The two certain things in life are, famously, death and taxes. If you are rich enough, you may be able to mitigate your tax liability, but death cannot be bought off. How do Buddhists handle it? Episode includes the Prayer for Rebirth in Dewachen. Words or phrases you might want to look up: Pashupatinath Naropa Tilopa Dewachen Amitabha Dzogchen Link to that file: Link to the Dewachen Prayer (pdf) Burning ghats at Pashupatinath #Buddhism #Vajrayana #Tibet #DoubleDorje #death
Hello everybody, including those who are listening regularly and those who've just stumbled across this podcast. Please feel truly welcome to the Double Doge. I'm Alex Wilding and in this episode I'm going to talk a little bit about death and what Buddhists do about it.
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Now, first things first. There are two obvious sides to teachings about death. Firstly, there is the question of how we should think about, prepare for and ultimately handle our own death. Secondly, the question of what we do when somebody close to us dies. Preparing for our own death is a major issue in Buddhist teaching.
In Christian thinking, and I believe in other Abrahamic religions, once one is dead, there is nothing left to do but to hope for some kind of resurrection in the future. What happens then will have been determined by things in our life, but death is the ultimate bottom line.
The Buddhist view is rather different and suggests that the way we think about death, the way we react to it, our motivation and intention continue to operate and influence where we go next. Of course, the thoughts that we've habitually cultivated in this life will have a very strong effect, forming our mental states after we've left our bodies.
And there are many teachings and practices designed to help during that drastic phase. But as I like to emphasise, I'm not here to be your Buddhist teacher, but rather just to be a fellow traveller with a little bit of experience. So I shan't be looking at those things very much. When somebody close to us dies, it is, of course, a time of considerable sadness and grief.
It's not my intention in this episode to touch on any of the themes that you might call grief-cancelling. I just want to look at some practical things that might make your dealings with this in the Tibetan Buddhist context go a bit more smoothly. You may, for example, hear of a practice known as Powa, meaning transference.
The term actually refers to all sorts of ways involving gentle and subtle meditations as much as forceful techniques for ejecting our consciousness out of the top of our head. Talking about any of these things would be above my pay grade.
I had planned to do an episode related to death sometime in the future, but a near neighbour of mine died two days ago, and I went to the funeral yesterday, which brought the subject of death to mind. This neighbour was quite old, and had been experiencing heavy dementia for quite some time, but as the grandmother of the family, it was, of course, a sombre day.
Not being a Christian myself, I didn't want to intrude by trying to get into the tiny church, but I did simply stand around amongst the quiet, small crowd outside. As we waited for the service to unfold, another neighbour, I'll call him Eddie, not related to me or to the Paride family, asked me what I, seeing as how I am a Buddhist, wanted done when it's my turn.
I laughed and told him that I didn't really care very much. Nobody's going to build a large white stupa up a nearby mountain and put my preserved remains in there, that's for sure. Eddie wondered whether I might want to be cremated. He had realised that cremation is quite common in India, but also that there are some religions that disapprove of it or actually forbid it.
After all, it was a practice that only began to be carried out in the UK towards the end of the 19th century. The thing is that while some religions do indeed approve or disapprove of various ways of disposing of dead bodies, Buddhism is in fact not very interested in that question. Local customs and practices will often enough be the deciding factor. Cremation is popular.
as the historical Buddha was cremated, and that set naturally something of an example, but it's not a requirement. As it happens, my own personal number one teacher, Ngadpa Kamalundup, quite frequently oversees funerals in Dharamsala where he lives. His father before him had been what I think is known as a funeral master.
These cremations are accompanied by a variety of rites, particularly the recitation of sacred texts, and need someone skilled in those things to carry the ceremony out properly. Many of you are probably quite aware that a lot of things that make us feel uncomfortable are not hidden in the East in the way that they are in the modern world.
Sickness and death are quite simply out there on the street for all to see. Typically at such a cremation the body would indeed be wrapped up in a funeral shroud of some sort, but the observer can very easily see what it is and watch the process of it being consumed by the flames. Burning ghats, that's G-H-A-T-S, are to be found on the banks of important rivers in the Indian subcontinent.
In Kathmandu, perhaps the main site is Pashupatinath, where bodies are cremated along the banks of the river, and where many people try to come to spend the last days of their life before being cremated there. Generally speaking, Hindus do have a high awareness of what we might call the cycle of life and death.
So, just as Pashupatinath is associated with death and cremation, it is also associated, particularly on the opposite bank, with betrothal. It is essentially a Hindu site and people who are not Hindu cannot enter the main temple. And that, by the way, includes the Hare Krishna lot. Nevertheless, it's a special site for Buddhists as well.
On one side of the river, there are two tiny caves very close to one another. The Naropa Cave and the Tilopa Cave. Naropa and Tilopa, important figures in particularly the Kaju lineage, are believed to have meditated in these caves, and they are said to be the place where Tilopa gave teachings to Naropa, who had a vision there of Vajrayogini.
As a general rule, they're locked, but it is possible we'd like to spend a little time in them. I don't honestly know whether I was particularly fortunate to get that chance, which I did, or whether it is in fact quite easy to get access. If there's a listener out there who knows, please add a comment.
Pashupatinath is also a highly appropriate place for the practice of Chö, although that's not something that I got a chance to do. In short, cremation is quite a common way in which Buddhists dispose of dead bodies. However, a funeral pyre that will burn hot enough to reduce the human body to ashes does take quite a lot of wood.
This is one reason why half-burned bodies are so often cast into some rivers in India, which, amongst other things, is very obviously a serious health hazard. In Tibet, the fuel situation is even more acute. The country is arid, and many people would probably never ever have wood to just burn, even for a funeral. The main fuel for domestic use would be dried animal dung.
In Tibet, of course, the animals might well be yaks. In Nepal, more likely ordinary cattle. Now, this fuel, which is used in many parts of the world, may well burn and give heat, but not ferocious heat, and that's therefore not enough for a serious cremation. Another technique, known as sky burial, is therefore not uncommon. This involves the body being cut up and fed to vultures.
Even the bones are crushed, and there are some species of vulture who live on little else. To western eyes, this is a gruesome sight. But realistically, what is the alternative? Feeding the vultures is an honourable way to deal with the body. Ecologically, it's probably much more sound than cremation.
I remember in my late teens and early twenties, which, yes, I know, that was back in history, but then I was a keen reader of science fiction. And I remember one story, which could in fact be quite a well-known one, because mostly I read paperbacks from famous writers.
In this story, a space-travelling human enters a lost spacecraft to find that an alien, who is still there, has eaten the original human pilot.
Details I don't remember, but somehow it turns out that the alien had found this a very unpleasant thing to do, but had felt obliged to do it in order to properly honour the pilot who had died in some kind of accident, rather than leaving the body to low-grade lifeforms such as bacteria.
Offering to the birds, while it may be shocking to some of our eyes, is in fact a respectful and ecologically sound method. It's just a pity that it is, like so many other interesting things on this planet, becoming just a tourist attraction.
There is a prayer that is commonly sung on such occasions, and quite a number of Western Tibetan-style Buddhists do know it because of the way it comes in two slightly different versions. It's known as the prayer for rebirth in Deva-chen, Deva-chen being the name of a pure land overseen by Amitabha, who is the Buddha of infinite light.
In one version of this prayer, there are two syllables whose grammar makes the prayer refer to ourselves, singular or plural, or indeed to all sentient beings in general. And this is the version that's quite often sung without reference to any particular death, simply in recognition of the fact that we all will die.
In the other version, the two syllables are changed, and that makes it refer to this particular person, he or she, who has just died. You may have suffered the sound of my chanting in one or two other episodes, so I will not be shy about singing it here now. I'm also going to include a PDF of the text in the episode notes, or you can download a version from this link. I'll read it carefully.
www.tibetanlanguage.com Needless to say, there are no spaces in anything that I've just read. And Dewachen is D-E-W-A-C-H-E-N.
The text shown there is the general purpose version, and if you want to use it for a specific person in your circle who's recently died, you can replace the first two syllables on the first line of the second page, that is, dagjen, meaning something like self and others, with semde, meaning something like this being.
If you know it well enough, you can recite it silently, as I did at yesterday's funeral, to lend your own best wishes without offending anybody by showing off the fact that you are not a Christian. Chanting This general purpose version was regularly sung at teachings I used to attend some years ago.
The technique there was that it was sung three times, and after the third time there was then a pause, a very silent, profound pause. Finally, the chant leader would shout a very loud, sharp, which everybody would attempt to shout at the same time.
It would be impossible to touch on this subject without saying a few words about the book, which has now become famous, known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Once again, this is something that has been hijacked by New Age wannabes.
But people who are serious about their Buddhism should know that it is a highly specialized text of most interest to long-term practitioners of one or two particular traditions. It was not particularly widespread in Tibet. Its real name means something like liberation through hearing in the intermediate state. But commercialization and marketing go back a long way.
In the late 19th century, Egypt was an object of fascination in Western society. Decoration based on Egyptian originals was not uncommon and is often still to be seen. As witness, for example, Cleopatra's needle on the embankment in London and the various sphinx-like statuary that can be found around the city itself.
There is an interesting article on Egyptomania in the United States on Wikipedia. As part of this Egyptomania, semi-occult circles became interested in what was known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. That gave this title a degree of cachet. At that point, the title Egyptian Book of the Dead wasn't so far off the mark.
So when Evans Wentz, who lived in California and had long had an interest in semi-occult matters, published his edition of a translation of this Tibetan text, it was a natural marketing move to try to cash in on that familiar title by calling his work the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And this was not an unsuccessful bit of marketing, it must be said.
There are a couple of other Tibetan traditions that it could pay you to be aware of at some future time if you're around Tibetans where there has been a death. Firstly, great effort is made to dispose quickly of the personal possessions of the deceased. These are things that the deceased spirit is held to be maybe attracted to and which might make it more difficult for that spirit to move on.
Some of these things will be given away, some will be burnt. For a similar reason, Tibetans will generally avoid ever saying the name of the deceased person. I do recall Alethea, the wife of the sadly recently deceased Atto Rinpoche, explaining how, after he had been visiting family in Tibet, he came back saying, My uncle died.
She asked which one, but he didn't know because nobody had said his name. So believe me, they do take these matters seriously. When it comes to the deaths of revered religious figures, there are a number of things that sometimes happen that you might not expect. Perhaps I might talk about some of these in more detail in future episodes, but today I'll just give them a brief mention.
First is a word you may come across, Tugdam. When a person with this high status, or at least a revered person, dies, it is held that they may well enter a state of extremely profound meditation in which their body has essentially stopped functioning, but without quite having come to a complete halt.
The body will remain, often with the legs locked in a meditation posture, and without collapsing for hours or even days, without showing the usual signs of rigor mortis or indeed of collapsing. The tradition then is to leave the body as undisturbed as possible until that point comes when death is complete and the body does collapse.
The longer this period of tukdam lasts, the more impressive it is. If the person was of high status, their body may well be kept. One technique is for it to be packed in salt and kept in a box for weeks or months to become desiccated, after which it may well then be gilded, dressed and kept in an appropriate place. It's a technique calling for quite a bit of skill and experience.
The salt that was used may then be distributed in little packets to the devotees, but I stress that this is for use in emergencies, and it's not for general culinary purposes. One of the top things to do in Kathmandu for people with a connection to the Nyingma tradition, and in particular to the Dujum branch of that tradition, is to visit Dujum Rinpoche's temple not far from the Bauda stupa.
where a large golden stupa, or at least large for indoors, holds his body, with his face peeping out of a window in the main bulbous part of the stupa. And then we have the rainbow body, which is demonstrated by some practitioners of the Dzogchen teachings.
In this, the body shrinks away, evaporating into rainbow light, to a greater or lesser extent after death, becoming very small or even vanishing. Looking more closely at that would definitely go over the boundaries of this episode. Just don't be surprised when you hear about it. And now I think I've probably said enough.
Please, again, if you haven't already, remember to like this episode of The Double Dorje, to subscribe, or to do whatever it is that suits your channel. And remember that death does come to us all, although most of us have a lot to do before that. Bye!