Mindfully Facing Disease and Death: Compassionate Advice from Early Buddhist Texts

This book provides a practical guide for those facing disease and death by helping them to access the ageless wisdom of the Buddha’s teaching. Disease and death are undeniably integral parts of human life. Yet when they manifest we are easily caught unprepared. To prepare for these, we need to learn how to skillfully face illness and passing away. A source of practical wisdom can be found in the early discourses that record the teachings given by the Buddha and his disciples. Analayo’s chief aim is to provide a collection of passages taken from the Buddha’s early discourses that provide guidance for facing disease and death. He focuses on the theme of compassion, and is concerned with anukampa: compassion as the underlying motivation in altruistic action. Analayo uses his own translations from the Chinese originals, presented here for the first time. Taken together with his practical commentary, we thereby gain a first-hand impression of what early Buddhism had to say about disease and death.