Buddhism's body-mind concept about death

By Rahayu Ratnaningsih

Editor's note: This is a reprint of the author's article Buddhism's body-mind concept about death which appeared on this page on Jan. 7. Technical problems caused the loss of several sentences in the original print. We regret any inconvenience caused to our readers and the author.

JAKARTA (JP): What is death? From a scientific point of view, death arises when there is a "flatline" on the EEG which means cessation of heartbeat and brain activity. The illusion of the subjective "I" in the individual consciousness, assumed by materialists to correspond with the presence of brain wave activity, should cease with the cessation of brain waves. Yet the grim--or for some people appealing--picture of death as oblivion or conscious nothingness is not a scientific finding; it is merely a conceptual notion inferred by the scientific materialists. There are many cases of people being revived after "flatlining" for some time, and they often report intense subjective experiences.

The Tibetans theorize that dying is a process of outer and internal dissolution. To understand this, one has to know first the three level body-mind complex: gross, subtle and extremely subtle. The gross body is the body of flesh, blood, bone and other substances that can be further analyzed into the five main elements of earth, water, fire, wind, and space. The gross mind that corresponds to this body is the mind of the six sense- consciousness, the five that correspond to the physical senses of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body, and the sixth, mental- sense consciousness that operates within the central nervous system coordinating all the input from the senses with concepts, thoughts, images, and volitions.

The subtle body is the nerve channels that form a structure of energy pathways that consist of thousands of fibers radiating out from five, six, or seven nexi, called wheels, complexes, or lotuses, or the more widely known chakras in Eastern holistic healing.

They strung together on a three-channel central axis that runs from midbrow to the tip of genitals, via the brain-crown and the base of the spine. Within this network of pathways, it is posited that there are subtle "drops" of awareness-transmitting substances, moved around by subtle energies called winds. The subtle mind corresponding to these structures and energies consists of three-interior states that emerge in consciousness the instant subjective energy is withdrawn from the gross sense. These three are called luminance, radiance, and imminence (the deepest state of the subtle mind), and are likened to pure moonlight, pure sunlight, and pure darkness.

In unenlightened beings these three are mixed with normally subconscious instinctual drive-patterns, called the eighty natural instincts (a long list including various types of desires, aggressions, and confusions).

The extremely subtle body is called the indestructible drop: it is a tiny energy pattern existing normally only in the center of the heart chakra. The extremely subtle mind that corresponds to it is the intuition of clear light, called transparency. At this extremely subtle level, the body-mind distinction is abandoned, as the two are virtually inseparable.

This indestructible-drop transparent awareness, though not to be misconstrued as a rigid, fixed identity, is the Buddhist "soul," the deepest seat of life and awareness, whose continuity is indestructible, though it constantly changes while moving from life to life. To achieve conscious identification with this body-mind, to experience reality from this extremely subtle level of awareness, is tantamount to attaining Buddhahood. And this is the real goal of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Now, the concept of indestructible drop or the relative soul that continues from life to life, on the surface, might contradict with the Buddhist tenet of no-self, or no-soul (anatta). I received harsh criticism from a reader who called himself "an admirer of the Buddha" for disseminating a "false, comforting" idea of self/soul, "the exact antithesis of Buddhist teaching."

I've often heard Buddhists, especially from the Theravada tradition, unthinkingly parrot the no-soul notion with the zeal of a dogmatic person without proper understanding of what it actually means. Since the Buddha teaches reincarnation, it never occurs to them what is actually transferred from life to life if there is no soul whatsoever. They make Buddhism a nihilist religion that in no way represents the Middle Path exemplified by Buddha Gautama.

The Buddha was never dogmatic about formulae, even about his most powerful formula known as "selflessness," realizing that ultimately the words he used to represent what he knew and learnt as a fully enlightened being were fundamentally flawed and dualistic, while a state of enlightenment is one that transcends dualism in any form and any way; a state of absoluteness that no relative human language could ever justly render.

As a supreme guru-psychologist who had excellent command over his diverse audience, he emphasized selflessness when talking with absolutists, and he emphasized self when talking to nihilists. So it is not a question of early Buddhism having no self, and Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism later returning to a self.

Buddha always taught a soul as what reincarnates, as a selfless continuum of relative, changing, causally engaged awareness, hence he said that an incarnate is neither the same or a different person, the way that river water that is flowing this very moment is neither the same to or different from the water that flowed yesterday; or the fire from one candle used to lit another candle is neither the same or different fire (or both the same and different depending on how one wants to look at it).

Back to our main subject, another important way of analyzing the gross body-mind complex is the scheme of five aggregates, or processes: the material, sensational, conceptual, volitional, and consciousness processes of the individual life. The first of these processes corresponds with the gross body, and the latter four represent the subtle part of a human being, an analysis of mind and its functions. This aggregates scheme shows that the habitually experienced fixed-self is in fact unfindable anywhere and in any way. What exists is an interconnected and interdependent web of processes and relationships and through this insight we are expected to attain liberation from bondage to the habitual sense of fixed identity that causes much conflict--either with ourselves or others- and suffering.

In these schemes, the gross body-mind complex begins at birth and ceases at death, except for mental consciousness, which changes for the between-being since it is no longer embedded in gross matter and preoccupied with the input of the five physical senses.

--The author is Director of the Satori Foundation, a center for study and development of human excellence through mind programming and meditation techniques, email: satori@cbn.net.id.