The Buddha's Wheel of Birth and Death

Of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, the first two address directly the structure of samsara (Kalu 15-16). The First Noble Truth announces that life is suffering. The Second Noble Truth describes craving or desire as the primary cause of suffering (unhappiness). With these two propositions Gautama Buddha is said to have analyzed duhkha, the underlying "disease" that afflicts sentient beings (Matthews 27-29). The world is inherently afflicted with decay, sickness and death.

In answer to his pessimistic diagnosis of life, the Buddha also presented his dharma, a prescription for ending the meaningless, frustrating, unhappy character of living. The practice of Buddhist teachings is embodied in the second pair of Noble Truths: the Third suggests that it is possible to attain a state of liberation from pain;

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betan Buddhism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol, "Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane") describes the process of dying in such a way that it also describes the process of shedding the desires of the world. It operates on the premise that the path to enlightenment permits access to the depths of one's consciousness, including the experience of past (and future) lives (Govinda liii). The description of a connection between dying and the attainment of a higher form of consciousness is, of course, not confined to Buddhism, let alone its Tibetan branch. As expressed in The Egyptian Book of the Dead and in Western manuals on "the Craft of Dying," the acceptance of death, the ability to die consciously and nobly, results in the fuller experience of one's life. The Eleusinian Mysteries encompassed, for example, a symbolic death and rebirth into the new life of an initiate. The individual seeker is conceived as a kind of hero who makes a frightening journey as a way of winning a new level of awareness. Christianity has incorporated a similar approach into its concept of salvation, but the mystical relationship between salvation and the death of the ego has largely been lost in Christian theology (Evans-Wentz xi
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Approximate Word count = 1733
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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