We in the West have more than great
difficulty hearing without a smile the kind of thing Mantak Chia has regaled us
with in his recent "bodhisattva" legacy of Taoist books written for
our drive-up-window eyes. He tells the kind of "story," which may
have been his, of the disciple who goes to the cave where his master is sitting
having "left" his body to join the "immortals." The
disciple goes there periodically to "dust the old guy off." Speaking
very generally it seems to me that we in the West "verify"
experiences by traditions of rational experiment and observation while Eastern
adepts learn by augmenting received experiences of processes a Western
reductionism could not even find. This does not mean that the entire
armamentarium of intuitively perceived "meridians," chi/ki/prana
energies, etc., has to be blindly accepted. (In my own experience, much of it
has been "experienceable" in such practices as body work and Tai Chi
Ch’uan.) In a similar way one could say that "scientists" and
"artists" do "exactly" the same thing using different
methods of immersion in concrete reality.

Sometimes you have to read a book
as if the Afterword/Epilogue were the Introduction. It is in the former that
disciple Blackman speaks of the experience of creating this book from the
experience of gurus in her tradition, the dying of her father, and her own
dying by metastasized lung cancer. More immediately she finds the motivation
for the book in coming to terms with her own illness (p. 147): "I had,
unknowingly, been busy compiling a training manual for my own ‘graceful
exit!’" This bleeds into the death of her master. "The medical reason
Swami Muktananda (affectionately called Baba by his followers) left his body
was a heart attack," she says (p. 143). Finally (p. 148),  the woman who took over from
"Baba" advised her thus: "Die a little bit each day in
meditation." All of the masters in this book go "somewhere" such
that between disciple and master some sort of communication is often said still
to take place. It is of this kind of "leaving," often with
"lights" and "earthquakes," depending on the degree of the
realization of the masters, that Blackman seems to be speaking as an insider.
But the question never clearly and concretely answered is What exactly is it of
"he or she" that "leaves" the "body?" Apparently all
the Eastern folks out-Cartesian-ed Descartes long before he lived. That such
things "occur," how they occur, when they occur, and that they occur
more than once in a meditating (quasi-comatose?) adept becomes possible only
within traditions of believings, whether Judeo-Christian, Muslim, Hindu,
Buddhist, or Taoist.

As an important part of the presentation this book
makes much use of the notion of "karma," among other terms it usually
defines, which has perhaps come down to the street as "What goes around
comes around." You get to build up "merit" or "credit"
(in your "account") toward the next "reincarnation."
Students of the "Harappan" culture of India remind us that outside
conquerors imposed the caste system with the result that even in a series of
generational lifetimes traditional status in a subcaste could not be changed.
Surely, karmic "ideology" offered
"Curry-in-Nirvana-When-You-Pyre" hopes to those who’d see none down
here where chalk lines would even be drawn on the floor in restaurants to
separate subcastes according to what the sociologist Max Weber called
"anti-commensalism."

More than most books, with its more
than 100 reports of the deaths of "Eastern" masters, this one
underscores the notion of "perennial philosophy," in general that at
very least "mystical" traditions have a common core. The specific
reports of these livings and dyings reveal an extraordinary range of unique
personalities. One, called "Gadge (p. 133)," got that name from the
broken earthen pot he wore on his head like some latterday Quixote wearing a barber’s
brass basin; another, a great Shaivite teacher (p. 132) "walked into a
cave followed by twelve hundred of his disciples, and none of them ever walked
out again." Even Ghandi’s dying is mentioned (pp. 119-20). There are too
many masters to comment on, even if limited to favorites, in this buffet of
gurus, so I restrict myself to Suzuki Shosan (pp. 122-3), who was a samurai who
became a monk in his 42^nd year. Each occupation, he says, has its
"way." Like so many, he tells us to look death in the eye, that that
is the "entire doctrine."

These are not perfect people. Some
are petulant, call those who don’t understand "stupid," and one, the
Sixteenth Karmapa (p. 126) combines the typical compassion and care with an
apparent popish hierarchical sense, as his bowing assistant seems to reveal in
a photo (p. 127). We recognize a brotherhood with the Stoic school in many of
the recurrent attitudes. And in my case I ended up writing my own 11-syllable
"haiku" "death poem" in acknowledgement of the outside cats
I abandoned on the west coast while vacationing on the other.

© 2005 A. P. Bober 

A. P. Bober has studied a
psychology spanning Skinner and a humanistic-clinical view based on existential
phenomenology and had been a PhD candidate in a substantive yet philosophic
European-based sociology including the "critical" view.  His
teaching augmented courses in group theory/"small-group developmental
dynamics" (lab) while introducing "sociology of knowledge" and
"issues in biological anthropology," with publications in the first
two fields.  Currently he is writing a book on mystical experience as
metaphorically tied to neurophysiology.

Categories: Grief