Maintaining a bodhisattva mind during dying: recognizing the mind's luminous, empty nature and transforming death into an opportunity for liberation through wisdom and compassion.
Image of the Buddha Descending from Tusita Heaven, Wat Pangla, Sadao Dt., Songkhla Province, Thailand. Photograph from Wat Pangla in Songhkla, Southern Thailand taken by Anandajoti.
In this teaching celebrating Lhabab Duchen—the Buddhist holiday commemorating the Buddha's descent from Tushita heaven—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche explores the Sutra of Wisdom at the Hour of Death, offering practical guidance on maintaining a bodhisattva mind during life's ultimate transition. Rinpoche presents a comprehensive framework of view, meditation, conduct, and result, revealing that one's true nature is luminous, empty, and unborn—qualities that remain unchanged even through the dying process.
The teaching demonstrates how to unite wisdom and compassion through practices like Tonglen (sending and receiving), transforming death from a moment of fear into an opportunity for liberation. Rather than viewing dying as an ending to be dreaded, Rinpoche shows how recognizing the mind's original purity in the present moment can lead to enlightenment. While acknowledging that various after-death states and experiences exist across different Buddhist cosmological "plans," he emphasizes that the ultimate realization doesn't depend on navigating these states but on recognizing what has always been true—the mind's inherent luminosity and emptiness.
Rinpoche offers this condensed guide as both preparation for death and instruction for living fully now, showing how understanding the dying process illuminates the nature of all experience. By maintaining bodhisattva motivation—the altruistic wish to benefit all beings—even at death, practitioners can turn the moment of transition into the culmination of their spiritual path.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a world-renowned meditation teacher who integrates traditional Buddhist practice with neuroscience and leads the Tergar Meditation Community, teaching students in over thirty countries worldwide.
