How to Face Death Without Fear

A renowned Tibetan lama’s guidance for supporting your loved ones through death, and dying without fear yourself, now in a revised second edition.

“Helping our loved ones at the time of death is the best service we can offer them, our greatest gift. Why? Because death is the most important time of life: it’s at death that the next rebirth is determined.”—Lama Zopa Rinpoche

For years Lama Zopa Rinpoche envisioned a practical book to inform students how to help loved ones have a beneficial death. How to Face Death Without Fear has been compiled from years of Rinpoche’s teachings and has been lovingly edited in this second edition by Venerable Robina Courtin.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche provides detailed advice on how best to prepare ourselves to face the inevitable end of our own and our loved ones’ lives with courage, grace, and a mind free of fear. With great care, Rinpoche explains what to do in the months, weeks, and days that precede death, as well as how to handle the moment itself, and he provides the mantras, prayers, and meditations that must follow the death of a loved one.

The book includes guidance for many powerful practices, making this an essential reference for Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, caregivers, hospice workers, and chaplains.

This new edition has been restructured to make it easier for the reader to navigate and find which of 87 total practices they need, when they need it. It addresses the diverse scenarios we may find ourselves in, such as sudden death and organ donation, and it gives adaptations in the cases of the death of meditators, of non-Buddhists, and of beloved pets.

Those who are mourning the prospect of a loved one’s impending death will find in this book deep solace, with its wealth of rituals for making their ultimate transition a time of joy and meaning.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche is one of the most internationally renowned masters of Tibetan Buddhism, working and teaching ceaselessly on almost every continent. He is the spiritual director and cofounder of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), an international network of Buddhist projects, including monasteries in six countries and meditation centers in over thirty; health and nutrition clinics, and clinics specializing in the treatment of leprosy and polio; as well as hospices, schools, publishing activities, and prison outreach projects worldwide.

A Buddhist nun since the late 1970s, Venerable Robina Courtin has worked full-time since then for Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s FPMT. Over the years she has served as editorial director of Wisdom Publications, editor of Mandala Magazine, executive director of Liberation Prison Project, and as a touring teacher of Buddhism. Her life, including her work with prisoners, has been featured in the documentary films Chasing Buddha and Key to Freedom.