This is also why Tibetan Buddhists believe that our loved ones can offer great help. By offering prayers, mantras and other practices at this time, it helps to comfort and guide the deceased through their passing, through the post-death state, into a state of greater peace and clarity. The Vajrasattva mantra can be recited every day for forty-nine days after the person has died.

Buddhists believe that though the body dies that there is mental body that continues to journey from life time to the next, carrying with it the residue of karma with it. How the person’s mental-body leaves the physical form affects the experience of the post-death state and of the future birth.