Rainbow Body

Most Americans with whom I’ve spoken throughout the past two decades regard Buddhism as a peaceful tradition, full of methods to engender a holistic lifestyle of mindful living. Others see it as an alternative to the Judeo-Christian worldview, attracting hippies and fad diet fanatics. Few, however, think ‘religion’ when considering Buddhism. With the Dalai Lama promoting interfaith—open dialogue with many of the world’s religious leaders—in order to spread the human necessities of love, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, and harmony, it’s no wonder that the more mysterious side of Buddhism has been little more than a blip on the radar of global consciousness.

Research by world renowned psychology and psychiatry professor, Richard Davidson, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—also the founder of the Center for Healthy Minds—has brought to the fore the importance of developing compassion in order to increase one’s happiness. Brain scans on French molecular biologist turned Tibetan Buddhist monk, Mathieu Ricard, have also been evidentiary in this pursuit. There is little controversy regarding the facts gathered from these endeavors.

Yet the culture of Tibet from which the sources of these hypotheses were born also have hundreds of years of cataloguing mysterious events during the times of death of many revered masters that read like science fiction. To completely dismiss these records simply because they do not fit into our current scientific paradigm of consciousness would be skepticism for the sake of skepticism, which is just as absurd as blind faith, something highly discouraged in the monastic trainings of Tibetan Buddhist monks who embrace logic and reasoning.

It is quite peculiar that a tradition that has been meeting annually for nearly three decades with some of the world’s leading scientists in the Dalai Lama’s Mind and Life Conferences would hold onto ideas that others would quickly dismiss as the superstitious invention of religious whackos. His Holiness has an impeccable track-record for encouraging scientific education among his people, going so far as to require a modern scientific curriculum be added to the already rigorous sixteen-year monastic education needed to earn the Geshe degree—similar to a Doctor of Divinity . . . on steroids. The three major monasteries of the Dalai Lama’s Geluk sect—Drepung, Ganden, and Sera—have built science academies within the past five years and installed Western science educators for this purpose.

Personally, I have heard many stories from my friends in the monasteries and the lay Tibetans who live in the surrounding settlements as well as in Dharamsala. There has never been a single Tibetan I have met who has regarded these events as fictitious or misunderstood by the explanations of the lineage masters throughout their history. In terms of the scientific method of hypothesis and experimentation, each of these events was preceded by rigorous study and practice on the part of the practitioner leading to the predicted result at the time of their passing.

In 1989, Yeshe Gyaltsen, a Tibetan monk entered into a personal retreat hermitage with the knowledge that he was going to die soon and left instructions that his room be undisturbed during his final meditation in this lifetime. Soon after, the Dalai Lama recognized the rare accomplishment of this master meditator in achieving jalü phowa, or rainbow body, a phenomenon in which the body of the deceased is dissolved into rainbow light leaving only hair, teeth, and nails—if anything. There is currently a stupa—a traditional Tibetan and Indian styled monument honoring the enlightened mind of Yeshe Gyaltsen—erected near the sight of its occurrence in upper Dharamsala, India, the home of many Tibetans living in exile.

Teams of researchers from around the world have already been at the ready to study another phenomenon renowned to the people of the Land of Snow’s called thuk-dam, in which the consciousness of the meditator at the time of death remains in the body long after all the vital statistics have ceased. Several scientists found never before seen subtle electrical activity in the brain of a practitioner who emitted no odor of decay and maintained an upright posture even after all of the known signs of life had ended. These findings corroborate the descriptions given to the scientists by Tibetan scholars before the data was collected.

My own personal experience with these phenomena, though limited, has given me the assurance that there is something happening that requires the attention of the scientific community. After four six-month trips to India to study with the Dalai Lama and in the monastic community of Drepung Gomang in the Dügüling Tibetan settlement of Mundgod, Karnataka in South India, I have made endearing friendships with monks and lay persons from Tibetan, Bhutan, and Ladakh—countries in which these occurrences are ubiquitously experienced.

In December 2015, a Tibetan monk named Khenpo Thubten Sherab is said to have achieved rainbow body in a remote area of Kham in Eastern Tibet. At that time, my phone was flooded with messages and pictures sent to me by many of my dear friends sharing the joy of this seemingly miraculous occurrence.

The day before Sherab’s passing away he told his followers, "Now it's time for me to leave this existence. I appreciate all of your kindness and forgive me if I have said any harsh words to any of you.” Dressed in his yellow monk’s meditation and ritual robe, his body slowly shrank, day by day until it was about eighteen inches from top to bottom and missing all four limbs.

With many quantum physicists postulating a new worldview—one in which Amit Goswami calls ‘monistic idealism’, the idea that consciousness is the foundation of all being—it is necessary to remove the taboo tag from the topic of consciousness and thoroughly examine it with the contributions of the two-thousand-year subjective research of the Tibetans. My experience with their techniques that are rooted in a commitment to honesty and compassion has resulted in a happier, healthier life in which I’ve been freed from depression and nightmares for the past fifteen years. As well, the Dalai Lama’s former personal physician, Yeshe Dhünden—winner of India’s coveted lifetime achievement award, The Ratna Shri—cured my hypothyroidism with eight months of Tibetan medicine, another centuries-old discipline that has accumulated thousands of volumes of data.

Thankfully, my anecdotal accounts are not the only support to the efficacious knowledge of this indigenous tradition. The Indiana University School of Medicine has honored Tibetan doctors as guest professors for around twenty years. Nonetheless, I would like to offer my own idea of what may be occurring based on my years of arduous study into this contemplative science.

As Goswami notes that there are two phases of consciousness: the localized consciousness of the individual or person, and the non-localized consciousness which is akin to a shared matrix of the reality of our species, I postulate that the rainbow body is an event wherein the master meditator has developed their consciousness to such a pristine state through compassion for all beings that the local dissolves lovingly into the non-local. “We are one,” is not just a warm and fuzzy liberal attempt to end all disharmony; it may very well be a true fact of reality itself.