Living in the Light of Death

Book excerpt: This book presents the Buddhist approach to facing the inevitable facts of growing older, getting sick, and dying. These tough realities are not given much attention by many people until midlife, when they become harder to avoid. Using a Buddhist text known as the Five Subjects for Frequent Recollection, Larry Rosenberg shows how intimacy with the realities of aging can actually be used as a means to liberation. When we become intimate with these inevitable aspects of life, he writes, we also become intimate with ourselves, with others, with the world—indeed with all things.