About This Book This book distills thousands of years of profound wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, conveyed in simple words that are easy for anyone to comprehend. My main goal is to present teachings that not only heal our pain and confusion about death and dying but also help us realize the enlightened goal of ultimate peace and joy, not only for this life, but also for death and beyond. The Buddha taught various ways for us to prepare ourselves for the unknown situations of death and make the best of them. Numerous enlightened masters of truth have written treatises on this very subject. Tibentan Buddhism has produced some of the most elaborately detailed teachings in the field of death and afterdeath - the famous 'Bardo Thodrol' (popularly know in English as 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead') being only one of them. In fact, all Buddhist teachings are about reognizing and improving the situation of life, death, and the next life. My sources for this book thus include a great variety of texts,* as well as the direct teachings I received form my spiritual masters and my firsthadn experiences in dealing with the deaths of great spiritual masters, close friends, and strangers. *The texts on which I drew are cited in abbreviated form in the notes at the back of the book; the "References" section provides the key ot these abbreviations and the full facts of publications about thses sources.