There is a traditional story, a Jataka tale, of the Buddha’s past life before he became a Buddha. While walking in the mountains he happened upon a mother tiger and her cubs. They were starving to death and about to die.

This is also why Tibetan Buddhists believe that our loved ones can offer great help. By offering prayers, mantras and other practices at this time, it helps to comfort and guide the deceased through their passing, through the post-death state, into a state of greater peace and clarity. The Vajrasattva mantra can be recited every day for forty-nine days after the person has died.

Loved ones can participate by making prayers, reading prayers aloud to you and doing mantras and other Buddhist rituals. The Kuntuzangpo Prayer can be read to the dying person. This explains how appearances arise from the mind and fundamentally everything is luminous presence. The mani mantra can be done, Medicine Buddha mantra or Vajrasattva mantra.

Buddhists believe that though the body dies that there is mental body that continues to journey from life time to the next, carrying with it the residue of karma with it. How the person’s mental-body leaves the physical form affects the experience of the post-death state and of the future birth.

The Buddhist teaching on emptiness offers radical perspective that breaks through the chains that bind us, the concepts and assumptions that obscure our perception. But emptying out misconceptions about emptiness requires a journey through the wide wonderful world of Buddhist philosophy.

One of the distinctive features of the Buddhist view of death and dying, is the notion that death is a process that begins before their last breath, during a time when the person is gradually transitioning from bodily life. And then it continues for many days afterwards.