Bodhisattva emits the light called “Seeing the Buddha” in order to make the dying think about the Tathāgata and so enable them to go to the pure realms of the latter after death’.
The dying or deceased man is adjured to recognize the Clear Light and thus liberate himself. If he does so, it is because he is himself ripe for the liberated state which is thus presented to him. If he does not (as is commonly the case), it is because the pull of worldly tendency (Sangskāra) draws him away. He is then presented with the secondary Clear Light, which is the first, somewhat dimmed to him by the general Māyā. If the mind does not find its resting-place here, the first or Chikhai Bardo, which may last for several days, or ‘for the time that it takes to snap a finger’ (according to the state of the deceased), comes to an end.
In the next stage (Chönyid Bardo) there is a recovery of the Death-Consciousness of objects. In one sense, that is compared with a swoon, it is a rewakening. But it is not a waking-state such as existed before death. The ‘soul-complex’ emerges from its experience of the Void into a state like that of dream. This continues until it attains a new fleshly body and thus really awakes to earth-life again. For this world-experience is life in such a body.
When I first read the account of the fifteen days following recovery from the ‘swoon’, I thought it was meant to be a scheme of gradual arising of limited consciousness, analogous to that described in the thirty-six Tattvas by the Northern Shaivāgama and its Tantras, a process which is given in its ritual form in the Tantrik Bhūtashuddhi rite and in Laya or Kuṇḍalinī Yoga. But on closer examination I found that this was not so. After the ending of the first Bardo the scheme commences with the complete recovery, without intermediate stages, of the Death-Consciousness. The psychic life is taken up and continued from that point, that is from the stage immediately prior to the ‘swoon’.[1] Life immediately after death is, according to this view, as Spiritists assert, similar to, and a continuation of, the life preceding it.
- ↑ Cf. Yogavāshiṣḥṭha, clx, v. 41.
