Anyen - Living and Dying with Confidence: A Day-by-Day Guide

A DAILY COMPANION FOR EMBRACING LIFE, PREPARING FOR DEATH, AND AWAKENING TO REALITY.

This beautifully crafted book gently helps readers accept lifes realities with courage and compassion.

TONI BERNHARD, AUTHOR OF HOW TO BE SICK

A NYEN R INPOCHE , Tibetan Buddhist master and teacher, and his longtime student and translator A LLISON C HOYING Z ANGMO present ancient and rich teachings on death in a contemporary, accessible manner. Learn how to release your attachments, embrace impermanence, cultivate virtue, and see the world as it really is one day at a time.

Their practical, disciplined timeline encourages step-by-step development of qualities such as lovingkindness, compassion, generosity, and patience. Each day offers a short teaching followed by a specific, concrete exercise to help you reflect on and fully integrate the message.

Through vivid and evocative contemplative scenarios and action items, Living and Dying with Confidence brings practice off the cushion and into ordinary life.

These everyday contemplations on death will be very beneficial, especially for those dealing with loss.

Tenzin Palmo, founder of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery

Beautiful! This books day-by-day encouragement is of great value for anyone exploring what it means to truly live.

Koshin Paley Ellison, editor of Awake at the Bedside

A remarkable, wise, and uncannily personal book that guides us to deepen our spiritual practice.

Deborah Schoeberlein David, author of Living Mindfully

Wisdom Publications

199 Elm Street

Somerville, MA 02144 USA

wisdompubs.org

2016 Anyen Rinpoche

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system or technologies now known or later developed, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Anyen, Rinpoche, author. | Zangmo, Allison Choying, author. | Singh,

Kathleen Dowling, writer of foreword.

Title: Living and dying with confidence : a day-by-day guide by Anyen

Rinpoche & Allison Choying Zangmo; foreword by Kathleen Dowling Singh.

Description: Somerville, MA : Wisdom Publications, 2016. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041227 (print) | LCCN 2015041728 (ebook) | ISBN

9781614292289 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 1614292280 (pbk. : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9781614292432 (ebook) | ISBN 1614292434 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Death Religious aspects Buddhism. | Death Planning.

Classification: LCC BQ4487 .A595 2016 (print) | LCC BQ4487 (ebook) | DDC

202/.3 dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041227

ISBN 978-1-61429-228-9 ebook ISBN 978-1-61429-243-2

20 19 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Phil Pascuzzo.

Interior design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc. Set in ITC Galliard Pro 10.125/14.7.

Dedication

For our root lama, Tsara Dharmakirti Rinpoche, who attained the fearless stronghold of death and passed away while resting in the dharmakaya; for Dorlo Rinpoche whose accomplishment equaled the span of his life; and for all of the lineage masters who have given their lives to maintain the stainless purity of the teachings for the benefit of all sentient beings.

Foreword

A T THE VERY HEART of each of us is a longing for the sacred. We have an innate intuition that there is more to life than only self and mere appearance; we have a yearning to know that deeper reality and live within it. This is so now and it has been so for millennia.

Throughout time, many have stepped into that deep pull of longing, surrendering to its call. Our wisdom traditions are the rich legacy of their spiritual explorations. The realizations gained through their longing and inquiry transformed their minds and their experience of being. They awakened into fulfillment, just as we long to do. But although they may have wished to pass their realizations along simply hand them over to us realization, inner knowing, is not a secondhand but a firsthand experience.

The saints, sages, yogis, and holy beings taught all that was teachable, shared all that could be shared. Within various wisdom lineages, they invited others into their wordless, invisible transformations by sharing their aerial view the testimony of their realizations. Unable to transfer their realizations or the transformations grace effected in them, they shared accounts of the practices they engaged in, taught the steps they followed to recognize grace and end all perceived and conceived separation from it.

They taught Dharma . Dharma is a word that transcends lineages. Its meaning holds a sense both of the truth and the path that leads to the truth. It encompasses all that can be taught in response to our deep spiritual yearning: wisdom, and the practices that allow us to arrive at wisdom.

Through the centuries, hundreds of thousands of longing souls followed these great spiritual explorers. Inspired by the views that pointed toward that deeper reality, they took up the practices of the lineages to which they had geographical access. These practices were taught and engaged primarily in secluded communities in monasteries, abbeys, and convents, in caves, forests, and deserts.

Now, in our time, we have access to many noble traditions, all gloriously available to us. In these last decades the age of information the river of Dharma is not only transcending geographic borders, its transcending the monastery. In response to contemporary longing, Dharma has poured out from behind the cloister walls, and the waters of that beautiful river are irrigating the fields where we live.

For ages, it was widely held that awakening was only possible for those with a monastic lifestyle. With Dharma now flowing far and wide, the way has opened for awakening to be a reasonable expectation for sincere lay practitioners as well. The intentions and the practices are the same; they lead us all to the grace for which weve longed.

In this book, the revered teacher Anyen Rinpoche and his student Allison Choying Zangmo offer Tibetan Buddhist monastic wisdom, accumulated and refined over more than a thousand years in meditation halls high in the Himalayas. They share the views and time-honored practices of the traditional Tibetan stages of the path to enlightenment.

Speaking to our common longing, Rinpoche and Allison present a clear and structured year-long guide of meditations and contemplations. Through thoughtful questions based on these deliberately sequential contemplations, they ask us to explore our own minds, to open to our struggles and impermanence. They suggest exercises throughout the day so that we can practice authentically in the midst of our busy lives just as we are living them.

Moral discipline based on mind training and an understanding of karma, renunciation that sees the suffering nature of ordinary mind, and bodhichitta a heart filled with wisdom and compassion are called forth and cultivated in us as the stages of the path are followed. An openness to living and a fearlessness in any circumstance, including death, become possible when we rest in awakened awareness, beyond self-reference.

A year spent with this book as guide can assist practitioners from any tradition in the holy tasks of emptying the mind and opening the heart. Living and Dying with Confidence is a great kindness, making available to all of us a view of compassionate wisdom and the steps to making that view our own realized awareness in our living and in our dying.