Those who die and come back, Tibetan style

 

Who knows what happens after death?

Those who live there, those who visit, those who have died and come back.

The Tibetan language has a word for those who have died and come back. The word is delog (“DAY-loak, with the stress on the first syllable). There is also the term nyin log, for one who dies and returns in one day.

Delog Dawa Drolma [d. 1941] recorded a detailed account of her travels in “realms of pure appearance” under the guidance of White Tara while her teenaged body lay seemingly lifeless for five days. These higher realms, like the lower ones, are understood to be “the display of mind”. The pure realms are the display of enlightened awareness, while the bardo state and the six directions of rebirth are “the display of delusion and the projection of mind’s poisons.” In the presence of the Death lord Yama Dharmaraja, she sings (with Tara) a song:

If there is recognition, there is just this – one’s own mind.
If there is no recognition, there is the great wrathful lord of death [Delog xi]

Sogyal Rinpoche discussed delog phenomena in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. He reported that “In Tibet this was an accepted occurrence, and elaborate methods were devised for detecting whether d´eloks [alternate transliteration] were fraudulent or not” (Sogyal, 1993, p. 331)

The Tibetan Library of Works and Archives in Dharamsala, India,  houses at least a dozen accounts of delogs.

A pioneer work of French anthropologist Françoise Pommaret was published in 1989 as  Les revenants de l’au-dela dans le monde Tibetain: Sources littéraires et tradition vivante. She traveled often to the Himalayan highlands and  discovered historical records of ten delogs from the 11th to the 20th century. She interviewed a delog in a village in Nepal and three in Bhutan. Pommaret’s studies of  texts included a detailed story of a delog whose biography was based on a 17th-century manuscript.

"At first, the delogs may not realize that they are dead, when the spirit separates from the body, leaving it seeming like an animal in the delog’s clothing. As the disembodied spirit roams about the home, the delog may not understand why the rest of the family is acting so strangely and unresponsive to the delog’s efforts at communication. The experience of Gling Bza’ chos skyid is typical:

"'Then when I saw my own bed, there was the cadaver of a big pig covered with my clothing. My husband and my children and all the neighbors of the village arrived and began to cry.:::They began to prepare for a religious ceremony and I thought, “What are you doing?” But they did not see me and I felt abandoned. I did not think that I was dead.'" (Pommaret, 1989, p. 70)

When Chos ’dzom met her protective deity (yi dam) and guide, he said, “Don’t you know that you are dead? Don’t show attachment to your body of illusion; lift your spirit towards the essence of things. Come where I will lead you” (Pommaret, 1989, p. 32). Then she met terrifying minions of Yama shouting, “Execute!” but was protected by her yi dam and her mantra.

I wish we had a suitable word in English to describe one who died and came back. "Revenant" is too creepy. Raymond Moody's coinage "near-death experience" has been valuable in facilitating discussion of this kind of phenomenon, but it doesn't quite embrace what happened to me after I was pronounced clinically dead as a boy. On the first of those occasions, the doctors told my parents, with perhaps some embarrassment, when I returned, "Your boy died and he came back". That still sounds right. .

 

References

Bailey, Lee W., “A ‘Little Death’: The Near-Death Experience and Tibetan Delogs”  in Journal of Near-Death Studies, 19(3) Spring 2001

Drolma, Delog Dawa, Delog: Journey to realms beyond death trans. Richard Patterson.  Junction City, CA: Padma Publishing, 1995.

Pommaret, Françoise , Les revenants de l'au-delà dans le monde Tibetain: Sources littéraires et tradition vivante  Paris: Editions du Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1989

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (New York: Harper Collins, 2002)

Art: "Storm Bird Brings Me Back" by Robert Moss. Published in The Boy Who Died and Came Back.