Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [49]
According to the Tibetan Tantras, there are four great moments for recognizing this dawning clear light of Rigpa: death, falling asleep, orgasm, and, believe it or not, sneezing. What’s the common denominator of all these experiences? Releasing and letting go in the natural state. Masters like Kalu Rinpoche train their whole lives in this type of mystical meditation so they will maintain awareness at the moment of death and dissolve into or return to that inner spiritual light.
Who can doubt that an awareness of death is the greatest teacher for learning to live? We see this all the time with people who have serious illnesses, accidents, or other traumatic experiences. I know a beautiful woman named Maria who says that she learned how to live when she was being wheeled into the operating room for cancer surgery. At that moment everything changed, because she started rearranging her priorities rather than taking life for granted. She learned to find joy in everything she did and every interpersonal contact.
For most of us, there is no greater fear than the fear of death. It’s difficult to believe that an easy acceptance of the possibility of death can help put joy in the life you are living, but it can—and will. The Sufis say, “Die before you die, and you shall never die.” What they mean is ego death. If you are able to let go of ego then you will not be afraid because you will no longer feel incomplete; you will not cling to the material world and conditioned existence, or samsara. The ego can be likened to samsara’s aorta.
If there is no ego, there is no one afraid of dying; there is absolute completeness and oneness. Death is a transformation, a passage, a transitional stage on the journey, but the ego sets up this finite little territory that it’s afraid to lose. Why be afraid? Why assume that each of us began at birth and will end at death? We might find the possibility of rebirth surprising, but it’s really no more surprising than being born at all. What a marvel to be alive at all, and who can explain it rationally, really?
Of course, everyone is probably at least a little bit nervous around death. The Buddha died at the age of eighty, lying under a tree, on his right side, very peacefully, but the monks around him were all wailing. The fact is that no one wants to die, not even Tibetan lamas. One Japanese Zen master died saying, “I don’t want to die.” And when his students pressed him again for some last words of wisdom, he repeated, “I really don’t want to die.” That was his truth in that moment, and he didn’t hesitate to express it.
I was at my teacher Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche’s monastery in Nepal when his wife, Ma-yum Kunsang Dechen, died. Ma-yum had suffered from pancreatic cancer for several months without complaint. Shortly before her death, when she was asked to write a eulogy about her life, she said, “Now that my time to die has come, I have no attachments whatsoever. When I was young I was afraid of death; for that reason I practiced the Dharma diligently for my whole life. Now I am at the very brink of death. I am happy to die, fearless without regrets. The moment this trap of my old material body falls apart, I will fly off like a bird, escaping its snare.” She passed away in meditation sitting up.
All Tibetan monks, nuns, and lamas learn how to meditate as they are dying. Kalu Rinpoche taught me how to meditate at the time of death, how to breathe out with a great exhalation—as if soaring up and out through a skylight—and dissolve all the four elements into mind and the mind into infinite space. This is hard to do without training throughout one’s lifetime. Kalu Rinpoche seemed able to do that.