Book Review: In Love with The World. What a Monk can Teach you About Living from Nearly Dying

Book by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche with Helen Tworkov 

A friend gave me a copy of this book when I was recovering after an operation. What a brilliant gift and what an engaging book! Far from being a stuffy Buddhist text, it is an adventure story, describing one man’s journey towards enlightenment, exploring the mind of pure awareness and finding himself in love with the world. The author, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, was born a Tulku (the recognised incarnation of a spiritual adept) to a devout Buddhist family. Throughout the book he tells of teachings he received from his father who was an esteemed meditation master: 

Just go. 

Who are you? 

Let it be. 

Acknowledge the wave but stay with the ocean. 

Watch without getting caught – getting hooked by the story means that we have lost touch with awareness.

These phrases will resonate with Chan practitioners and every chapter offers such gems. 

Mingyur Rinpoche became a monk at the age of five and went on to become Abbot of a Tibetan Monastery in Bodh Gaya in Northern India. Leaving his privileged and protected life as an Abbot, he secretly escaped his monastery and his senior responsibilities to experience retreat as a Sadhu, wandering penniless, clothed in a thin loincloth and needing to beg. He finds himself facing all his vexations. Judgement, panic, fear and embarrassment are high on the list of troubles he is up against. He describes the various meditation techniques he uses to help maintain awareness despite many challenges. Just as we are taught, his methods include the body scan, breathing, counting, inquiring, compassion meditation and awareness meditation (a practice similar to direct contemplation). He shows us how he finds freedom alongside stress and anxiety. 

The story interweaves Buddhist teaching with the everyday experience of journey and change. In leaving behind, letting go and becoming different, Mingyur Rinpoche explains the bardo as a stage of in between and of becoming. Bardo does not refer just to the time after physical death but is also the space between the passing of the old and whatever comes next, unknown, uncertain and transient. Bardo is the gap, the transition between one moment and the next. 

He describes states of mind continuing to move like a revolving door through moments of tranquillity to aversion, dislike and judgement. He becomes dangerously ill and nearly dies. Towards the end of the book, in a breakthrough, he describes how the clarity and luminosity of awareness – beyond concepts, beyond fixed mind – become his sole vehicle of knowing. 

On the cover Pema Chodron says this is one of the most inspiring books she has ever read. 

And to quote John Crook: 

Nothing matters 

and everything must go. 

Yet love is having the heart touched 

in the valleys of suffering. 

Yongey Mingyur Rimpoche with Helen Tworkov, In Love with the World. What a Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying. Bluebird 2019, ISBN 978–1–5098–9934