Geshe la's Teaching: Sunday, 9 March 2008

First, a note on the source for Sunday’s teaching.  Geshe la was teaching from one of the classic works  of Gelugpa philosophy by one of the most important philosophers of the Gelugpa tradition:  The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment by Lama Tsong Khapa.  Oddly, the book is most often known in English by its Tibetan name, Lam Rim Chenmo, or Lam Rim, in its shortened version. Geshe la began his teaching on p. 307, beginning with “Causes of Death.”

     The passage that Geshe la covered was divided into four sections, with the second section being further subdivided into three sections:

1.)    Causes of death

2.)    The mind at death

a.       Dying with a virtuous mind

b.      Dying with a non-virtuous mind

c.       Dying with an ethically neutral mind

3.)    Where heat gathers

4.)    How you reach the intermediate state after death

     Where to begin to summarize what Geshe la told us?  Death and dying in Buddhism—in any spiritual tradition, for that matter—are in many ways the whole ball of wax.  The opinions we hold about death reverberate over our life, as we prepare ourselves, while living, to confront the specific characteristics of our death.  But our knowledge of death, particularly in our current state of ignorance, is uncertain, often superstitious, and always vulnerable to all sorts of frightening and oppressive prospects that force us while alive into all sorts of frightened and oppressed behaviors.  We need to begin at the beginning when thinking of death, trying to understand what we do know with reasonable and logical assurance.   And that primarily was what Geshe la was trying to accomplish.

     Death is a problem, Geshe la reminded us, because we have allowed ourselves to become attached to our bodies, which we often assume to be unchanging and everlasting.  Even when we see evidence of our mortality all around us—war, sickness, hospitals, the death of friends and loved ones—we have an astounding and nearly unassailable ability to imagine that we will somehow escape this fate.  Whenever I think of this problem, I am reminded of a poem by James Dickey entitled “Falling.”  In it, a flight attendant falls from an airplane.  Dickey imagines that the attendant has time, as she fell, to grapple with the idea that she has begun an experience that she will surely not survive.  What do you think of in such moments?  How do you prepare?  What are your priorities?

      Geshe la’s point is that we are all currently falling from the airplane.  We do not, however, have the one vital piece of information that the flight attendant had:  that our end is imminent, and that none of the evasive maneuvers we usually entertain—I’m still relatively young!  I have few aches and pains!—will postpone the arrival of the rapidly rising earth.  Knowing with real certainty that we are now falling from the airplane, having removed the scales from our eyes, we ought to be able to come to meaningful conclusions about how we might best prepare for our ending.  Preparation for death, Geshe la told us (and Lam Rim teaches us) is important because our transition from this life to the next is dependent on the state of our minds at the moment of our dying.  Meditation is an important ingredient in this preparation because as we die, and the form aggregate disappears, we are left with the four mental aggregates:  emotions, conceptions, volition, and consciousness, the very elements that we must control in the intermediate stage between death and rebirth, and the very elements that we engage during prolonged meditation. 

     If we attempt to familiarize ourselves with these elements while we are alive, then at the moment of our death, when the form bodies disintegrate, we will not be so disconcerted that we are helplessly propelled along to our next life by the impersonal force of our karma.  We are able to gain a measure of control over the forces that have traditionally controlled us.

     Geshe la also spoke of the difference between the sutra traditions and the tantric traditions regarding death and dying.  In the sutra tradition, he explained, “positive thoughts” are said to be transformed into a higher rebirth, while in the tantric tradition the dying person controls consciously the various energies that rise and converge during the dying process.  Another way of saying the same thing:  tantric practice is an extremely subtle meditative process that allows the practitioner to gain conscious control over the fundamental energies that become dominant at the time of our death and that, in the sutra tradition, are largely unconscious.

     So in one sense tantric practice involves nothing more than moving the unconscious, uncontrollable psychic energies that propel us from one life to the next into the conscious and, therefore, controllable realm where we are able more efficiently to work with these energies, understand them, and turn their extraordinary powers to our benefit.  That’s it in a nutshell; the problem is the nutshell’s a fairly large one.

     Large enough, at any rate, that the most helpful part of Geshe la’s teaching, as always, concerned  how we begin to crack that nutshell.  It concerned the practice.  Geshe la told us that it was not productive to imagine ourselves confronting something as abstract and ill-defined as  . . . the bardo.      It’s much better, he indicated, to cultivate the habit of tracking the ups and downs of our emotions, the coming and going, the rising and falling of our expectations, and to begin to acquire an intuitive understanding of impermanence.  That way, we’re neither buoyed unreasonably nor depressed uncontrollably by whatever befalls us.  If we develop this practice--at the bus stop, waiting at a traffic light, listening to a friend, suffering loss, enjoying gain, continually rendering conscious what is often unconscious--then our dying, the news that the earth is rising to meet us very quickly, will not upset us unduly, and we will have a much better chance at establishing equanimity at the time of our death.

     The point is—and it is a joyous point—that the most effective opportunities for practice do not await us in the bardo alone.  They await us here and now, sleeping, waking, walking, talking, everywhere.  It is in this sense that our present life is also seen as another bardo, another opportunity for transitioning toward clarity.

     And insuring as well that at the moment of our dying, equanimity is our partner.

Sidney Burris, Tibetan Cultural Insititute of Arkansas