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By Root 1067 0

I was at his Darjeeling monastery when he died. It was sad, the end of an era, yet his death was a powerful learning experience. It brought home to me, once again, that as incredible as it may seem, these Dharma teachings are actually true. During his life, Kalu Rinpoche taught that it was all about conscious living, self-transcendence, and relinquishing control. Stay awake, and stop grasping for things that can’t be grasped. That’s also a good lesson for this brief bardo or transition called our life. We can afford to just authentically be, without proving or doing anything. This is the wisdom of allowing.

The Tibetans love life. In fact, few people have as much reverence for life as Tibetan Buddhists, who advocate compassion and nonviolence toward all living creatures. Tibetan teachings stress how important it is to understand that we need the same kind of wisdom to prepare for death as we do to prepare for life. This isn’t just about nirvana and enlightenment; this is about living sanely and gracefully, living impeccably without regrets, without leaving behind any unfinished mess. When it’s time to die, no one exclaims, “I wish I had spent more time in the office.” We must set priorities in our lives with the understanding that death is a reality.

Tibetan tradition says that we must all live up to death. This means living up to the truth of death; it also means living until the very moment we die, without deadening ourselves by sleepwalking through our days. What does it profit us to kill time just to get by while we wait for the weekend or the next summer vacation and consequently overlook the miracle of the present moment? Tibetan teachings say that an inner clear light dawns at the moment of death, and if we are not present and aware, we will miss the moment. But the clear light actually dawns every moment, and if we’re not careful, we miss it all the time. Life is a miracle to be celebrated, not something to be escaped from or avoided. We are all going to die, aren’t we? But are we each going to truly live?

Tibetan masters teach what the mystic European monks in the Middle Ages called ars moriendi, or the “art of dying.” There is an ancient European work from that period called Book of the Craft of Dying that says:

Learn to die and you shall live,

for there shall be none who learn to truly live

who have not learned to die.

It says in the Dzogchen teachings that whether our nature descends into samsara or ascends into nirvana, it is not ruined in samsara, and it is not improved in nirvana. It is beyond both. According to the tantric teachings, samsara and nirvana are inseparable. Inseparable. Nirvana is not just the distant other shore—it’s right here. Of course, we are usually sort of elsewhere and not fully present, but, as in some prize drawings, you must be present to win.

KARMA

Karma means that you don’t get away with anything; we all reap exactly what we sow. People sometimes think of karma as destiny, but in fact, the word actually translates as action and reaction. In the Buddhist view, there are no accidents. In very simple terms, the traditional Buddhist Law of Dependent Origination means that every cause has an effect, and every effect has a cause.

There’s a country song I sometimes hear on the radio that reminds us how cause and effect typically sets up a chain of events. In it, if I remember correctly, because she has a fight with her boyfriend, a woman calls her sister, who comes over, leaving her husband at home alone. Bored, he goes to the store, leaving his pickup with the keys in the ignition; the pickup is then stolen by some teenagers and driven into an electrical transformer, leaving the whole town dark. You get the point: cause and effect.

“Where does our karma come from?” you ask. Each of us is a composite of different experiences, a whirling, changing congeries of conflicting forces and habits. Some of these experiences are within our memory banks; some are in our body; some are like knots, kinks, blocks, and twists in our energy. Some of these experiences happened last week; according