In the Bardo

“Open your heart knot, they said,” Tenzin mumbled to herself as her consciousness catapulted through the in-between state, or the Bardo, as it is called in what is mistranslated as The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

It wasn’t really mumbling, since strictly speaking at this point she no longer had a mouth, nor was she making any actual sound, even as she could still formulate words. She was surrounded by darkness, but it was an uncannily translucent darkness, whose clarity almost felt like a kind of light. This darkness was sparsely populated by various figures, some looked human but with animal and bird heads, appearing as black on black images, with the occasional metallic glint. It was in reference to them that Tenzin could tell that she was flying, or was it falling?

Just moments before, she was taking her first powa lesson, the Buddhist technique of consciousness transference. She had recently finished her master’s degree in Religious Studies, finally, and decided to take a gap year to travel around Asia, while giving yoga lessons to expats. But she didn’t even get to leave Kathmandu, before this happened. She wasn’t sure if it was good or bad, luck or karma, but strangely she didn’t feel particularly scared, even as everything around her seemed to indicate that in the usual sense of the word, she was now dead.

“Did the lama know this would happen?” she wondered. Powa works by projecting your consciousness out of your body through the crown of your head, along the central channel that runs parallel to the spine. Normally, this process is impeded by various knots in the areas somewhat ambiguously called chakras, with the heart knot being notoriously difficult to unravel. Who could have predicted that Tenzin’s heart knot was already undone?

Maybe the lama just assumed all foreigners are hopelessly polluted and would require years, if not decades, of practice to make any headway in powa practice. Or maybe he was just sexist as monks often seem, and didn’t think a woman could have such an innate predisposition for it. But it didn’t feel that way, Tenzin definitely had a good feeling when she met him, and there was something about the subtle smile in the corners of his mouth as he gave her the instructions that made her suspect he knew exactly what he was doing. Too late to worry about that now.

While powa is usually practiced in shorter ranges, with the consciousness not straying far from the body, and thereby being able to return to it fairly easily, Tenzin totally overdid it on her first try, and her consciousness rocketed straight through the stratosphere, the mesosphere, and whatever other spheres surround the planet, like nesting dolls. What’s worse, she had no idea how to get back, and knew that unraveling the heart knot completely would make the heart stop beating, which a yogi can handle for a minute or two, but beyond that it meant death.

Of course, for Buddhists like her there was no perma-death, except maybe Nirvana, in a very qualified sense. The fact of the matter, which was even recognized by science, but with many of its implications bracketed, was that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Life doesn’t end with death, it just transforms.

For Tenzin, this was more than a belief, she knew it experientially, even before the mess she found herself in now. Since she was little, she had vivid memories of her past lives. It was hard to keep track of them all, the human ones were easy, but those of her non-human lives were sometimes difficult to reconcile psychologically while in human form. The animal ones were still fairly relatable, though there were sometimes glimpses of truly bizarre, alien worlds, which she wasn’t sure what to make of.

It was easiest to deal with them in dreams, when the critical, rational mind takes a back seat, allowing consciousness to be carried along by experience, like a leaf on a river. Usually it felt like she was recalling something past, other times it seemed like the dreams were prophesying something yet to come, and on rare occasions it felt like the past-present-future wasn’t really distinct if viewed from a high enough vantage point.

No longer being confined to a physical body, her perception felt like she had 360 vision. It was pretty disorienting, especially as she felt she was spinning, her astral body barreling through space like a broken airplane. The feeling, combined with a high level of panic, made her want to puke rainbows, which is what she assumed a non-physical body would have inside. First things first, she needed to stabilize her trajectory, before she ended up somewhere even worse.

Tenzin tried to close her eyes, which of course wasn’t something she could really do without physical eyelids, but the thought of doing it was enough to help her focus. She scoured her memory for anything that may help in this situation, when a Chöngyam Trungpa quote rose to the surface of her awareness, a lotus sprouting from the murky darkness:

“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there is no ground.”

With that realization, she felt her body stabilize and slow down. Even though she no longer had lungs, she felt like she could breathe. The panic subsided. She started examining the various animal-headed forms that glittered like constellations around her, and recognized them as the 100 deities of the in-between state she had learned about in the Zhitro cycle of teachings. These were the 42 peaceful and 58 spooky deities that appeared to most people at the moment of death. The main purpose of the Book of the Dead was to familiarize people with them ahead of time, so that they wouldn’t let their appearance frighten them, and divert them into a bad rebirth. Tenzin was glad she was able to figure this out in time.

As she continued falling, she quickly came to accept her situation. Was it quickly? She wasn’t sure, the flow of time definitely felt different in the Bardo, though there was no use dwelling on that. Tenzin had to figure out what to do next. She knew the general topology of the in-between state. Going towards the warm pinkish light seemed appears more welcoming, but only leads to another rebirth, while the colder bluer light is the direction of liberation. However, Tenzin didn’t feel she was ready for enlightenment yet. It wasn’t so much that she was that attached to her previous life, or lives, but she did consider herself a Mahayana Buddhist, and as such had taken the Bodhisattva Vow, which meant that she was suppose to liberate all other sentient beings before liberating herself. Of course, it could be argued that the vow itself was just a skillful device to accelerate individual liberation by cutting attachment to the self through the dedication of all one’s actions to others, but Tenzin, perhaps naively, did not see it that way.

Also, she wasn’t really ready to give up on her previous life, which had transformed so suddenly. There was still a chance she would get to see her cat, her boyfriend, and her family. She giggled to herself realizing how her priorities ordered themselves in her mind. Besides, there could still be a chance that she would be able to return to her previous body, maybe they’d put it on life support or something. Either way, it was too early to throw in the towel, or raise the victory banner of enlightenment, depending on how you phrase it.

Still, she wasn’t entirely sure how to navigate to her next rebirth. There is an important difference between reincarnation and rebirth, one is intentional and deliberate, the other is when you just end up in a different body depending on your karmic connections. Tenzin did have memories of previous lives and deaths, but she never had much control over them. This was the first time she “died” semi-intentionally. For most living beings, death is a traumatic event. Either it comes by surprise, or after a long period of suffering, both of which make it hard to keep a clear mind in the in-between Bardo state. Would this count as a rebirth or a reincarnation, she wondered? She was here as a consequence of her own actions, and her mind was surprisingly clear considering she basically just died. Yet, even though she maintained a certain level of autonomy, she didn’t exactly know what she was doing, so even if she was reborn as a result of intentional actions, she couldn’t help but feel like she was still winging it. No matter, she wasn’t going to solve the philosophical question of free will vs. determinism now.

When in doubt, phone a friend.

Now that she had calmed down and evaluated her situation, Tenzin remembered that she is never truly alone, she always had her yidam. The main thing that separates tantric Buddhism from the other kinds, is the practice of deity yoga, a process for visualizing, internalizing, and eventually role modeling yourself on a particular god, goddess, or group of deities. Some practitioners only practice one yidam, others alternate between multiple ones, while others utilize a mandala of several or sometimes even several hundred different ones simultaneously. Tenzin mostly focused on just one, and it was this yidam that she now invoked with her particular mantra.

“Om Kurukulle Hri Soha, Om Kurukulle Hri Soha, Om Kurukulle Hri Soha…” she recited in a practiced, melodious way, as she had done millions of times before.

The form of Kurukulla, the female Buddha, specializing in magnetism and enchantment, the saint of unhappy lovers, appeared in her usual form, that of a sixteen-year-old girl with red skin and fiery hair, a garland of human skulls around her neck, and four arms, two holding a flowery bow and arrows, and the other two each holding a lasso and an elephant goad. With each mantra recitation, her form grew more and more distinct and detailed. Tenzin noticed that here in the Bardo, her patron deity took on a far more realistic appearance than she had ever been able to visualize in the living world, which was a relief, everything here now seemed so unreal, hence in a weird inverse way, it felt good to have your quasi-imaginary friend be the one real thing.

The way Kurukulla drew her bow looked like she was stretching after a nap. Once her form reached its full opacity and detail, she put away her symbolic instruments, crossed her legs in full lotus posture, crossed two of her arms in front of herself, scratching her ear with her third arm and examining the nails on her fourth, while flying upside down in front of Tenzin at about eye-level.

“What did you get yourself into this time?” Kurukulla asked.

“Well, there was this monk… and then I tried powa… and he said to unravel the heart knot…”

“Wait, are you saying you ended up here because you tried doing powa and messed it up?!?” Kurukulla burst out laughing, while pantomiming rolling around on an invisible floor, beating it with the fists of her four hands. “I always said you needed to find an outlet for your energy instead of letting it build up inside you, miss goodie two-shoes.” Kurukulla, of course, like most deities, never wore any shoes.

“It’s not funny! I’m scared.”

“Come on, it is kinda funny. And besides, you know the Middle Way means being free of the extremes of hope and fear.”

“Are you gonna help, or just laugh at me?”

“The fact that there is no self, also means that there is no Other, so really you’re just laughing at yourself,” Kurukulla snickered, “but yes, we’ll find you a way to help yourself.”

Having her yidam there made Tenzin feel safe. For much of her childhood, she had tried to rely on others, but found that it always led to disillusionment. After all, most sentient beings were stuck in the same predicament as her, existence in the desire realm came prepackaged with inevitable suffering for everyone. Eventually, your friends and even your family will fail you in one way or another, and after that unconditional trust becomes impossible. That’s why the best thing you can do for yourself and for others is to become liberated as soon as possible, because only an enlightened Buddha is capable of never failing others.

The tantric path means visualizing yourself as a Buddha in this life, a Buddha in the sense of an enlightened being, not necessarily like the historical Siddhartha Gautama. For Tenzin, Kurukulla was the Buddha she chose to follow, a semi-wrathful red deity associated with power and magic as expressions of liberating activity. To oversimplify, the way tantric Buddhism works is by assuming that given enough time, we will all become enlightened, and since time is illusion-like, we might as well act as if we’re already enlightened, and by acting like we are, we become so. It’s a bit like a time loop, but it has worked for many people over the centuries.

So, asking her yidam for help was still essentially Tenzin helping herself, just through an aspirational, perfected form of who she wanted to be, which apparently was an immature, sarcastic, little imp of a Buddha. As she continued falling through the Bardo, Tenzin couldn’t make up her mind as to what kind of rebirth she wanted next, so she left the decision to Kurukulla, as soon as her yidam finished laughing at her expense. After a few minutes, which felt like hours, her yidam was ready to get back to business.

“Ok, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Kurukulla said pulling out her lasso, “remember that time you lost your prayer beads in the meadow and asked my help to find it, so we took a bow and fired an arrow into the air, and it landed right next to them? This will be kinda like that,” she said as she tied the magic rope around Tenzin’s ankle. “I know we’re being indecisive right now, like do we want to be reborn as a human again on Earth, or would it be better to do another life as a cat, or maybe a scifi adventure on some alien world, choices choices choices.” Kurukulla tied the other end of the rope to one of her flowery arrows. “But the discursive mind is stupid, and there’s a high chance that we’re lying to ourselves about what we want, need, and should do. So, it’s best to mix in a good dose of chaos and choose to give up conscious choice, and let the unconscious do the calculations.” She then nocked the arrow to the bowstring. “We’re probably wondering, will that make this a rebirth or a reincarnation. The answer is yes.” She snickered as she pulled back the bowstring. “So trust the process, my little weeaboo, closet fujoshi, the arrow knows the way. See you in another life.”

“Wait, hold on,” she couldn’t finish her thought before Kurukulla released the arrow, which pulled Tenzin astral body in the direction of the pink light of rebirth. She felt her consciousness fly through the Bardo, like a spaceship in hyperspace, the constellations around her blurring into lines, until she approached a green and blue planet, similar but different from Earth, and zeroed in on an area in the south of the main continent. As she got closer, she saw a large, sprawling, walled city, with flowing banners and decorated parapets, resembling a royal capital in a fantasy book. She got excited imagining a new life as a princess, a long overdue reward for all the karmic work she’d been putting in during her previous lives. But, of course, that was just her ego talking. As the arrow pulling her along overshot the city, she could see her hopes slipping away. The Middle Way is free of the extremes of hope and fear. She was close to the ground now, flying over a dense forest, her consciousness being pulled along between the tips of the pine trees, when a clearing appeared with a modest, but beautiful wooden cabin surrounded by an herb garden. In the bedroom, her new parents were in the middle of trying to make a baby, and as her new dad came, Tenzin felt her consciousness enter her new mom’s womb.