..续本文上一页psychology at Bristol University has done interviews with people who had near-death experiences. She explored them from a range of approaches, from the medical to the religious. The biological-medical argument is that the reason people consistently see a great light at the end of a tunnel is because the brain is being starved of oxygen, and therefore everything goes dark; people thus experience something like going through a tunnel and coming out to the light on the other side. This argument can explain why there is a tunnel, but it cannot explain why there is a light at the other end. They haven”t got an answer for that one! The researcher Ñ and she was taking a straight scientific approach Ñ said that maybe Buddhism had some answers there, the best answers. Because Buddhism says that the self is merely a construct and that we re-create the self over and over and over again, moment by moment. And at the time of death the physical construct of the self starts to fall away: body and mind falling away, that moment. And we can witness the great light, we can witness the emptiness. And this also accounts for people”s consistent experiences of the interconnected oneness with all things in those near-death experiences

　　There is a range of beliefs about death that we may have subscribed to at some point. The scientific view is that we live once; we die once; death is total extinction. This of course is very rational, and there is no proof to support any other view, nothing else is available. The Christian view is that there is life after death; for those who find God, the kingdom of heaven is open for eternity; for those who reject God, there is hell for eternity; the earth is but a brief home, a testing ground for our love of God.

　　A Buddhist view of death is that we are all waves on the ocean; each wave is born and dies repeatedly, according to our underlying forces; there is rebirth until enlightenment, until we get off the wheel of samsara. A variation of that is that there is reincarnation, until the dissolution of the ego, when the soul becomes one with the absolute. I am still not sure about any of those beliefs.

　　Years ago, when I was at Kopan monastery, at the age of nineteen, I did my very first meditation retreat. I was naive enough to sign up for a thirty-day retreat. Kopan monastery is just outside Kathmandu in Nepal, and the lamas there, Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe, were wonderful teachers. For all beginning students they used to make us meditate on death for two weeks. Then, if that was not enough, we would have to meditate on the hell realms for two weeks. We started out on that retreat with 150 people and about thirty of us finished. They were always saying, ”The reason we get people to meditate on death is because it motivates people to practise.” I”m not sure about that! But, twenty years later, I have come around to thinking that the lamas had something that was important there: they weren”t so eccentric and crazy as I originally thought.

　　Tibetan Buddhism focuses a lot on understanding the process of death and dying. The lamas used to say that the moment of death is potent with opportunity, because it is then that we have access to the fundamental nature of mind. This luminous clear light will manifest; it will naturally manifest. This is a crucial point, because it is also at that point that we can attain liberation. However, we usually do not recognise it, because we are not acquainted with it, here and now in our practice, in our daily lives. So they emphasise that it is right now in our practice, in this lifetime, that we must encounter that unmanifested great mind, establish that essential recognition here and now.

　　Just after that thirty-day retreat, I was getting on a plane to leave Kathmandu to go …

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