Herbert Guenther did us a favor in translating the word often rendered “secret” as “mystery”. A secret involves boundaries, control, and limited access. A mystery involves awe and spiritual not-knowing. Our true nature is mysterious. It is awesome. According to the Nyingma Dzogchen tradition, when one undergoes the mystery of death, one may reunite with the mystery of one’s nature.
As humans one of our greatest challenges is facing death. Psychoanalyst Ernest Becker says if we were truly in touch with life’s fragility, we’d all be crazy—more mystery than we are emotionally equipped to face. Quite a prospect.
In our Buddhist tradition, it was Gautama’s seeing an old person, a sick one, a corpse, and a renunciate that stirred him to seek escape from the suffering tied to decay and death. Confronting these facts can be deeply unsettling. When we face illness or the death of a loved one, we may experience a storm of emotions. In my own experience, the presence of death disrupts the ordinary entirely. Whatever my cognitive sense of it, the reality breaks through to something raw.
Buddhism arose in a context of belief in rebirth and the possibility of liberation from a cycle of birth and death. There’s a deep interplay in our teachings between what awaits the uncultivated and what awaits those who’ve practiced. One use of this knowledge is to enhance our spiritual endeavor here and now. How do we integrate the future perspective with our practice?
In Dzogchen’s foundational practices, what happens after death plays into practice. Early on, contemplation of impermanence, death, and rebirth’s pains spurs spiritual activity.
Within Becker’s view, human development includes defenses against the distress that would follow deep awareness of death. A helpful approach is that mindfulness of death—conceptual and nonconceptual—aims to wind back these defenses while building meditative stability, to support greater sensitivity to this truth.
Within Dzogchen, death presents a natural moment when the clarity of our true nature can arise. Familiarity with this nature allows a reunion with our inner liberated state. One may attain Buddhahood and manifest spontaneously to liberate others.
Dzogchen’s foundational practices offer two major avenues for liberation at death: one is through profound Guru Yoga, union with the teacher’s realization. Deepening this opens opportunities at death.
The other is through Powa, the contemplative sending of one’s nature into union with Amitabha in his pure land, from which one avoids powerless rebirth and opens to liberation.
These descriptions cannot do justice to the richness of the practices. Most of all, they cannot capture the dance between contemplating our mortality and practicing out of compassion for all beings. We use the mirror of death and what may come after as a guide and motivation for who we become today—in the depth of our hearts and the breadth of our understanding.