Birth, Life and Death

by Ven. Thubten Gyatso

With the gradual loss of our faculty of conversation, and easy access to information about everything in this age of the Internet, one question is probably never asked anymore: "Mummy, where did I come from?"

From the Buddhist perspective, the standard answer culminating in a description of how the sperm and egg are introduced to each other, is insufficient. There is a third factor - the stream of consciousness itself. The mind, bearing all its karmic potentials and positive and negative propensities from previous lives, also joins with the egg at conception. Furthermore, mental energy is the primary organising factor behind the transformation of the fertilized egg into the vastly complicated form of our human body. The description of how this happens is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this article.

It is said that, at about twenty-five weeks of gestation, we awaken from deep sleep into a state of clarity where, intuitively, we are aware of the connection between our past and present lives, and we experience a sense of melancholy, thinking: "Here we go again."

The memory remains with us even after we are born, but we are unable to say anything because we cannot talk. The immediacy of our new life takes over, and we forget the past life. Even if we do talk about it, we are probably told not to speak nonsense and hurry up and finish our cornflakes. But there are fascinating stories of how some children were listened to, and how they were able to recognise homes and relatives from their previous life.

Life, the period between birth and death, is when our mind uses its body to experience as much pleasure as possible. But our body cannot keep pace with our mind, and we die.

Death, the gradual disassociation of the mind from the body, occurs in five stages. As the mind withdraws from the body, the first stage is characterised by physical weakness and loss of our most dominant sense faculty - our vision becomes blurred. There is a physical sensation of pressure, like being buried beneath sand, or a sudden loss of support, we feel as if we are falling. Many experience this when falling asleep, a similar process to death. There is an inner vision like a shimmering mirage on the desert sand.

In the second stage we lose the intensity of our feelings of pleasure and pain; secretions stop and we have dry eyes and a dry mouth. Our hearing fails and relatives have to shout for us to hear them; the inner vision becomes like a room full of smoke.

The third stage brings a loss of discrimination, we can no longer recognise our friends and relatives, or remember their names. Starting at the periphery, our body becomes cold, breathing is weak, we lose the sense of smell, and the inner vision is of red sparks dancing in a black background.

Then the fourth stage brings a loss of volition, we forget our purpose in life, taste and touch sensations cease, the inner vision becomes a pin-point of light in the dark, and we stop breathing. But we are not dead until the consciousness separates from the body. In ordinary people, this can take up to three days. One who has developed clairvoyance through meditation can tell if death has actually occurred or not, and that is why Buddhists request a qualified Lama to observe and say when the body can be disposed without disturbing the mind.

With the fifth stage of death, all thought activity, virtuous and non-virtuous, ceases as the mind becomes more and more subtle. The inner vision changes from white, like the light of the full moon in a clear sky, to red, like the redness of a sunset, to black, to the clear-light vision, the most subtle level of mind, likened to the first appearance of light in the eastern sky before dawn.

When the mind does separate from the body, it is like going from deep sleep to dreaming. This is called the intermediate state, or Bardo. We have a subtle body with all sense faculties and thoughts. When we think of a place, suddenly we are there. Initially, we may see our old body with our relatives standing around crying. We try to communicate but they cannot see us. In distress, we lose contact with the past life and spiral into a pleasant dream or a nightmare according to the state of our mind during the death process.

The shape of the bardo body is that of the next life, the karma for which was ripened during the third stage of death. If human karma ripened, we eventually come across our future parents in the act of intercourse. Physical desire for the parent of opposite sex draws us irresistibly towards our mother's womb, and hostility towards the parent of same sex causes us to die. Our mind, once again in the clear-light, enters the egg within the mother's womb. If conception does not occur, we awaken again, still in the Bardo. After seven weeks the vast majority of Bardo beings have taken rebirth.

And so our personal wheel of life has turned one cycle, as it has been turning since time without beginning.

Gyatso

This teaching is by the Venerable Thubten Gyatso (previously Dr Adrian Feldmann), an Australian monk and old friend now working in Mongolia. One of the senior students of Lama Yeshe, Lama Zopa Rinpoche (and also Geshe Roach) he is currently teaching at the FPMT centre in Ulaan Baatar. These teachings originally appeared in his local English language newspaper in Ulaan Baatar and arereproduced with his permission.

Thanks to Diane Olander (pelmo@got.net), these teachings first appeared on the Internet on the website (www.gepeling.org) of
The Jangchub Gepel Ling Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies,
6960 Highway 9, Felton, CA 95018, Tel: 01 (831) 335 1217
where you can find many more teachings and other interesting material.