Dying Professionally
Stage 11 of the Heroic Vajrayana Practitioner’s Journey
I hadn’t seen my friend in a while when he called. We had a kind of inner closeness that months, even years, apart didn’t touch. He got right to the point: He was dying. Although he was in a lot of pain, he kindly took time with me to explain the important stuff: how he discovered that he had extensive cancer, how he was doing, and his gratitude to me for the ways I had helped him in the past. I tried to comfort him; he didn’t need it. He was a man who had 100% accepted his death, had very little time left, and wanted to “die professionally” as our mutual guru, Lama Tharchin Rinpoche, had instructed us to do when our time comes.
Weeks later, I arrived at his place a few hours after he had passed, and listened to the stories of how it went from a hospice volunteer and one of his best friends, both exhausted from being up all night. Long story short, he had been in the hospital briefly and wanted to go home to die. His late wife’s family was being aggressive with him in his final few days, desperate to get into the house and grab valuables that they perceived as rightfully belonging to them.
His helpers got him home and arranged to change the locks and block their incessant calls. Undaunted, he had focused his mind on preparing to transfer his consciousness to a “pure land” as soon as he would die, the best choice if a practitioner needs to make a quick exit, which the situation around his home dwelling required. Orgyen Chowang Rinpoche got on the phone with him a few hours before he passed, expressing his confidence in his ability to accomplish the transference, and assisted him spiritually at a distance shortly after he passed.
And that was it. He was off.
I experience him now as my guardian angel. Just thinking of him, I experience a palpable inflow of blessings.
The classic Hero’s Journey, Stage 11 (Resurrection), which is the model I have been using to talk about the lives of serious practitioners of Vajrayana Buddhism, is qualitatively different from every ordeal that came before it. Those earlier crises broke something open and proved the hero could survive transformation. This crisis differs in kind, not just degree. It is the final exam under maximum pressure: a test of whether the transformation was real, or only appeared to be.
For the Vajrayana practitioner, this maps onto the process of dying. Our practice has been preparing us to “die professionally” session by session since we first crossed the threshold into Vajrayana Buddhist practice and tested us with fire at times.
The practitioner who has done this work is very familiar with the process of dying and accepting of it as another stage in the cycle of life. They have been studying the territory.
The situation around you as you die is just like life: unpredictable. It can be beautiful and peaceful, with a harmonious family gathered around. Or the outer situation can be a total shit show. I’ve seen practitioners die with genuine stability and clarity in both kinds of situations. For them, the outer circumstances mattered less than you might think.
The Bardo of Dying
The Tibetan word bardo (བར་དོ་) means “in between.” These are the phases of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Several bardos are described in the teachings, but the one that begins in the active dying process is the chi kha’i bardo, the bardo of dying: the sequential dissolution of the “elements” and the withdrawal of consciousness from the body.
Superficially, the elements are a way of categorizing everything in the world by their qualities. Solidity is earth, movement is air, temperature is fire, cohesion and fluidity are water, and space is space. The advanced Dzogchen teachings go further, reflecting on the five elements as they relate to the nature of mind and the inherent purity of all experience, but that is a longer conversation.
The dissolution of the elements at death follows a sequence. Earth dissolves into water, and tone becomes heavy and weak. Water dissolves into fire, and one becomes dehydrated. Fire dissolves into air, the body’s warmth withdraws toward the heart, and breath becomes labored and shallow. The air element dissolves into consciousness; one may have positive or negative visions, depending on whether one’s ordinary mind is positive or negative. The breathing becomes more and more difficult, and, finally, the last breath comes. There are even phases after the heart and breathing stop in which a series of subjective experiences continue. One isn’t 100% dead for some time after the heart stops.
Phowa
For practitioners who have received instructions, there is a specific technical preparation for the moment of death. Phowa, consciousness transference, trains the practitioner to direct awareness upward through the central channel at the moment of death, ejecting it toward a pure realm or toward the lama’s heart, allowing the mind to move with intention rather than being carried by accumulated habit.
The practice involves visualization of the central channel, the consciousness as a shape within it, and a specific upward motion coordinated with breath and sound. At the moment of death, the practitioner applies the key points they have rehearsed as part of their training.
Phowa is like a paraglider: essential for those who are still developing confidence in their own wings, but also useful for very accomplished practitioners, where the outer circumstances may not allow for the body to lie in state for a few days as they rest in present clear wakefulness. We approach the preparation for death with thoroughness, a realism about our level of realization, and a flexibility to work with whatever arises in the situation.
Each practitioner should ideally do at least one week-long Phowa retreat in their lifetime, in which certain signs of accomplishment are experienced. A lama can also perform the transference on one’s behalf.
In addition to phowa, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, in what I view as the best book for practitioners about the bardos, Mind Beyond Death, describes this period after we stop breathing as a potent time of practice for “those who are habituated to the Deity Yoga practices of the Vajrayana, which rely on the visualization of enlightened forms, appearances of the sacred world will manifest at this time.” Likewise, practitioners more oriented toward devotion may see their lama and other awareness holders. If one has not already recognized the true nature of one’s mind, it can be easier to do that.
Our consciousness then dissolves into space, a process that has its own sequence of subjective experience beautifully described in the bardo teachings.
These stages are described in remarkable detail in a text most Westerners know as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, whose actual title is Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo (Bardo Thodrol). It belongs to a larger cycle revealed by the terton Karma Lingpa in the 14th century. According to traditional accounts, Karma Lingpa was around fifteen years old when he discovered these teachings on Mount Gampodar in central Tibet. The text itself is a masterful distillation of pre-existing streams of teaching about death, dying, and rebirth drawn from the Indian tantras and the Dzogchen tantras, gathered and clarified through a remarkable young mind attuned to the teachings of Padmasambhava, a fully awakened Buddha.
Recognizing the Luminosity
When the dissolution of the elements has fully run its course, breathing stops, and inner physiological processes conclude; everything goes dark. What follows that darkness is the Bardo of Luminosity (osal): the luminous, aware, empty nature of mind itself, nakedly present, freed from the machinery of ordinary cognition.
It is described as brilliant and vast, without center or edge, like a cloudless autumn sky at dawn. Those who have already spent decades becoming familiar with this, on and off the cushion, in formal practice and in daily life, will fully awaken as Buddhas then and there. It will be a homecoming, the mind unfurling into a familiar naked, unmodified recognition known as rigpa, a relaxed knowingness of what has always been true.
What is next in the bardo of clear light is the arising of the peaceful and wrathful deities: overwhelming light, vast sound, visions of Buddhas that are projections of the awakened nature already present in one’s own mind. For advanced Dzogchen practitioners, this is the second gateway to complete Buddhahood. The recognition that arises here is: These come from inside me. These are my own nature displaying itself. That recognition is itself liberation. Lama Tharchin Rinpoche related the story of an uneducated, unpracticed Tibetan woman whose relative was a painter of scroll paintings. He had spent a long time working on a painting of the hundred visionary deities seen in this bardo, so she had naturally looked at it a lot as he worked on it. After she died, she saw one of the animal-headed dakinis in the painting and thought, “That’s it!” and attained enlightenment. So maybe things are more flexible than they are sometimes made out to be.
There are other famous practices related to death and dying that are part of the completion stage of Vajrayana, such as Illusory Body, Dream Yoga, the nighttime Yoga of Luminosity, and there are even retreats on practicing as though we are already in the post-death experience. These are really the best practices in long-term retreat. Even then, individual practitioners’ results will vary.
What Is the Point?
The point of Vajrayana practice is full awakening, Buddhahood, so that we can be of genuine benefit to beings. There is an unbidden side effect: perfect peace. A practitioner who recognizes the Bardo of Clear Light gains the capacity to emanate forms that help others, including taking physical rebirth in cyclic existence to help the suffering of any kind of entity, human or animal, god or demon, demigod or denizen of hell. Freed of self-interest, one can act in ways that our current limited minds can barely imagine.
In deity practice, there is a section near the end of our practice text, sometimes called the Yoga of Clear Light: deity dissolving into emptiness, then re-arising in the body of light. This section deliberately mirrors the process of relaxing into the Bardo of Clear Light and arising in full awakening. We rehearse this in every session.
The bardos of dying and clear light reveal what has actually been developed. This is why the tradition insists on the urgency of practicing now, in the bardo of this life. When we dedicate the merit to the welfare of all sentient beings at the end of each practice session, it is like capital being deposited for a moment of extraordinary need.
In the Buddhist Himalayan societies of my late teachers’ youth, you could be a stellar practitioner, a mediocre one, or none at all, and the framework was understood by everyone. You and I live in a religiously pluralistic world where people of every background have near-death experiences and describe them in their own language. These days, you can hear directly from people who have been through it. The correspondence and the divergence between classical Tibetan bardo teachings and the actual reported experiences of people who have nearly died, regardless of their religion, is a rich and fascinating subject.
Rebirth
When we attain full awakening, we will have the capacity to choose where and how we will be reborn as an extraordinary being to help others, rather than being driven into rebirth as an ordinary being through the habitual tendencies, bakchak (བག་ཆགས་), and karmic momentum. This is called the manifest body of awakening, a nirmanakaya. We will look at that more closely next week, along with lesser, but still marvelous, impacts of how our previous life’s training impacts our next one.
This has been an unusually long article by the American village lama Yudron Wangmo, who is currently bustling around preparing for her group’s annual retreat on the wrathful dark blue dakini of the Dudjom Tersar tradition. www.mayummountain.org. Hopefully, this hasn’t led to a lot of typos!
Colophon: Guidance for a Practitioners
If you are a Vajrayana or Dzogchen practitioner approaching the end of your life, or supporting someone who is, a resource I trust and recommend is Transitional Life Care, led by my close friend Julie Rogers. They have recurring live online programs on every aspect of the dying and post-death process, from experts on the sublime to the mundane, including senior Tibetan Rinpoches. Videos of many of their past programs are available on Vimeo. Their website is www.TLCServes.org.
This was incredibly clear and cogent. Your writing is becoming every more graceful, serene and helpful. I truly appreciate it.