The-Tibetan-Book-of-Living-and-Dying

402 NOTES
5. The future Buddha, Maitreya, is in fact portrayed sitting on a
chair.
6. You may not be following this practice now, but keeping the
eyes open creates an auspicious condition for your practicing it in the
future. See Chapter 10, "The Innermost Essence."
7. See Appendix 4 for an explanation of this mantra.
8. Although I have given here a full instruction on the practice, it
should be borne in mind that meditation cannot truly be learned
from a book, but only with the guidance of a qualified teacher.
9. Rainer Maria Rilke in Duino Elegies,
10. Lewis Thompson, Mirror to the Light (Coventure).
6. EVOLUTION, KARMA, AND REBIRTH
1. Adapted from the "Middle Length Sayings," quoted in H. W.
Schumann, The Historical Buddha (London: Arkana, 1989), 54-55.
2. Quoted in Hans TenDam, Exploring Reincarnation (London:
Arkana, 1990), 377. Other figures in the West in modern history who
have apparently believed in rebirth have included: Goethe, Schiller,
Swedenborg, Tolstoy, Gauguin, Mahler, Arthur Conan Doyle, David
Lloyd George, Kipling, Sibelius, and General Patton.
3. Some Buddhist scholars prefer the word rebirth to "reincarnation,"
which they feel implies the notion of a "soul" that incarnates,
and it is therefore not appropriate to Buddhism. The American statistics
for belief in reincarnation appear in: George Gallup Jr., with
William Proctor, Adventures in Immortality: A Look Beyond the Threshold
of Death (London; Souvenir, 1983). A poll in the London Sunday Telegraph,
April 15, 1979, indicated that 28 percent of British people
believed in reincarnation.
4. Joan Forman, The Golden Shore (London: Futura, 1989), 159-63.
5. Ian Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (Charlottesville:
Univ. of Virginia Press, 1974); Cases of the Reincarnation
Type, vols. 1-4 (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1975-1983);
Children Who Remember Previous Lives (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia
Press, 1987).
6. Kalsang Yeshi, "Kamaljit Kour: Remembering a Past Life," in
Dreloma, no. 12 (New Delhi, June 1984): 25-31.
7. Raymond A. Moody, Jr., Life After Life (New York: Bantam,
1986), 94.
8. Margot Grey, Return from Death: An Exploration of the Near-Death
Experience (Boston and London: Arkana, 1985), 105.
9. Kenneth Ring, Heading Towards Omega: In Search of the Meaning
of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Quill, 1985), 156.
10. Interestingly Mozart, in a letter to his father, referred to death
as "the true and best friend of humanity ... the key which unlocks
the door to our true state of happiness." "At night," he wrote, "I
never lie down in my bed without thinking that perhaps (young as I