Hello again! Anil and I are still in Lhasa but have recently received news about a death in our Pemako village. Did I ever tell you about Crazy Uncle? He was a recluse with whom no one in the village had had contact for months, if not years. A lightning rod for public opinion during his lifetime, even his death is proving controversial. It is doubly disturbing for me. Although I never met Crazy Uncle, the news of his death has reignited memories of my own wife’s life and death.
Crazy Uncle first. Our village is embroiled in heated debate regarding how his death should be observed. If he was the highly-realized dharma practitioner that some allege, he will likely be honoured with a ceremonial cremation and his remains ensconced in a stupa. Local officials or disciples will write hagiographic accounts of his life, portions of which will be inscribed on this stupa. As a spiritual adept, death may also be an opportunity for him to demonstrate spiritual prowess by manifesting miracles. If you have read Heruka’s account of Milarepa’s death, you know just how opulent and spectacular these miracles can be! Although I regard most of Heruka’s account as metaphoric, the mere presence of a consecrated stupa at the mouth of Crazy Uncle’s cave or at the junction of nearby roads has the potential to attract pilgrims and change the flow of life in our village.
However, if Crazy Uncle wasn’t a great lama his funeral will be completely different. It will likely resemble that of my own wife. You may think me morbid to write about her death but, for Tibetans, death is anything but a morbid or forbidden subject. Buddhist have in fact been accused of having a rather “voracious curiosity” about the subject! (1) It seems your culture fears death; it is different here. As you know, we regard existence as saṃsāra, a continuous cycle of rebirth, and our spiritual teachings continually emphasize both life’s fragile impermanence and death’s inevitability. And there is one special spiritual teaching that helps to prepare us for the potentially terrifying period between two lifetimes.
This teaching is the Bardo-Thodol-Chenmo, the ‘Book on Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate States’. A few months before Losar, I wrote to you about terma; the Bardo-Thodol is an example. Written by Padmasambhava in the 8th century, it was later discovered in a cave by a tertön. (I believe selections of it have been published in English as “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” and that it had quite a heyday of LSD-feuled popularity in the 1960s and ‘70s.) The Bardo-Thodol describes six types of “Bardo”, a word which means “transitional state”. The first three occur within one’s current existence: the Bardos of Life, Dream and Meditation. The remaining three occur sequentially between our sentient lifetimes: the Chikhai Bardo which concerns the moment of death; the Chonyid Bardo which follows shortly thereafter; and the Sidpa Bardo which describes the waiting period before the ‘spirit’ is reincarnated in a suitable rebirth. When we use the word ‘Bardo’ alone, it is usually to this last Sidpa Bardo that we are referring. Navigating this Bardo is particularly disorienting, complex and frightening; the Bardo-Thotrol’s teachings help one to manage this period and obtain the best possible rebirth.
My wife, Pema, approached her own death with trepidation. In retrospect, some of the classic signs of death were present: six months beforehand she dreamt of a wide-open space; two months later she had a continuous stinging sensation at the tip of her nose; two weeks before her death, her heart sank suddenly within her body. As she lay on her deathbed, a monk recited funereal verses from the Bardo-Thodol over and over again in her ear:
“O nobly-born Pema, the time hath now come for thee to seek the Path. Thy breathing is about to cease. Thy guru hath set thee face to face before with Clear Light; and now thou art about to experience in its Reality in the Bardo state, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like unto a transparent vaccuum, without circumference or centre. At this moment, know thou thyself, and abide in that state.” (2)
At the time, I was overcome by events. Reading these lines now with the emotional distance that time provides, I am struck by their beauty and gravity.
When her breathing eventually ceased, the monk instructed, “Pema, now that thou art experiencing the Fundamental Clear Light, try to abide in that state which thou art now experiencing”. (3) This must sound very mysterious to you; let me try to explain. Pema’s ‘body’ actually existed as a series of vibrational levels; her physical form comprised the lowest of these. Pema also had a subtle body consisting of channels through which her life energy and consciousness flowed in the form of ‘winds’. After her breathing stopped, both these bodies began a process of dissolution whereby their five physical elements (water, air, fire, earth and ether) dissolved into one another in sequence. Her sensory faculties and various levels of consciousness disappeared one after another in a process that can take up to three days. Eventually Pema’s spirit separated from her physical form and emerged into translucent light. This moment of light, also sometimes called the Ground Luminosity of Mind, marked the moment that her true death occurred.
Pema’s spirit then entered the Chonyid Bardo. If one is able to recognize this Clear Light state, the wheel of rebirth is stopped and enlightenment is instantly obtained. It is unlikely that this happened to Pema, however, as it requires a level of spiritual proficiency that is extremely rare. Her spirit was instead surrounded by and bombarded with sound, colour, light and the appearance of peaceful and wrathful deities. (Interestingly, I have heard that if you are from a Western culture, these deities may appear in the form of Jesus or Mary (4)). As she underwent these changes, monks continued to recite from the Bardo-Thodol both to remind Pema of knowledge previously acquired during her lifetime (it is so very confusing to lose the support and container of your body!) and to provide spiritual teaching to Anil and I sitting by her side. We were continually reminded that death is a transformation, not an ending.
After three days, we washed Pema’s corpse, wrapped it in white cloth and carried it to the charnel grounds next to the monastery for a ‘sky burial’. Although this sounds rather majestic and beautiful, you will probably be startled; her now-empty corpse was offered to the vultures. A specially-trained monk known as a ‘body breaker’ dismembered the body so that the birds could consume it quickly. He removed the skin and cut the flesh and internal organs into chunks of meat. As the whole body must be eaten, he smashed the bones into into small pieces with a sledgehammer and mixed them with tsampa to make them more consumable. When he was ready, the body breaker had only to gesture to the vultures circling overhead; the corpse was completely gone within minutes. Anil and I watched from a distance, once again reminded of the impermanence of our present lives and circularity of saṃsāra.
Are you still reading? ☺ Sometimes non-Tibetans have strong reactions to the idea of sky burial! Indeed, the Communists banned the practice in the 1960s and did not reinstate it until the mid-1980s. Sky burials have great religious significance here, however. Some regard the vultures as dakinis who escort souls to the heavens where they can await rebirth. (I personally find this hard to reconcile with the teachings of the Bardo-Thodol.) Sky burial is also regarded as karmically fruitful — by giving food to vultures one saves the lives of other small animals who would otherwise become their prey. The Bodhisattva Gautama demonstrated this in a Jataka tale: to save a pigeon’s life, he offered a hawk a piece of his own flesh as an alternative.
In a world facing environmental challenges and resource shortages, I believe sky burials also make a good deal of environmental sense. No wood is burned, no water is polluted, no space is used up. The body is returned directly to the earth as vulture droppings, not perhaps the most poetic of endings but an appropriate one for a spent husk. Pema’s spirit was, after all, long gone.
This spirit was by then struggling through the Sidpa Bardo. It wandered, driven by the force of karma and the craving for rebirth. For each of forty-nine days, it passed through a new level perhaps visiting hell realms or encountering gods, demons and hungry ghosts. The Bardo-Thodol tells us that these wanderings are at a minimum disorienting and, more likely, downright terrifying! The only way I can understand the experience is as a kind of frantic dream. Throughout the journey, our monk continued reading to Pema to remind her that these apparitions, no matter how frightening, were merely projections of her own consciousness. These many years later, I can still easily recall the prayer he exhorted her to recite:
“Alas! when the Uncertain Experiencing of Reality is dawning upon me here,
With every thought of fear or terror or awe for all [apparitional appearances] set aside,
May I recognize whatever [visions] appear, as the reflections of mine own consciousness;
May I know them to be of the nature of apparitions in the Bardo: When at this all-important moment [of opportunity] of achieving a great end.” (5)
In addition to guiding her through the Bardo, the readings helped Pema’s spirit attain a better rebirth than might otherwise have occurred. Eventually the light from the rebirth realms appeared, and her spirit was drawn to the most karmically appropriate one. In time, her spirit was further drawn to where her future parents were conceiving her next incarnation.
So the Pema that Anil and I knew and loved is gone. Yet the continuum created by her past karma lives on in some sensory realm, within some being, somewhere in the world. When my loneliness or nostalgia is triggered by events such as Crazy Uncle’s death, I find this comforting. Just as the continuity that was Pema is fulfilling its karmic destiny on its journey through saṃsāra, so too will I inevitably fulfill mine. So will we all.
