Why The Tibetan Teachings On Death Are inspiring (Hint: It's About Buddha Nature!)

Tibetan teachings on the death process are profoundly inspiring. Yes, it’s a sad and possibly scary time of letting go of our ordinary sense of self – but what really dies is everything except our true self, which gets to shine through clearly into our experience. Today’s teaching episode centers on Tibetan teachings about the death process, but we’ll also discuss why it’s difficult to let go into transitions and how we can prepare daily.

Transcript

Welcome to Letting Grow,

The podcast about one of the spiritual journey's most difficult and courageous moments,

Letting go of who we think we should be so we can grow into who we most deeply are.

I'm your host,

Claire Villareal,

And I appreciate your joining me today.

For this second teaching episode of the podcast,

I wanted to actually start by explaining the name of the podcast.

I think it's kind of obvious,

But maybe not.

There's letting go,

And there's growth.

And these two things are related.

So letting grow.

But to unpack that a little bit,

Because it is relevant,

I think,

To today's topic,

Which is the Bardo of death.

So I chose letting grow,

Because I think this act of letting go is probably the most difficult part of a transition process for a lot of people.

And I just want to start by making a distinction for everybody who just thought like,

Oh,

I have no problem letting go of stuff and changing and whatnot.

I've been reading William Bridges book,

Transitions,

Making Sense of Life's Changes.

It's really,

Really good.

If you're interested in these topics,

I highly recommend it,

And I'll put a link to it in the show notes.

But the reason I'm bringing this up is that he actually makes a distinction between change and transition.

So change is a change in our external circumstances.

So that might be getting a different job,

Moving to a different city,

Graduating,

Something like that.

So a change has to do with external circumstances.

And for many of us,

That is actually relatively easy to navigate.

So the thing that's different about a transition is that a transition is when you're leaving behind an old identity and growing into a new identity.

And that I don't think is actually easy for anyone.

It's always a time of challenge,

Always a time of opportunity as well,

Which is part of the reason that it really interests me to talk about and think about transitions,

Because I think we tend to mostly notice or focus on the costs of a transitional time.

When it really comes to letting go of part of our felt sense of identity,

That's not easy.

But the thing is,

There are also opportunities that come with that letting go.

And that's related to the death process.

So we'll talk about that a bit more later in this episode.

Basically when we give up everything we think we are in this lifetime,

What do we discover underneath?

The movement of letting go of who we were is often challenging or we don't have a choice,

We're thrust into a certain situation by a loss or something like that,

An economic downturn.

But until we can let go of what's old,

We can't actually recycle the energy and the passion and the time and the resources,

Financial and otherwise,

That are tied up in that old identity,

Which is exactly what we're going to need to grow into our new identity.

So this letting go part of the process is really important.

And a lot of us,

According to what I've been reading,

May not really do the work of letting go of the old as we go through these transitional states.

So many of us who have lived a while,

We may be carrying around some unresolved transitions from earlier in our lives too.

So we may actually have a lot of opportunity when life hits us with a big transitional state like the coronavirus Bardo state that we're all living through now.

It may be an opportunity to let go of more than we're even necessarily aware of.

So that's just a little commentary on the name of this podcast and why it's related in particular to today's topic,

Which is the Bardo of death.

If you're familiar with traditional Tibetan presentations of the Bardo states,

And there are four of them,

If you haven't listened to the previous instruction episode,

Two episodes ago,

So like episode two,

I guess,

Out of season one,

It's an overview of the Bardo states.

So you might want to just check that out.

But briefly,

Bardo means between,

And there are four of these Bardo states.

There's the Bardo of this life,

There's the Bardo of death,

Bardo of clear light,

And the Bardo of becoming.

And I'm actually going to start with the Bardo of death,

Partly because it's easier to understand what this one is about in a way,

And I think it's going to be easier to understand the Bardo of this life once we've covered the other Bardo states.

The Bardo of death begins when we start what physicians might call actively dying.

So if we get in an accident and our body starts shutting down,

We're beginning to actively die or if we've had a long illness,

And finally we have multiple organ system failure or something like that,

And our body is just starting to shut down,

That's the actively dying process.

So the Bardo of death begins at that point,

And it lasts until our body and our mind,

Our ordinary mind,

Are dead.

And the Tibetans have sort of a different definition of what dead really is from what like a modern medical definition would be.

So we'll talk about that.

But basically this Bardo of death,

It's very famous.

If you've heard of the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

Which would maybe be more accurately translated as the Great Liberation through Hearing.

So it's a text that's meant to be read to people as they're passing away or after they've recently passed away to kind of remind them of how to recognize the nature of their mind,

How to navigate this death process in such a way that they have the best possible chance for Buddhahood.

But basically,

If you've read some translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

You've probably read descriptions of the way that the mind starts to die,

The different experiences we might have as the body is dying,

Different experiences we might have as the mind is dying.

And so I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail on that today.

If you're interested,

You can find a lot of great translations and great descriptions.

But the book I would recommend is called Mind Beyond Death.

It's by Dzogchen Pannapur Rinpoche.

And it's kind of technical.

So it gives you a lot of detail.

But it's not as hard to read as some other books on the Tibetan presentations of the Bardo states and the death process.

So it's really good if you want a full deep dive on that.

I recommend that book as a place to go for that.

I'm also planning to interview Simon Cox,

One of my colleagues at Rice's PhD program in religious studies.

He wrote his whole dissertation on the subtle body.

So we're going to have a conversation about the subtle body and how it relates to the death process.

So I'm also not going to go into a lot of detail on that today,

Because we're going to cover it in a lot more detail later.

I want to start today by underscoring what I think is the main benefit of studying the whole death and rebirth process in the first place,

Which is that Tibetan Buddhism is really clear that what dies in the death process is not us.

It's our ordinary sense of self.

So it's not that we end.

It's not that as we talk about death and the actively dying process,

We're talking about like the end of a human.

What we're actually talking about is the end of our ordinary conventional self.

So most of us identify with our body,

Our memories,

Our proclivities,

Our personality.

There are all these aspects of who we are that we identify with.

But most of us,

Unless we've really done some deep spiritual practice,

Don't identify as much with the part of ourselves that is sacred.

The Tibetan tradition calls it Buddha nature.

You might call it Christ consciousness.

You might just call it the transpersonal or sacred element of yourself.

And that doesn't die.

It's not born.

You can't damage it.

You can never create it because it's already there.

It's our true nature.

That's what we can come home to in the death process.

And that's what I really love about these teachings on death and rebirth.

And I think it's relevant not just when we're talking about literal death and rebirth,

But also when we're metaphorically speaking about the deaths and rebirths that we all go through in our lifetimes.

And you know,

I don't want to minimize the pain or the loss that's involved in a big life transition.

Maybe somebody has lost their partner or lost their job,

Lost their home,

Lost their life savings.

There's a lot of really significant stuff that can have a deep impact.

And that's not,

I don't want to whitewash this and just say like,

Everything's great in a transition.

Don't worry.

It's going to be better on the other side because many of us do end up really carrying,

You know,

Some deep losses from it.

But if we're going to have that loss anyway,

We might as well try and make some meaning out of it,

Get some spiritual growth out of it.

So that's what I really find helpful about the Tibetan tradition is that it gives us like a structure for thinking about transitions in a way that doesn't end with loss and in a way that helps to really guide,

It can help us guide our own experience of the losses and the growth that we go through in transitional states as well.

So from that context,

The Bardo of death really is describing how everything that is not our true nature gets stripped away from us at the time of death.

So basically the Bardo of death in the traditional teachings is describing how everything that is not our own deepest nature gets stripped down at the time of death.

So I'll just describe,

At least briefly,

What these teachings say about how we die.

And so first of all,

To understand the Tibetan teachings on the Bardo of death,

We have to understand the Tibetan model of what a person is.

So according to this model,

A person is made up of body,

Like our physical body,

And then our energy system,

And then our ordinary conceptual mind.

This is not our deepest nature.

This is like the part of our mind that makes up laundry lists and stuff like that.

Laundry lists?

Is that a thing?

Shopping lists.

I know I make up shopping lists.

I don't know what laundry lists are.

Anyway,

So the first thing to go as we're dying is our body.

And the thing about our body,

About really all three of these layers of our being,

Body,

Energy system,

And ordinary mind is that in the Tibetan view of things,

They all are connected by energy.

So our physical body has energy circulating through it,

And that's what keeps us alive and keeps our organs functioning.

If you're familiar with chi or prana in,

Say,

Like a Qigong context or martial arts context or yoga context,

You're already familiar with this idea.

The Tibetans use the word lung to describe this energy that circulates through the body.

I'll just give you a little bit of an introduction,

And if you're completely unfamiliar with this,

Like I said,

We'll have a later episode on it,

Or you might Google it and armed with a little bit of knowledge,

Hopefully you can distinguish what's good information and what's not.

Basically the Tibetan view of our energy system is that we have channels that run through the body and they carry this energy.

So that's why we set up straight to meditate so that the channels of our body are straight and that energy can flow more freely.

So this energy feeds in a way our physical body,

And it's also what our mind rides on.

So the energy flowing through the body is really key,

Not just to keeping us alive in our physical body,

But also it kind of provides like the circulatory system,

So to speak,

For our entire ordinary being.

And it's this energy system that begins to break down when we die.

So without getting too complicated,

Tibetans think about five elements and they feel that our physical body,

Energy body,

And mind,

Conventional mind,

Are all made up of or involved with these five elements.

So the elements are earth,

Water,

Fire,

Wind,

And space.

And with our physical body,

As we begin to die,

These five elements are shutting down.

So the energy system of the body,

For instance,

Will first of all begin to lose the quality of earth.

So this is described as the body no longer feeling supported,

Like we just feel like we're kind of slumping down.

And it's said that people who are undergoing this phase of the death process might feel like they're always falling and they might ask to be propped up by pillows by the people around them.

And then the next energy level or the next element to go is the water element.

So when this element goes,

The mouth gets dry.

There's a couple of different stages to each of these disolutions of each element.

So people might lose control of their bladder,

For instance,

But then once the water element has stopped circulating in their physical body,

Their mouth might be really dry.

They might ask for someone to wet their tongue down.

So this is also something that's been observed with people who maybe work in a hospice or a hospital and they spend a lot of time with patients who are dying.

Both of these,

Actually really most of these physical signs of the death process are readily,

You know,

People report them a lot in these medical contexts.

So the next element to go is fire.

And it's said that as the fire element is breaking down in the physical body,

We begin to lose our warmth.

So people get cold.

And again,

This is something that happens as people die.

And in particular,

You know,

People's extremities will get cold as their circulation begins to fail to the extremities of the body.

And you know,

You can think of that as being a bit similar to what the Tibetan system is talking about with the breakdown of these elements is that they're just not circulating,

They're not flowing through the body anymore.

So as we lose the fire element,

We begin to feel cold.

When the air element goes,

That's when our what's called our external breathing stops.

So this is around the time that somebody passing away in a hospital that this might be considered their time of death.

But in the Tibetan tradition,

It's actually just the death of the physical body.

So even after the sort of gross level of our being has shut down,

So our physical body is kind of kaput at this point,

But our energy may still be circulating in a more subtle way within the body.

But eventually,

That subtler circulation of energy in the body also begins to break down.

And this is when you'll hear descriptions of various,

Various like signs that somebody might experience as they're going through the death process.

And I should say also,

You know,

These are described in like,

Sort of neat and tidy sequential ways.

But the teachings also say that each person's body is different.

So each person may experience the death process differently.

So having said that,

After the energy that supports our physical body has broken down,

The energy,

The more subtle energy that supports our mind also begins to break down to dissolve.

So again,

First of all,

We lose the earth element in its more subtle form that would be supporting our conventional mind.

Then we lose water,

Fire,

Wind and finally space.

So it's a similar order.

What's different though,

Is that each of those elements is considered to correspond to a sensory capacity.

So I don't remember right now which ones correspond to which,

But like sight,

Sound,

Touch,

Hearing all of those.

One by one,

Our capacities for each of those types of perception breaks down.

The last thing to go is just the conceptual mind itself.

So even our ability to like have a thought or recognize somebody who might be by our bedside as we're dying,

Eventually that dissolves so that consciousness dissolves into space.

And it's at this point that we're like dead.

Before that,

We were maybe physically we would have looked dead,

But Tibetans and many traditional cultures would consider us not quite dead yet.

This is why in many cultures around the world,

People will try to leave the body of a dead person in place for several days.

So Tibetans will try and leave it for about three days without disturbing it because they feel that the person might be still undergoing the most subtle aspects of the death process.

And they don't want to interrupt that because it could sort of distract somebody out of recognizing their own true nature,

Which is the next step in the death process.

It's the bardo of clear light when we are left with nothing but what's left after the death process.

So if you're thinking like,

Well,

My God,

I've just lost my ability to like see and hear and even create like conceptual thoughts,

Like what could be left?

The answer is Buddha nature.

So when we talk about what's left after the end of the death process,

We're really getting into like the heart of Tibetan Buddhism.

One of my teachers,

One of my lamas and also my dissertation advisor,

Anne Klein talks about the discovery model of spiritual development.

So she talks about two,

There's the discovery model and the developmental model.

And the discovery model says that we all have within us basically this like sacred or divine nature already and we're trying to discover it.

We're trying to pull off the layers that obscure our view of that.

And by contrast,

The developmental model would be that we have like a seed of that sacred nature within us,

But we have to then develop it.

And the thing that's really cool about Tibetan teachings on the death process is that they actually say that this process of everything that is not our own Buddha nature being stripped away from us,

It gives us a natural glimpse into our true nature.

And if we've trained to recognize that this is the best time for us to actually achieve enlightenment because we're being given like direct access to it.

Everybody,

Even like a tiny bug that hits your windshield,

Like experiences this moment of its own Buddha nature.

I actually feel like one of the reasons that we as a culture,

I'm speaking as,

You know,

Somebody from the US,

Speaking in the year 2020.

So like in the sort of North American culture that I at least grew up in,

We have a really hard time I think with death and endings because we typically think that we are ending.

Like we've really become a very disenchanted culture.

That term disenchanted,

It's a common one that you'll hear if you take any religious studies courses.

And what it means basically is that a lot of cultures look out at the world and they see,

You know,

The gods of the rivers,

Gods of mountains.

Like their whole world has a spirit and has a sacred quality to it.

And for us,

For various reasons that are beyond the scope of this podcast,

We've lost sort of in the,

You know,

European scientific revolution.

We ended up,

Well that and the Protestant revolution for a lot of reasons,

They're complicated.

We seem to have lost our view of the world as sacred.

So we live in a disenchanted world and we're,

I think,

Not naturally trained to recognize that sacred element of ourselves either.

So if we're 100% identified with our address and our social security number and our phone number and our Facebook profile,

None of that is who we are,

But all of that is going to go when we die.

And so I find Tibetan reflections on the death process and particularly on what dies and what doesn't die super,

Super helpful for even being willing to engage in the death and rebirth process.

Not that it makes it easy,

But if you have this cyclical vision of time and of identity even that we're born and we die and that happens many times even within this lifetime,

Then it's less existentially threatening to go through this process.

Even if we find it less existentially threatening to think about deaths and rebirths,

We still need a lot of support to go through this process of death and rebirth.

And in Tibetan culture,

And many,

Many cultures around the world have some similar version of this.

I'm speaking about the Tibetan one because that's what I'm most familiar with,

But in the Tibetan culture,

If someone was dying,

Their lama optimally would come to their bedside and recite texts to them,

Remind them of the practice they've done,

Remind them of their own true nature and that they're basically going to see that true nature,

That it's not them that's dying,

It's their ordinary self.

And their friends,

Their spiritual friends would be around.

Everybody would be helping them to let go and release into that true nature.

And for us,

Again,

Speaking as somebody in a North American culture,

You know,

Typically literal death happens in a hospital and we're likely to be surrounded by doctors and nurses and hooked up to IV tubes and especially now in the time of COVID,

There's a pretty good chance we're going to die alone.

So we can't really count on having that kind of support,

Which is awful.

But the good news is that the most important form of support for making this big death and rebirth transition and for,

You know,

Getting spiritual benefit out of it really is the practice that we do.

So the most important thing,

You know,

From a Tibetan Buddhist perspective about the death and rebirth process is really to be familiarizing ourselves with our true nature as much as possible every day.

So that as we go through this death and rebirth process,

After everything is stripped away,

We'll recognize like the true nature of reality as ourselves instead of just getting blown away by like,

What is this and it feels overwhelming.

Just the ability to recognize that there's more to us than our ordinary sense of self.

It's transformative.

Like you don't have to wait to die for this to really pay off in just a different experience of ourselves,

A different experience of our lives.

What's important?

What do we want to spend time and energy on?

So you know,

Like the spiritual path in a traditional context is not just about stress reduction or being more present at work or something.

Like we're actually dealing with these existential issues of like,

What am I?

What goes on when I die?

What doesn't?

And then living from a place of knowledge and awareness of that.

As an example,

There's a practice that I did quite a while ago now,

But I used to do it every day and it was really effective.

So I'll just share what it was.

It's very simple.

Basically every day,

And I would do this as I was lying down about to fall asleep at night,

But you can do it anytime.

Every day you imagine that you are dying and in the beginning it might be helpful to start out like imagining,

Oh,

You've lived a long life.

You're ready to go.

You're in bed.

It's peaceful.

You know,

Whatever the circumstances are that you would find most conducive to a peaceful death.

And then you imagine,

You know,

Your breath stopping.

You imagine that energy circulation beginning to break down.

You imagine your mind dissolving and during the whole process,

You're kind of training yourself in what you want to do.

So I would train myself to say,

Om Mani Pe Mi Hong,

Classic mantra of the Buddha of compassion.

It's been called the national mantra of Tibet.

It's very simple.

So I would just train myself like,

Oh,

When I know I'm dying,

I want to do that.

As you do this practice more and more,

You can take on more challenging imaginary situations like oh,

You know,

I've had a heart attack or I've gotten a car wreck and sort of train yourself that like no matter what happens,

You're going to try and fall back on what you've trained to do.

So anyway,

I was doing that practice and the time I knew it was working was when I had a dream that I was on a plane and then suddenly the plane started going down and in the dream,

I just clicked immediately into Om Mani Pe Mi Hong,

Om Mani Pe Mi Hong,

Om Mani Pe Mi Hong.

And it just like it transformed the dream to such an extent that I woke up out of it.

I just had this like burst of awareness of like,

Oh,

Yep,

This is it.

This is what I've trained for.

Better say my mantra.

So I endorse that form of meditation because I found it pretty helpful.

And you know,

It was a dream,

It wasn't real life,

But I feel like it's probably a good sign that if I were to start doing that again regularly,

Which maybe I should do,

That it might be helpful when I actually do start dying.

So that's one possibility for a way to meditate in preparation for own eventual death.

But you can also do a simpler and gentler version of a meditation on impermanence if you'd like.

So the next meditation that will show up in this feed will be a breath meditation,

But one in which you're noticing impermanence.

So the impermanence of the breath.

You can do this with the impermanence of anything,

The impermanence of your thoughts.

You can notice during any given day,

Like notice when the sun is rising,

Notice when the sun is,

You know,

At its peak point,

Notice as it's going down,

Just notice that things constantly change.

If you do that kind of practice with just the motivation to notice impermanence,

To familiarize yourself with it,

To not immediately react by grabbing onto whatever is passing and trying to make it stay,

That can also be a powerful way of familiarizing yourself and preparing in a certain way for death.

Before I wrap up this episode,

I want to just give a little introduction,

A little,

I don't know,

Preview for the next upcoming episode and for a whole genre of episode that hasn't shown up in this podcast yet,

Which is talking to people about their stories of transitions in their lives.

And another book I've been reading is Life is in the Transitions by Bruce Feiler.

F-E-I-L-E-R,

I'll put again the book title and the author's name in the show notes.

But one of his,

It's a fabulous book by the way.

Again,

If you're interested in this topic,

You've got to read this book.

It's so good.

It's like relatively easy reading too.

So basically in that book,

I'm just going to call him Feiler,

Not sure how to say his name.

I apologize,

Bruce,

If I'm saying it wrong.

So one of his main points is that we make meaning of our lives by telling the stories of our lives.

And often we can really only make meaning of transitions in hindsight by telling that story to ourselves.

And the ways that we tell our stories of transition actually can have a big impact on how much benefit,

How much meaning,

How much empowerment we can take away from them.

The more agency we feel that we have,

The more beneficial it is.

So he says there's a real power to telling our stories and also to hearing other people's stories.

So I want to offer these conversations with people in the spirit,

First of all,

Of,

You know,

Their being able to share their transitions with the rest of us,

Which I think can help to resonate with experiences we've had or to help us make meaning of our own transitions.

But also it is kind of a way that we all get to listen in on someone telling their story and making meaning of it.

And I would invite everybody who feels so inclined to maybe have a conversation like this with someone in your life.

So I'm hoping that this type of episode will spark some thoughts for the rest of us,

But also inspire us maybe to tell the stories of our own lives or at least write them out or,

You know,

Maybe sketch some important episodes,

Whatever your creative function of choice is.

I hope that it will spark something in you to experiment with some storytelling of your own.

So that's it for this week.

I hope that you have learned a little something about the Bardo of Death and hopefully the most important takeaway that sticks with you is that what dies isn't us.

It's our ordinary self.

And what comes through during this death process is our deepest nature.

So thanks for listening.

See you next week.

Thanks for coming along for today's exploration of the process of letting grow.

If you found this episode helpful,

Please share it and subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts so you're always in the loop.

For links to more content related to today's episode,

Please see the show notes.

See you again next week.

Reviews

I found this very interesting and you very engaging. I want to learn more from you.

Interesting 🤔

One of the best/clearest description of the Bardo of Death I’ve ever heard. highly recommended episode in a great series! 👍🏻

Thank you, I so loved this clear and accessible explanation 🙏

My mother just died. She did not believe in an afterlife. Just darkness and space. Nothingness. I am grappling with this chapter of love & loss.

Thank you Claire, so very interesting and I look forward to listening to your other podcasts 🙏