Rebirth as Rhyme
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Rebirth as Rhyme
Past the mouth there is no river, yet the water keeps a direction for some distance.
TWO IMAGES FOR WHAT HAPPENS AFTER DEATH CIRCULATE IN ORAL TEACHING.
The first: the bardos are a river entering the sea. Past the mouth there is no river, yet the water keeps a direction for some distance.
The second: rebirths are rhymes. The origin of these is not on record. The present writer has given them to students several times, attributed to unnamed teachers, and can no longer say whether they were received or coined. That uncertainty turns out to be the subject.
What the usual account needs
The popular picture of rebirth is freight. Something leaves a body, crosses an interval, and is delivered to a fetus. Tibet gave this picture institutional form: estates, titles and monasteries passed along the line of delivery, and so the picture acquired the solidity of property law. Call it the feudal model.[1] It imagines a passenger, a someone who makes the trip, and a passenger is what the teaching on selflessness removes.
Thought is the habit
Dzogchen instruction works from a different place. rNam rtog bag chags yin:[2] thought is habit. A thought is the tendency in its activated state. The instruction is addressed to a practitioner, and what it tells the practitioner is where to look: activation is the only point at which habit is ever met. Manifest and latent are two modes of one thing, and only one of them can be worked with. What a tendency is while it is not occurring is a question the instruction leaves alone. It has no bearing on practice.
Applied to the river, this says to look at the water moving. What persists past the mouth is motion, and motion has to be kept up.
The teachings describe a phase after death in which there is no thought and the clear light of the nature of mind is unobstructed.[3] But thought falling silent is not recognition. What ends at the mouth is the banks (this life’s karma), and the sea (ground, gzhi[4]) is that absence of banks: nothing to belong to and nothing to merge with. Knowing this is rigpa. Clear light unrecognised is already the activity of ma rig pa.[5] The show resumes because that activity has not ceased. Everyday instruction already describes it that way: samsara is something “done”, moment by moment, with investment.
The same holds on any ordinary afternoon. Ngak’chang Rinpoche writes that birth and death alternate in every moment and that continuity is the effect a film produces by flickering.[6] This morning’s person claims yesterday’s by an act of recall performed now. The freight model is the everyday self-model extended across a funeral, and it is no better founded on a Tuesday than at death.
Rhyme
A rhyme has no carrier at all. The second word contains nothing of the first. The relation is formal, and three of its properties matter here.
It is retroactive. A word becomes a rhyme-word only when its partner arrives, so the later term makes the earlier one a predecessor. Recognition of an incarnation always sits at the later end, whether performed by a committee, a lama, or the person concerned.
It requires difference. The same word said twice is repetition. An incarnation who was the same, independently existing person would be a survival, which is what the doctrine denies.
It is not exclusive. One word rhymes with several, and rhymes skip lines. The tradition’s twin incarnations, its separate emanations of body, speech and mind, and its recognitions made while the predecessor was still alive are embarrassments for freight and ordinary for rhyme.
Ngak’chang Rinpoche’s account of his own case is written in this grammar. Looking back at the nineteen-year-old who first set out for the Himalayas, he calls him “someone else entirely”, joined to the writer by a thread he describes as empty form. He reports dreams in which he is neither himself nor absent, a merged identity of which Aro Yeshé is part, and in which he can call Ngakpa Chögyam “him”. Asked whether he needed to know which of the two he was, he answers that it had been irrelevant.[7] Nothing in these passages is delivered from elsewhere.
Retroactivity can be read two ways. On one, recognition notices a relation that was already there. On the other, recognition makes the relation. Either way there is no lineage before it. Rhyme by itself cannot decide between the two, and it cannot tell rebirth from affinity, imitation, or a good story told afterwards. What constrains it in a living tradition is the scheme a rhyme falls into: aspirations made by the earlier figure, the judgment of those qualified to hear, and what follows from the recognition in practice. Without that scheme a rhyme is a coincidence.
Why the story is told as transport
The lineage histories still speak the other language. A gTértön guides her dying consort through the bardo into the child she is carrying.[8] Told that way it is a story of transport, with a pilot.
The story is method, and it is told for wonder. Wonder is a working part: it loosens the listener’s certainty about what a person is, which no doctrinal statement does as quickly. A story translated in advance into safe abstractions stops doing this. The same histories keep their own counterweight. One lineage figure, said to be the emanation of a great treasure-revealer, denied it and maintained that he had been a goat.[9]
What the two images remove is the passenger. Rhyme accounts for recognition and for lineage. It does not settle whether anything continues across a death. The instruction does not wait for an answer. One practises with what appears.
Really was
The objection comes anyway: was there, in fact, a previous life? Was there a Padmasambhava? It is asked with most force of the lineage this essay draws on. Its founding visionary, Aro Lingma, is publicly unattested outside the tradition’s own records.
A fictional schoolboy wizard has changed the lives of millions of children. No boy attended a physical school, and the lives changed all the same. Whether there was such a boy and whether he is at work in a life are two questions. For the child the second is the one that counts, and it is answered in the present tense.
But readers remain readers. In guru yoga the practitioner ends by resting as what was invoked. Künzang Dorje Rinpoche: “Mind itself is Padmasambhava and Yeshé Tsogyel in union.”[10] In plain terms this says realisation has no owner and no limit and is available wherever there is mind. The devotional phrasing is what lets it be entered and not only agreed with. Padmasambhava at the Copper-Coloured Mountain[11] is spoken of in the present tense for that reason.
Efficacy is also no guarantee of worth. Certain figures who never lived have moved millions toward voracity, pugnacity, and obscuration. The further test is what the effect does to those it reaches.
The test
So: does influence cross a death? Who establishes that two lives belong together? Does it work?
A recollection only needs an audience of one. A lineage is checked by those who practise it, by what its methods do to them over years. Strong experience is not the measure, since experiences can leave a person more dependent and more pleased with themselves. The measure is whether reference points loosen or harden. It shows in conduct, which teacher and student test on each other for a long time before either trusts the result. A later life makes the earlier one its predecessor, and students do the same for a teaching: until it is practised it is only a claim. They complete what they inherit. A cycle of teaching nobody practises is a private dream whatever its pedigree. That holds for the Aro gTér as for any other, and it is the standard this essay accepts for its own sources.
Confidence[12] in such a lineage means willingness to sing the line long enough to find out whether it scans. Belief in a biography is not required.
As for the two images: where they began is not on record. They are kept going by whoever uses them.
བརྒྱུད་པ་ངོ ས་འཛན་ི ས་འགྲུབ།
ི་མས་སྔ་མ་སྔ་མར་ེ ད།
ཐོ བ་པ་ཉམས་སུ་བླངས་པས་ཚང་།
brgyud pa ngos ’dzin gyis ’grub
phyi mas snga ma snga mar byed
thob pa nyams su blangs pas tshang
Recognition establishes lineage.
The later makes the former a predecessor.
What was received is made whole by practice.
“Aro Yeshé dead. Chögyam alive.”
KÜNZANG DORJE RINPOCHE[13]
Footnotes
- ↑ The tulku (sprul sku) system of recognised reincarnate lamas, institutionalised in Tibet from the thirteenth century. A tulku inherited the predecessor’s household and estate (bla brang), which gave the doctrine of rebirth direct economic and political consequences.
- ↑ rnam rtog — discursive thought, conceptual movement. bag chags (Skt. vā sanā ) — habitual tendency, usually glossed as a latent imprint. The formula identifies the two at the point of occurrence, which is where practice meets them.
- ↑ 'od gsal, clear light, in the chos nyid bar do, the bardo of the nature of reality, which follows the moment of death in the standard enumeration.
- ↑ gzhi, the ground or base. Neither a substance nor a whole of which beings are parts.
- ↑ ma rig pa (Skt. avidyā ), commonly translated “ignorance”, which suggests a lack. The Dzogchen usage is closer to an act: not-recognising.
- ↑ Ngakpa Chögyam (Ngak’chang Rinpoche), Tracts of the Sun, entries for the eighth of February and the fifth of June.
- ↑ Ngakpa Chögyam, Goodbye Forever, volume three. Khyungchen Aro Lingma (1886–1923) was the visionary who revealed the Aro gTér; Ngak’chang Rinpoche is recognised as the incarnation of her son, Aro Yeshé.
- ↑ Aro Lingma and ’a-Shul Pema Legden, in the lineage history of the Aro gTér. The child was Aro Yeshé.
- ↑ Ngakpa Rangdrol Takshar, a blacksmith ngakpa of the Aro Gar, said to be an emanation of Pema Lingpa (1450–1521).
- ↑ Quoted by Ngakpa Chögyam in Rays of the Sun. Kyabjé Künzang Dorje Rinpoche was one of his root teachers.
- ↑ Zangs mdog dpal ri, the Glorious Copper-Coloured Mountain, the pure land in which Padmasambhava is said to reside.
- ↑ dad pa, usually translated “faith” or “devotion”.
- ↑ Kyabjé Künzang Dorje Rinpoche to Ngakpa Chögyam, who had said he might teach better if he were more like Aro Yeshé. Reported in Goodbye Forever, volume three.