Andrew Holecek

Andrew Holecek

Andrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher who offers talks, online courses, and workshops in the United States and abroad. As a longtime student of Buddhism, he frequently presents this tradition from a contemporary perspective—blending the ancient wisdom of the East with modern knowledge from the West. Drawing on years of intensive study and practice, he teaches on the opportunities that exist in obstacles, helping people with hardship and pain, death and dying, and problems in meditation. Known as an expert on lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep and dream, he is an experienced guide for students drawn to these powerful nocturnal practices. He is the author of several books, including The Power and the Pain: Transforming Spiritual Hardship into Joy, Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep, Meditation in the iGeneration: How to Meditate in a World of Speed and Stress, and the audio program Dream Yoga: The Tibetan Path of Awakening through Lucid Dreaming.

Andrew Holecek

Andrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher who offers talks, online courses, and workshops in the United States and abroad. As a longtime student of Buddhism, he frequently presents this tradition from a contemporary perspective—blending the ancient wisdom of the East with modern knowledge from the West. Drawing on years of intensive study and practice, he teaches on the opportunities that exist in obstacles, helping people with hardship and pain, death and dying, and problems in meditation. Known as an expert on lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep and dream, he is an experienced guide for students drawn to these powerful nocturnal practices. He is the author of several books, including The Power and the Pain: Transforming Spiritual Hardship into Joy, Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep, Meditation in the iGeneration: How to Meditate in a World of Speed and Stress, and the audio program Dream Yoga: The Tibetan Path of Awakening through Lucid Dreaming.

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GUIDES

The Passing of Lama Tharchin Rinpoche

Photo from BuddhistChannelTV.comWe are deeply saddened when Lama Tharchin Rinpoche passed away  Monday, July 22, 2013.

Lama Tharchin was born in Tibet and was a dzogchen master who received his training at Dudjom Rinpoche's monastery. He fled Tibet in 1959 to live in India and Nepal, before arriving in the United States in 1984. He was the tenth lineage holder of the Repkong Ngakpas, a family lin­eage of yogis. Rinpoche founded the Vajrayana Foundation and established a monastic college and three-year retreat center. He taught throughout the United States, and his gentle presence endeared him to thousands.  Hhe was the driving force for the publication of The Complete Nyingma Tradition, a masterwork from the 19th century.

The following interview was conducted in Boulder, Colorado, and is excerpted from Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition by Andrew Holecek.

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What is the best thing for a practitioner to do before death?

We are now in the bardo of this life, which is from the moment of birth until the moment of a sickness that leads to our death. This is the time that is the best time to prepare. Dharma is how we can come to die professionally. That includes prostrations, circumambulation [around sacred sites and the gathering of merit], mandala offerings, Vajrasattva, taking refuge and generating bodhichitta, ngöndro, and then guru yoga. It is especially helpful to prepare with phowa practice. This is really powerful. We can practice phowa now, then when the time comes to actually do it, our chances for success are much greater. Reading Karma Lingpa's six bardo teachings is also helpful, along with the creation stage practices (of mahayoga). These deity and visualization practices are really wonderful. Then there are the completion stage practices and the Six Yogas of Naropa. This is all really important to do.

The main point is the recognition of your own enlightened buddha nature. When that wakes up in the bardo there is a chance you can be liberated at the level of the dharmakaya. The deity practices prepare you for the sambhogakaya. Any kind of practice is multiplied in the bardo, because consciousness is nine times smarter in the bardo. Therefore if we can practice in the bardo it's easier to attain liberation at that time.

What's the best thing one can do during death?

It is good if someone can read or remind the dying person to practice the teachings on the six bardos. In addition, try to remember these six things: remember the view, remember the deity, remember mantra, remember your samaya, remember your faith and devotion, remember love and compassion. It is also helpful to remember the Nyingma forms of liberation: liberation through taste (and the blessing substances, the relics), liberation through touching, through hearing, through seeing, through remembering, and through wearing. One can also read the Aspiration Prayer of Samantabhadra, or the Coppered-colored Mountain prayers-that can all be really helpful.

It is also very helpful to give teachings that will help the dying person recognize the bardo of dharmata, and to help them remember phowa. Practitioner or not, remind them to focus at the top of their head. You can also touch up there, or pull a little hair. Remember not to touch any lower parts of their body. Feeling directs consciousness, and it can make the consciousness exit from a lower door and take rebirth in a lower realm. You want consciousness to exit from the crown and merge with luminous emptiness awareness, so that your consciousness becomes vast like the sky. Reminding them of this is very helpful. There's also the recitation of all the Buddha's names, and the Chöying Dzö [Treasury of Dharmadhatu], by Longchenpa (which is what I usually recite). The root text is good to read.

What's the best thing to do after someone dies?

Each week, on the day that they died, they repeat the death experience, so this is a very special time for them and a time we can really help. You can do tsog (feast) offering on those days. Butter lamp offering is also special for those times, because the lamps represent clear mind-and help them find their way. If a practitioner is available, until the forty-ninth day, every day they could do the né dren ceremony, which is when you bring their consciousness into the support and then give empowerments and teachings and introduce the path that leads them to the pure land. You can also offer food and drink, and perform the sur offering. If you can do this every day until the forty-ninth day that is best (because seven weeks is the longest they can stay in the bardo), but especially in the first week, and then again for the third week. There is a phowa component in the né dren as well, so phowa is being practiced for them with this practice.

You can read also The Tibetan Book of the Dead, because bardo beings come back to hover around their loved ones during the bardo of becoming. This is the time when your prayers can penetrate and reach them directly, helping them. They can truly receive this help.

(from Preparing to Die by Andrew Holecek)

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Teachings to Prepare for Death

Intermediate States: Bardos and Living and Dying from Ancient India to 21st Century New York

The term bardo, often translated as "intermediate state" is a term that entered the popular imagination in the West with the publication of W.Y. Evans-Wentz's 1927 translation of The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States, which he rendered as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is curious that such a specialized esoteric text packed with the imagery of Buddhist tantra and intended for practitioners who had undergone years of training and received the proper initiations, came to be so well-known. But such was the attraction of the exotic then, and that attraction continues: new translations continue to appear, keeping Evans-Wentz's title and presenting the visions of peaceful and wrathful deities to a wide audience.

But there is something more to its appeal than simply infatuation with the exotic as, if one looks closely, the teachings on intermediate states - made famous in this text - have an intuitive appeal and in fact are enmeshed with broader teachings of karma, suffering, and our possibility for transcendence. So when we see an artist like Laurie Anderson whose new film Heart of the Dog explores death and letting go through the lens of the bardo teachings, the very immediate and human experience of these teachings is laid bare in a contemporary context.

Walter Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Buddhism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Anthropologist
Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (02/02/1878 – 07/17/1965): American anthropologist and writer who was a pioneer in the study of Tibetan Buddhism.

Recent Releases on the Bardo Teachings

In How We Live Is How We Die, Pema Chödrön shares her wisdom for working with this flow of life—learning to live with ease, joy, and compassion through uncertainty, embracing new beginnings, and ultimately preparing for death with curiosity and openness rather than fear.

Also available as an audiobook.

How We Live Is How We Die

More Books on the Bardo Teachings

The Tibetan Book of the Dead Chogyam TrungpaOne of the most well-known versions of the The Tibetan Book of the Dead  was translated by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Francesca Fremantle with a commentary by the former. On one level, the teachings presented in this text are instructions on how an advanced practitioner can secure liberation within the actual process of death. As they progress through these well-mapped stages of dying, opportunities present themselves for the practitioner to recognize what is happening and, with relative ease, free themselves from the cycle of rebirth, up to 49 days  after the physical body is considered dead. In popular practice, the text was often read to those in the process of dying, whether or not they had engaged in the training to achieve this goal.

While the concept of intermediate states was present in various schools of Buddhism in India, the teachings on these really flourished in the Tibetan traditions most of all. It was here where the different states - and detailed descriptions of them - were mapped out in extraordinary detail by the texts as well as adepts who mastered them. The particular text focused on here, a revelation of Karma Lingpa in the 14th century, is a continuation - or perhaps re-ignition - of a set of teachings rooted in a much older tradition of the Guhyagarbha tantra which was compiled from even older texts and oral instructions in India in the 6th century and came to Tibet with Guru Rinpoche in the 8th century. So there is a long history to these teachings with death and dying where the rubber meets the road.

However, there is also a way of presenting them that emphasizes how they are applicable to the here and now. As Trungpa Rinpoche explains in his Transcending Madness: The Experience of the Six Bardos," the experience of the six bardos is not concerned with the future alone; it also concerns the present moment. Every step of experience, every step of life, is a bardo experience."

Tibetan Buddhism, Milarepa

Milarepa (1040-1123)

The great yogi Milarepa, beloved saint of the Himalayas, wrote a Vajra-song about the bardos, detailed in Opening the Treasure of the Profound, which conveys how sentient beings and Buddhas share the same nature, the implication being that anyone can become enlightened in the here and now as we continually pass through these intermediate states.

Francesca Fremantle in her Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead explores more deeply this idea that bardo teachings are as much for this present life as it is for the next life.

In Mind Beyond Death, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche gives a very comprehensive presentation of the bardos, providing a framework for directing our own story of living and dying. That is a very powerful message.

Teachings to Prepare for Death

For those interested in the emphasis of these teachings to prepare for death specifically, there is a wealth of material to support their practice. It should be noted that this text and associated practices are meant to be done under the guidance of a qualified master with an unbroken lineage from the source.

One of the most readable treatments of the bardos is Tulku Thondup's Peaceful Death, Joyful Rebirth: A Tibetan Buddhist Guidebook. Tulku Rinpoche gives a wonderful overview of how death is not the end, why practice is important for both this life and the death process, and then gets into very specific teachings and practices which the reader can actually do.

A more distilled treatment can be found in Dudjom Rinpoche's Counsels from My Heart where he briefly presents the six bardos and describes the state of a dying person as they progress through these states.

Preparing to Die is another excellent source book for those who are facing death or working with those who are dying. It is a spiritual toolkit that discusses the bardos that also includes very practical advice from contemporary masters. It also covers more worldly matters from the medical to the legal.

More Traditional Accounts of the Bardos

Some other more traditional accounts of the bardos include Lama Lodu's Bardo Teachings: The Way of Death & Rebirth. This is a complement to Trungpa and Fremantle's translation as it includes teachings on the Chikai bardo, the intermediate state that occurs at the moment of death which were not included in Trungpa Rinpoche's volume.

While many of the above are presentations of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, all the other schools have very clear teachings on the bardos. One example is Tsongkhapa's presentation included in The Six Yogas of Naropa.

Can we control our own trajectory when we die?

What all these have in common of course is that they present the very real possibility that any of us, with proper training in the preliminary and main practices, can live a life with fearlessness with the skills and ability to control our own trajectory when we die.

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