To a Mountain in Tibet(52)
In death, an advanced yogi recognises this light as that of pure emptiness–it is sometimes described as transparent moonlight–and passes into nirvana. Then the sound of sacred instruments may be heard, and rainbows appear.
But for most others, as the light fades, a series of benign Buddhas arises, blazingly illumined, and continues for seven days. Each is accompanied by the dull, sensuous light of the once-experienced world, and the words half-chanted to the dead urge the spirit not to flinch, but to recognise and meld with Buddhahood. Each time the spirit slips back into worldly illusion, another Buddha arises, and the guiding voice of the Liberation tenderly repeats itself: O Child of Buddha-Nature, that which is called death has now arrived. You are leaving this world. But in this you are not alone. This happens to everyone…
Only after these first invocations fail do the visions fade and others more horrible surface. Over renewed cycles of seven days, wrathful deities stampede through the brain, monsters jewelled in snakes and bones. Their entwined consorts offer no comfort: they feed them skullfuls of blood. Yet even now, if these are recognised as aspects of devotional gods, and finally as emanations of the self, the spirit of the dead may liberate itself into the realm of the bodhisattvas.
O Child of Buddha-Nature, now you have wandered to here…Where such visions arise, do not be afraid or terrified. Your body is a mental body, formed of habitual tendencies. Therefore, even if you are slain and cut in pieces, you will not die.
But if the spirit does not dispel these ghosts, it becomes mired still deeper in delusion. The terror induced by its past deeds intensifies. The blood-drinking deities become one with Yama, the Lord of Death, whose mirror is even now reflecting the sins of the pilgrims toiling round Kailas towards the pass of compassion. The astral body of the dead can move anywhere at will, but its wretchedness only increases. It returns to its old home, but cannot re-enter its body, even if this still exists. It hears its family mourning, but they cannot hear it calling back. Now its past actions mass like a hurricane behind it. One by one, as the nightmare gods gain credence, they grow more terrifying. The spirit flees into darkness, hears mountains crumble, tries to squeeze into crevices. At last Yama weighs its sins and virtues as black and white pebbles, then beheads and dismembers the undying spirit, which still does not recognise that even this is illusion.
O Child of Buddha-Nature, listen…If you continue to be distracted, the lifeline of compassion, suspended to you, will be cast off and you will move on to a place where there is no prospect of liberation. So be careful…
Hereafter the dead are condemned to reincarnation. Six ‘womb entrances’ confront them, leading to the regions of the mortal gods and antigods, of reborn humans, animals, ghosts and the final zone of hell. The spirit starts to recognise the kind among whom it belongs. Yet even now there are prayers and practices for blocking one womb and entering another. At the funeral’s end the presiding lama manipulates a placard inscribed with the name of the dead, stopping up wombs and reconciling sins until the spirit has found its place.
The monk Tashi, back in Kathmandu, told me how he spoke this Liberation above the corpse of his grandfather. ‘He was a lama, a man who had done good in the village,’ he said. ‘He can’t have suffered much. All the same, in this intermediate state, the soul may not know it is dead. It can see all these mourners crowded round something, weeping. But it may take a long time to realise, as it wanders.’
In the monastery garden, in the blaze of scentless hibiscus and marigolds, this voyage seemed unimaginably remote. But Tashi spoke with the same unshakeable authority as his scripture. ‘The soul may put its foot in a stream, perhaps, then notice that no foot is there; or it may suddenly see that its body casts no shadow. Then it realises that it is dead…’
Tashi attributed the Book of the Dead to Padmasambhava. But in fact its rite seems to have been compiled from fourteenth-century sources, and standardised 300 years later by a feared mystic named Rikzin Nyima Drakpa, who performed dubious miracles on Mount Kailas.
In its duel between ignorance and realisation, illusion and the light of emptiness, this infernal journey seems to gather to itself an unnerving cosmic coherence. There were even those, the delok, who had returned from the dead, Tashi warned me (they were mostly women, it seemed) with blissful or hair-raising messages.
I had heard of these people, I said, and they seemed to bring back reflections only of their own culture. Had anyone ever returned with something startlingly different?
Tashi seemed then to become credulous, childlike, and talked of incidents in which people had recognised their past in others. ‘I heard about a little girl in a village in our area, reincarnated from a dead child in the village next door. Suddenly she ran into the home of her earlier birth, calling out her old parents’ names. Nobody could explain it…’
‘But in your faith, can the knowledge of a previous life exist?’ I heard my own voice unsteady. For the Buddhist soul did not recognise its past. It transmuted continually into another body, another childhood, other parents. ‘Isn’t everything shed?’ I sounded harsh, I knew, because I wanted it otherwise. What anxiety could it be that expected this humble monk to hold life’s secrets?
He smiled, as he tended to do at contradiction. ‘That is so. Only karma lasts. Merit and demerit.’
‘So nothing of the individual survives.’ Nothing that retains memory?’