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Is there any other religion with a development of a doctrine of death and IRL, active practices to control the death process like tibetan buddhism?
The Bardo Thodol describes what you "see" after death in a very detailed and systematic way as a mental projection (several lamas consider that the imagery changes according to the dead's culture/ideas) then gives several techniques to guide the dead's wandering concsiousness to liberation. The body starts decomposing and each part is "recycled" (maggots eat the flesh, maggots get eaten by animals, meat is eaten by humans, etc)
This even recognizes that anybody can be liberated at the moment of death, no matter what karma was accumulated, which makes sense if it's all a mental process.
AFAIK all other religions I know have a passive approach to death (you just die and whatever happens afterwards is out of your control). Here your mind can be guided, or with enough control you can still control the death process
Is this tradition the only one with such features?
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>>3227299
>Is this tradition the only one with such features?
No, I can't think of which though off the top of my head, besides ancient Egypt. There's other religions that give instructions for what to do after you die, what you will encounter, etc. Fug, can't remember...Also Orthodox tollhouses lol...but there's other ones.
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>>3227299
Many Hindu schools have this practice of preparing for death, but I'll speak on Gaudiya Vaishnavism specifically here.
The moment of death is seen as crucial to liberation, as liberation is very hard to attain in embodied material life. Whatever one thinks at the moment of death he becomes in his next life. If you think of your wife, you become a woman; if you think of God, you become liberated. What you think of is automatic, based upon how you lived your life. You have very little conscious control over the mind during this state. The intermediate state is a very dark state of ignorance, a deeper state of consciousness than even sleep and very hard to become lucid during. Therefore, one must practice during his life to constantly think of God by the chanting of his names, this is called Bhakti. By keeping God in mind constantly, there is no question being reborn again as his liberation is guaranteed.
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>>3227299
The Orphics buried their dead with instructions on what to do in the afterlife to assure salvation, basically it was don't follow the other souls down to the river Lethe, if you drink from it you will forget your life and be reincarnated, instead approach the guardians and ask for water from the Spring of Mnemosyne, that you will remember your life and be able to move on to the next world.
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