Mind after Death

by Kalu Rinpoche

(Luminous Mind: The Way of the Buddha)

ONE LIFE OR MANY LIVES?

All spiritual and religious traditions agree on some type of existence beyond this life, and all of them prepare us for that future. If after death there were nothing, if our existence were limited to this lifetime, we could be satisfied with worldly knowledge and activities. A spiritual practice, no matter what it is, would be unnecessary.

The idea that death is a complete end followed by sheer nothingness is the product of an extremely narrow mind. It is as if someone who lives in France were to conclude that beyond the country’s borders the human species ceased to exist!
While religions might be in general agreement about the existence of an afterlife, the various traditions do have distinct perspectives about the nature of that afterlife. Some teach that death is not followed by more lifetimes, but by one eternal life, while Dharma teaches that death is followed by many lifetimes until enlightenment.

On the surface, those views might appear to be contrary, but they actually aren’t. It’s really just a question of presentation. Let’s say that you’re in France and you ask someone what Switzerland is like, and the person replies that Switzerland is a nice place. That response may be accurate, but it is quite general. Another person might give the same positive response, but add a more detailed description, explaining what it is that gives each area and each city its charm. This detailed description does not invalidate the first person’s response in the least.

Likewise, Christianity, for example, offers a general presentation of the afterlife, teaching that there is life after death and that the conditions of that life depend upon the way in which you live your present life. For a Christian, virtue leads to heaven and sinfulness leads to hell. That’s the basic idea. Dharma, on the other hand, teaches the possibility of many future lives, that negative actions in this life lead to suffering in future lives while positive actions lead to happy future lives and finally to enlightenment.

These two traditions are in perfect agreement about the need to abandon the negative or harmful and adopt the positive; they also agree on the results of negative or positive actions. There is no contradiction between them. The difference is that Christianity offers a briefer presentation, while Buddhism offers a more detailed one.

DEATH AND THE CONTINUITY OF MIND

Space is beyond time; we can’t say that space began to exist at a given point in time or that it will cease to exist after a certain amount of time has passed. Similarly, the mind’s emptiness is beyond time; mind is essentially atemporal. By nature, mind is eternal, beyond births and deaths. These exist only at the level of the mind’s illusions.

When the mind does not know its nature and is therefore caught up in the path of illusions, it transmigrates endlessly in illusion, from life to life. Conditioned by ignorance and karma, we have had to live out innumerable previous lives. In the future, we will be forced to live out many more. The mind transmigrates from life to life, from one illusion to the next as long as it has not attained enlightenment, the awakening of a Buddha or great Bodhisattva.

In our present state, we cannot recognise our previous lives; we don’t know where we came from, where we’ll go, or what condition we’ll be reborn into. Meanwhile, what we experience is actually only a transition, one passage among an infinity of possible lives and worlds beyond our conception.

The Spear of Mindfulness ~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Alas for people in this age of residues!

The mind’s wholesome core of truth has withered, and people live deceitfully; so their thoughts are warped, their speech is twisted. They cunningly mislead others—who can trust them?

In the golden age, the age of perfection, there was no need for sunlight or moonlight, for beings radiated light from their own bodies. They could move miraculously through space, and they lived without needing any solid food.

All creatures naturally abided by the ten virtues. But, as time passed, they began to harm each other, to be ruled by their desires, to steal, and to lie. They lost their natural radiance and had to depend on sun and moon for light; they lost their ability to fly; they began to need solid nourishment, and when eventually the spontaneous harvest and the bountiful cow
disappeared, they had to toil to produce their food.

Now in our present epoch, all that remains of the qualities of the golden age are residues, like the unappealing left-over scraps of a sumptuous feast. Anyone with eyes of wisdom seeing the miserable condition of people in this decadent age cannot help but feel great compassion.

In this age of conflict people are ill intentioned and full of deceit. They put themselves first and disregard the needs of others. Whoever flatters them they regard as a friend; whoever contradicts or opposes them they see as an enemy.

As these attitudes gradually distort all their actions, words, and thoughts, people become more and more warped and twisted, like crooked old trees, until finally their mentality degenerates so far that any notion of right and wrong is completely lost.

We are in an age when anger, craving, ambition, stupidity, pride, and jealousy are the rule of the day. It is an age when the sun of Dharma is already sinking behind the shoulders of the western mountains, when most of the great teachers have left for other realms, when practitioners go astray in their meditation, and when neither lay people nor the ordained act according to the Dharma.

People may obtain some transient advantage from the misguided values of these times, but ultimately they are cheating no one but themselves.

The poisonous emotions that saturate people’s minds in this dark era are the principal cause of their wandering in the endless cycle of saṃsāra. To deal with those emotions we need to keep a constant vigilance, following the example of the Kadampa masters, who used to say: I will hold the spear of mindfulness at the gate of the mind, And when the emotions threaten, I, too, will threaten them. When they relax their grip, only then will I relax mine.

– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
from the book "The Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones"

SPEAKING GERMAN IN TEXAS

SPEAKING GERMAN IN TEXAS:

In Texas there is a town called New Braunfels, where resides a large German-speaking population.

One day, a local rancher driving down a country road noticed a man using his hand to drink water from the rancher's stock pond.

The rancher rolled down the window and shouted, "Sehr angenehm! Trink das Wasser nicht. Die kuehe haben darein geschissen."

This means, “Glad to meet you... but, don't drink the water. The cows have crapped in it.”

The man shouted back, "I'm from New York and just down here campaigning for Biden's presidential run. I can't understand you. Please speak in English."

The rancher replied, "Use both hands."