  In fact many kinds of cleverness are just further obscurations.  There is a Tibetan saying that goes, “If you are too clever, you could miss the point entirely.”
9.      Generally we waste our lives, distracted from our true selves, in endless activity; mediation, on the other hand, is the way to bring us back to ourselves, where we can really experience and taste our full being, beyond all habitual patterns.  Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing, and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations.
10.     Buddha said:  “Do not overlook negative actions merely because they are small; however small a spark may be, it can burn down a haystack as big as a mountain.  Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit; even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel.”
Buddha said, “What you are is what you have been, what you will be is what you do now.”  Padmasambhava went further:  “If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.”
11.     Shantideva said:  “Whatever joy there is in this world all comes from desiring others to be happy, and whatever suffering there is in this world all comes from desiring myself to be happy.
Dalai Lama says:  “If you try to subdue your selfish motives—anger and so forth—and develop more kindness and compassion for others, ultimately you yourself will benefit more than you would otherwise.  So sometimes I say that the wise selfish person should practice this way.  Foolish selfish people are always thinking of themselves, and the result is negative.  Wise selfish people think of others, help others as much as they can, and the result is that they too receive benefit.”
12.     Our present condition, if we use it skillfully and with wisdom, can be an inspiration to free ourselves from the bondage of suffering.
Whenever we act negatively, it leads to pain and suffering; whenever we act positively, it eventually results in happiness.
13.     Our society is dedicated almost entirely to the celebration of ego, with all its sad fantasies about success and power, and it celebrates those very forces of greed and ignorance that are destroying the planet.
14.     For those who have led good lives, there is peace in death instead of fear.
15.     Thomas Merton wrote:  “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?  This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.”