My Last Moments in Tibet

By Snow Eagles Mantra

I am a Tibetan, I am a simple monk,I live in Tibet in the Thrangu Tashi Choling Monastery.

(for the full article and multimedia experience, click here:  OM-Times June 2010 Edition) My life is in service to the Buddha. Now my world has been shaken and my life lays in rubble and in ruin. I lay prostrated before the Buddha and i see my brothers and sisters around me also laying on the floor. I first thought they were prostrating before Buddha same as i was, but they are not moving, i am not moving, and why are we not moving? I do not have any feeling in my legs or back, i cannot seem to get up to do my prostrations. My fellow monks and nuns around me are not moving either, I glance around moving my head carefully, and looking up at the Buddha statue I am shocked to see the statue shattered. The roof of the temple is caved in and I can see the sky. This has been my home all my life and my fathers home before me, I can trace my family line back 1300 years of monastic life in this beautiful temple, now I lay here broken, unable to move and all is in ruins. Well just as the Buddha said about the impermanence of life this is surely proof of that. I try once again to move and try to sit up and I feel something pressing against my neck, pulling it out from under me to see what it is and it to seems almost poetic to find of all the holy books in this beautiful temple the one I am laying on is Bardo Thodol, best known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. As I glance through the plates of the Bardo Thodol I glance around at all my fellow monks and nuns laying helpless and motionless around me and start to recite the Bardo Thodol.

“Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind.  The natural state of the universe un-manifested.  Let go into the clear light, trust it, and merge with it. It is your own true nature, it is home.”