Death & Dying
By His Holiness the Dalai Lama

At a three-day teaching in California earlier this year, His Holiness the Dalai Lama was asked a question about death and how to prepare for it. This is his response:

When we speak of death as a phenomenon from the Buddhist point of view, it is understood to be the moment when all the gross levels of mind, the various levels of consciousness, have eventually dissolved into the clear light nature of mind, which is the most subtle level of consciousness.

However, something similar to this process occurs even in our day-to-day life while we are alive. For example, when we experience sleep, before we reach the dreaming state, there is a deep-sleep state, which is devoid of dreaming. That deep-sleep state is quite similar in its experience to the actual experience of death; at that point the level of consciousness is comparatively much more subtle and deeper. As the level of consciousness assumes greater grossness or coarseness, one moves from the deep-sleep state into the dreaming state, which is a coarser level of consciousness. When one wakes up, that’s an even coarser level of consciousness. Similarly, death is when all the consciousness levels have dissolved into this subtle-most level of consciousness. This will be followed, in most cases, by an interval period during which the consciousness arises from this extremely subtle state into a comparatively grosser level of existence, which is described in the Buddhist texts as bardo, or intermediate state. (There are some types of rebirth where there will be no interval period of bardo.) From the bardo state, when one takes the full embodiment of a rebirth, then the level of consciousness has assumed an even greater coarseness.

So in a sense, we can see that our existence is characterized by this continuing cycle of the consciousness moving through an extremely subtle level to a comparatively less subtle level to a gross level, and then dipping down through a reversal process of subtlety and so on. When we go to sleep we have this deep sleep, and then it rises from there into the dream state, and from there to the waking state, and then back to the sleep state, dream state, and so on.

Even in our day-to-day life our consciousness goes through these transitions of different levels of subtlety. Death marks a big point when consciousness has finally dissolved into the most subtle level of its existence. When the new rebirth occurs, then it again reverses the whole cycle…

This article can be read in its entirety in Mandala