General Dharma

A short pamphlet authored by Jhampa and Wolfgang that provides an excellent introduction to the process of death as understood in the Himalayan tradition.  The orginal text and charts are excerpted from 'Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism' by Lati Rinpoche and Jeffrey Hopkins, Snow Lion Publications, 1979.

Since the death process and the meditation upon is crucial for all anuttara-yoga-tantra practitioners we made this excerpt available on this website. For a far deeper analysis, we recommend the original text.

Also, even though the process is derived from the vajra tradition, the text itself is not restricted to those who have been initiated.  For that reason, we have shared it for those who are interested.

This version is single column, portrait.

This is a single page printable image of the visualisation for the Lama Chopa practice. When the Tibetans were introduced to Buddhism from India, their teachers described the visualisation of one's teachers as a field - (such as the field of teachers).  The word for field in Tibetan is 'shing', which also happens to be used in Tibetan for 'tree'.   The Tibetan students considered that a field was not such a noble place to visualise their teachers, and so one finds such visualisations from this tradition where the teachers are in trees.

This explanation was given by the great lama  Khensur Pema Gyaltsen Rinpoche in 1983.  He also said that, while this was a change from the Indian progenitors, there are also many advantages to this approach, and the Indians (while finding it amusing) approved.