III. The nature of death

The term “thanatology” was first penned by an American surgeon, Dr. Roswell Park, in an essay published in 1912, which eventually became a field for interdisciplinary studies. The history of this field is only a little over one hundred years. The Tibetan Buddhist text of death, Bardo Tödröl or Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo, is over a thousand years old. And Buddhist texts that deal with the subject of death have been around for 2500 years. The process of dying is clearly laid out particularly in the Kālacakra Tantra which was expounded by Buddha Sakyamuni in the year before his parinirvana when he was 80 years old.

~ Depicted from "THE HANDBOOK FOR LIFE"S JOURNEY : On Death And Rebirth-Understanding Death