Tibetan attitude toward death not mystical

By Rahayu Ratnaningsih

JAKARTA (JP): The most popular views of death are typically dualistic in nature: on one hand there are the spiritualistic, soul theories embedded in theistic belief systems, on the other there is the "modern", materialistic nihilism.

The former posits the eternalness of the soul, either jumping from one life to another through multiple births and rebirths, or from life to the hereafter, i.e. the blissful paradise or fiery hell.

The latter rejects all kinds of speculation of what might happen to the "soul" after a person dies, since the concept of soul itself has no grounds in the empirical scientific circle. It is regarded as something scientifically unverified, thus the question of its existence cannot be determined with reasonable certainty, therefore it is safer to believe that only nothingness embraces us after death.

Blissful nothingness. It sounds enticing, sounds much better than the emotionally draining and physically painful existence of life. But why do even those who believe in this theory dread death so much? Presumably, because deep down they do not really believe in it, not to mention that there is little credible evidence for their nihilistic belief.

No one has ever returned to report entry into nothingness. In fact, those who have had near-death experiences testified to a kind of realm resembling the religious or spiritualist view of the afterlife.

It is hard to believe the great souls we know, the people whose presence illuminate those around them, will one day just be a piece of nothingness; their greatness no more than a sum of atoms and molecules in the brain that will decay together with the rest of their physical existence.

It is absurd to think our mother's unique personality and strong, loving character is nothing more than an effect of atomic or molecular flux in her brain. that her consciousness is a matter of electric leaps among the neurons in her central nervous system. If that were the case, why are we so different from one another? Why is each of us so marvelously unique? If consciousness were a matter of uniform biological and physical mechanisms, we should all be as boringly predictable as Japanese- made robots.

Buddhism, the tradition that is adhered to by the Tibetans, rejects the two extremes represented by the two opposite camps above. Although it acknowledges the continuity of consciousness from life to life -- as energy can neither be created nor destroyed -- it rejects all absolute soul theories -- postulations of a rigidly fixed identity or static personal essence -- with its cardinal doctrine of selflessness, or soullessness (anatta).

It, however, never rejects the relative presence of a living self and contrary to nihilists, it insists on the continuity of the changeable, fluid soul from life to life. During his time, the Buddha explicitly challenged the contemporary nihilism that reduced the relative, conventional, lived soul, self or identity to a random epiphenomenon of matter. He insisted on the relative self's reality, vulnerability, responsibility and evolutionary potential.

This process of continuity is sophisticatedly dealt with by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, one of the most important books our civilization has produced. Written by the great master Padma Sambhava, it is a manual of useful instructions for people who are facing death, as well as for their relatives and loved ones, and has been quite popular for centuries in Tibet. It is connected with a large body of literature in Tibet that thoroughly investigates the phenomena of dying.

The title is a free translation of Bardo thos grol. Bardo means "between-state", which refers to the whole process between death and rebirth. Tibetans discern six betweens: the interval between birth and death ("life between"); sleep and waking ("dream between"); waking and trance ("trance between"); and three betweens during the death-rebirth process ("death-point", "reality" and "existence").

The words thos grol mean that this book's teachings "liberate" just by being "learned" or "understood", giving the person facing the between an understanding so naturally clear and deep that it does not require prolonged reflection or contemplation. So the more apt translation of the title would be "the great book of natural liberation through understanding in the between".

The Tibetan attitude toward death and the between is neither mystical nor mysterious. Their multilife perspective is no more (and no less) a religious belief system than our modern sense of the structure of the solar system, or of the pattern of the cycle of seasons in a year.

They considered it a matter of common sense and scientific fact that animate beings exist along a continuum of lives, and that the death, between and rebirth processes follow a predictable pattern. They have credible accounts by enlightened voyagers who have gone though the between experience consciously, preserved the memory and reported their experiences.

Tibetans accept these reports of their "psychonauts" just as we do those of astronauts who report what happened on the moon. Tibetans also believe that most people can recover memories of their former lives by a fairly elementary regime of meditation. Tibetans act on this Buddhist perspective in a practical manner, using their lifetimes to educate themselves to understand the world and to prepare for death and future lives by improving their ethical actions, emotional habits and critical insights.

Despite their seemingly unreal, "gay" acceptance of death, Tibetans celebrate lives to the amazing point that they will not harm worms when it can be avoided, for "those worms could have been their loved ones in their previous lives".

Tibetans are on the whole a cheerful, vibrant and lively lot. They cherish freedom in all respects and on all levels. They are very modern, indeed, in their heads and hearts. They have lived intelligently by their lights, have used human life well and extracted its fullest potential for evolutionary, not just material, progress.

With the surprisingly sophisticated age-long inner and death science of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition they have cultivated, they have so much to offer to their more "modern" counterparts, whose concept of achievement is heavily colored by a relentless pursuit of materialistic accomplishments. A distinct measure of the unparalleled beauty of their civilization comes from their vivid awareness of the immediacy of death and the freedom that awareness brings.

The author, the director of the Satori Foundation, can be e- mailed at: satori@cbn.net.id.