The Art of Dying : Tibetan Spiritual Classic Deals With the ‘Next Step’ as a Communal Experience

Death, in Western culture, comes in an instant and signals the end of things: cessation of pain; swift release from disease; a slip into oblivion; a flat line on the oscilloscope.

But to the Buddhists of Tibet, for whom dying is an art, a science and the ultimate test of an individual’s courage and compassion, death is a much more complicated process.

Convinced that Westerners have much to learn from this ancient art and science of dying, Robert Thurman, an eminent Buddhist scholar at Columbia University, has translated a new version of the spiritual classic known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

“I wanted to produce a new version that would be simple and useful, easy for bereaved relatives to read and easy for lost souls to hear in the room where they anxiously hover above their corpses and wonder what has just happened to them,” Thurman said.

A burly, plain-spoken scholar who is passionately devoted to Buddhism and Tibetan culture, Thurman approaches his subject with a dramatic flair that makes the most abstruse concepts come alive, even to those unfamiliar with the principles of Buddhism. (A flair for drama apparently runs in the family: His daughter is film actress Uma Thurman.)

“No intelligent tourist would depart for a foreign land without a good guidebook giving instructions on basic preparation, equipment, dangers and obstacles,” Thurman said. “No intelligent Tibetan would depart the known territory of this life without a good guidebook for the in-between.”

On one level, the Book of the Dead is a devotional handbook for spiritual adepts well-schooled in meditation and yoga; on another, it is a practical guide for the ordinary person. It is a rich allegorical description of the physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of the maelstrom of death, full of demons and furies and the fierce and benevolent forces encountered along the way.

Its great lessons are that death can be lucidly perceived, from beginning to end; that dying is a communal experience for the departed and the bereaved, and that it need not be fraught with terror or psychic pain. Its great instruction to the dying, simply put, is to seek the light and merge with it.

Thurman’s translation of this 1,000-year-old text, newly published by Bantam Books, taps into a growing curiosity about the physics and metaphysics of the “big sleep.”

Current best-sellers such as Betty J. Eadie’s “Embraced by the Light” and Richard Seltzer’s “Raising the Dead” are firsthand accounts of the authors’ near-death experiences. Physician Sherwin Nuland’s “How We Die” reduces the death experience to a catalogue of grisly clinical details. Euthanasia advocate Derek Humphry’s gloomy “Final Exit” has become a mainstay for those who seek pharmacologic deliverance from the specter of a lingering, pain-ridden death.

Sogyal Rimpoche, a flamboyant Tibetan lama in San Francisco who produced his own translation of the Book of the Dead, has attracted a following of aging baby boomers newly aware of their own mortality and that of their parents and grandparents.

Stephen Levine, a Bay Area meditation teacher, conducts seminars around the country in “conscious dying” that draw heavily from Tibetan tradition.

A scholar rather than a guru with a following, Thurman is arguably the most credible of a growing number of experts applying the teachings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to contemporary life.

Suffused with humor and a sunny optimism, his narrative reflects the central Buddhist principle that wisdom and compassion will overcome every obstacle. In fact, his notes, designed to appeal to people of all faiths including secularists, are more illuminating than the Tibetan text.

More properly translated as “The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding the In-Between,” the Book of the Dead was written in the late 9th or 10th Century by the spiritual master Padma Sambava, whom Tibetans believe to be a Buddha in human form, returned to earth to help the less enlightened on their way to spiritual perfection. It is a guide through what Tibetans call “the bardos”--roughly translated, the in-between--the interval between this life and the next.

Practical information about what happens at the moment of death is, in Thurman’s view, a great gift that the lamas and yogis of Tibet have given human culture.

Although the West has spent its energies on exploring the material world, from the conquest of new continents to astronauts’ exploration of outer space, Tibet’s holy men and women--Thurman calls them “psychonauts”--probed inner reality, using yoga and meditation to explore the subtle realms of human consciousness, experienced as inner light, ecstasy, trance, dreams, death and beyond.

These explorations of inner reality shed light on what for many is the darkest corner of human experience. Consider Thurman’s explanation of the moment of death, and its resonance with contemporary accounts of near-death experiences:

“Sensations cease, one feels enveloped in smoke, then cold. . . . One feels surrounded by fireflies or a burst of sparks,” he writes. “When consciousness stops and energy withdraws into the central nervous system, the will fades, body sense is lost. . . . One feels enveloped in a candle-flame in its last moment.”

Though at this point a Western physician would pronounce a person clinically dead, in Buddhist terms the process of dying has only just begun.

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As consciousness stops, Thurman says, the mind finds itself in a vast sky full of white moonlight; then orange sunlight; then pure darkness, before passing into the realm of “clear light translucency.”

This clear state, Thurman says, is the real moment of death.

“It is the subtlest state possible for a being. Anything said about it cannot do it justice,” he writes. “It is a state so transparent that one unprepared for it will not even notice it, yet it is a being’s deepest home.”

It is common for people to spend a number of days in this luminous state, Thurman says. But confusion about what has happened to them or terror at being cut loose from the certainties of earthly existence can prevent the newly dead from making the most of this state.

This is the point at which the traditions of the Book of the Dead are of greatest impact, in Thurman’s view, because it is here, in the clear light at the “in-between,” that the human soul will either go on to its next incarnation or break free of the cycle of death and rebirth into the ultimate enlightenment of nirvana, or Buddhahood.

An individual knowledgeable about the practice of yoga and meditation can slow down the transitions in the death process and remain lucidly aware of the changes as they occur. The less spiritually evolved can depend on their loved ones to keep a vigil and help them through the experience. It is a state in which the deceased is most fragile, and for that reason many Buddhists want to avoid frightening places such as hospital emergency rooms or histrionic expressions of grief.

“Above all, we should try not to become morbid when we consider or encounter death,” Thurman advises. “If our loved one dies, we should channel grief into helpful activity, remaining joyous and cheerful. It is important not to indulge in weeping and wailing to convince others--including the departed--that we care, to assuage our own sense of guilt at surviving or to avoid facing our new aloneness.

“We will only frighten and annoy the soul of the departed and distract her from navigating the in-between. She is the most important guest at a death and a funeral. She is in the most momentous transition point in her life cycle. Positive or negative influences will affect her for years or lives to come.”