– Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche
Body of Light or the Tibetan jalus is also known as the Rainbow Body. Certain realized beings (practitioners of Longde and Managede levels of Dzogchen) achieve the transformation of their ordinary bodies into a Body of Light at the time of death. In this process, the physical body dissolves into its natural state, which is that of Clear Light. As the elements of the body are purified, they transform from their gross manifestation (body, flesh, bone, etc.) into their pure essence as the five colors: blue, green, white, red, and golden yellow. As the body dissolves into these five colors a rainbow is formed and all that remains of the physical body are fingernails and hair.
All the methods of the various paths, those of the sutras and all the levels of tantra, as well as those of Dzogchen, lead to Total Realization. This is the surpassing of conditioned existence in the manifestation of the primordial state, which endows the individual with a perfect understanding of the functioning of reality and all its phenomena, and a perfect Wisdom with manifold capacities. But the sutras explain that, by applying their particular methods, it will take several kalpas, or eons to attain realization. And although the methods of the lower tantras are quicker, it will still require a very long time to accomplish the goal through them. The higher tantras and Dzogchen, on the other hand, both enable one to reach total realization in a single lifetime. The Visions of Longde and of the practice of Thodgal—the final and most secret teaching of Dzogchen—allow the practitioner to rapidly undo the knots of conditioned existence and attain the most absolute and total type of realization, which culminates in the complete dissolution of the physical body in the essence of its elements, which is light.
To accomplish this realization, Semnyid, which means the ‘nature of the mind’, also called the internal ying, is integrated with Chodnyid, which means the ‘condition of existence’, also called the ‘external ying’. That they are both called ying (meaning ‘space’; dhatu in Sanskrit) shows that from the beginning they are of the same nature.
The Dzogchen teachings are based on the individual — and that of the macrocosm—the universe—are the same and, therefore, when one fully discovers and manifests one’s own nature, one is discovering and manifesting the nature of the universe. The existence of duality is nothing but an illusion, and when this illusion is undone the primordial inseparability of the individual and the universe is fully discovered and the functions of that inseparability manifest; that is to say, through the integration of the internal and the external ying, the Body of Light manifests. If the other five Ngonshes are signs of development on the Path, this is the ultimate expression of the Fruit.
The Jalii (in Tibetan) or Body of Light, realized through the practice of Dzogchen is different from the Gyulii, or Illusory Body, realized through the practices of the Higher Tantras. The Gyulii is dependent on the subtle prana of the individual, and thus, since prana is always considered to be of the relative dimension in Dzogchen, this Gyulii is not considered to be Total Realization. The Jalii, or Body of Light, itself, is a way of manifesting realization that is particular to the masters who have carried the practice of the Longde or of the Mennagde to their ultimate level, and with only very short breaks in the lineage, it has continued to be manifested right up to the present day.
The Rainbow Body means that our physical body disappears because it enters into its real nature of the five elements. Those five elements are the five colors. So even if the physical body is disappearing, the shape and everything is maintained as the five colors.
People have represented the idea of the Rainbow Body by painting thangkas of Guru Padmasambhava as a cluster of rainbow colors. That is not accurate. With the Rainbow Body, the whole form remains—the nose, eyes, and so forth—but normal people cannot see it, because everything disappears into the elements. We cannot see it because we don’t have the capacity to see the nature of the elements. If we are a little developed and have more clarity or realization, then we can see the Rainbow Body. In this case, the sign of the Rainbow Body is that the hair and nails remain because these are impure aspects of the physical body. The physical body enters into a pure dimension, but what remains is that impure aspect.
Another way other than the ordinary Rainbow Body is the great transference of consciousness called phowa chenpo. According to some historical accounts, Garab Dorje manifested the Rainbow Body in that way. Other accounts say he manifested the ordinary Rainbow Body. In the biographies, it is said that Vimalamitra and Guru Padmasambhava manifested the Great Transference, which means they did not even manifest death.
In the normal Rainbow Body, they first manifest death, and afterward, they dissolve the physical body. For example, if you put a small piece of ice in the sunshine, the ice slowly becomes smaller and smaller as it is melting. In the same way, our physical material body melts into the nature of the elements, but its form remains. In this case, it is necessary to first manifest death, and then it takes a week, sometimes less, to manifest the Rainbow Body.
The teacher of my two teachers Changchub Dorje and Ayu Khandro, Nyagla Pema Düddul, told his students, “Now I am dying. At the end of this month I will die, so come and we will spend it together.” The students went there and did many days of Ganapuja for purifying the relationship between teacher and students, between student and student. If they had created some problem of Samaya, they purified with the Ganapuja.
Then, in the end, he said he wanted to go to the sacred mountain where he had discovered many terma teachings. He wanted to go there to die. Many students said, “Oh, please don’t die. Remain; we need you.” He said, “This is my time. When the time comes, everyone has to go; so I have to go. It is more important that you collaborate with me and follow the teaching.” They went to the mountain and he asked them to put up his small tent, the same kind of tent that the practitioners of Chöd use. He asked them to sew him inside because otherwise, the mountain animals could enter. Then he asked them to go back to the Gar, the place where they resided, and do Guruyoga and other practices.
After returning, they did practice for seven days, and then they saw many rainbows and other interesting signs on the mountain. When they went back to the mountain, they opened the tent, and all they could see were the remains of hair and nails. Hundreds and hundreds of people came to see, and Nyagla Pema Düddul became very famous. Although when he was alive he had very few students, after his death, everyone claimed to be his student.
One of my uncles, Ogyen Tendzin, was a very good Dzogchen practitioner and a student of Adzom Drugpa, and also one who practiced much Yantra Yoga, contemplation, and integration, realized the Rainbow Body. When I was very small, I spent some months in a retreat place, and I remember he was always sitting and doing meditation. I didn’t understand much about what he was doing because I was very small, but I would try to get him to play with me because I was bored. Sometimes he would sit naked in the cave, and I would beat him and then run away.
Later, before I left Tibet, I went and spent some weeks with him with the particular purpose of learning Yantra Yoga well. I asked him many questions because there were many parts I didn’t know well or didn’t remember. I also received some teachings. I received my first Dzogchen teachings from my uncle when I was seven years old. He gave me the whole series of Dzogchen Upadesha teachings from the Longchen Nyingthig.
He also manifested the Rainbow Body at the time of the Cultural Revolution. He was living in Yidlhung, in Derge (East Tibet), at the house of a very famous noble family, where he remained until the end of his life. In this family, there was a man, also a Dzogchen practitioner, and a student of my uncle, who rose very high in a Chinese office. My uncle was living on the roof of their very big palace, always doing retreat. As this man was my uncle’s student, he was doing service to him. My uncle lived there for many years and was living there during the Cultural Revolution. When at one point the revolutionaries seized him, some Tibetan functionaries of the Chinese office who had faith in my uncle found a way to secure his freedom.
Once my uncle was free, he didn’t know where to go or where to live, and so the official said he would find him a place where the nomads stay in the winter. There was a small house, and my uncle lived there. That functionary went every weekend to visit him, bring a little food, and check upon him. One day he and another Chinese official knocked on the door and it didn’t open. They thought maybe my uncle had fled. Knocking down the door, they saw his robe on the bed; but as he was apparently not there, they looked inside the robe and found a small body inside. They knew that Ogyen Tendzin was no longer alive, but had become a small body. They shut the door and went away. We didn’t find out what had happened after my uncle died until 1978. Then we received news from Derge that after two or three days, some Chinese functionaries had reported that Togden had died, and had left only hair and nails. The Rainbow Body still exists even today—it is not only something from ancient times.
In Dzogchen Longde many teachers have manifested the Rainbow Body. In later times, Dzogchen practitioners were mostly doing the practice of Dzogchen Upadesha; Longde remained only a transmission. For example, when I received transmission of Dzogchen Semde and Longde, there was only the lineage of transmission, but no one was doing the actual practice of Longde or Dzogchen Semde. It had disappeared. Everybody had become engaged with Dzogchen Upadesha.
In ancient times, Vimalamitra manifested the Great Transference, and his student Nyang Tingdzin Zangpo manifested the Rainbow Body. However, after Nyang Tingdzin Zangpo, the realization of the Rainbow Body did not occur for four or five generations. Although we do not know very precisely, it seems there had been some problems in the transmission.
I know many other such stories, but there is a particularly interesting one that my uncle Togden told me. In 1952, in the area of Tibet that I come from there lived an old man who, when he was young, had been a kind of servant or assistant to a Dzogchen master for a few years, and who had thus naturally heard many teachings. But for the rest of his life, he had just lived very simply, cutting mantras into stones for a living. He lived in this way for many years, and no one took much notice of him or thought he was a practitioner. But then one day he announced that he was going to die in seven days’ time, and sent a message to his son, who was a monk, saying that he wanted to leave all his possessions as an offering to the monastery where his son lived. The monastery spread the news far and wide that this man had said that he wanted to be left closed up for seven days to die, and since everyone understood the significance of this, many people came and the whole thing became a public event. There were representatives of all the various Buddhist schools, from the great monasteries and even members of the Chinese administration, who at that time were all military personnel. Thus, when they opened the room inside which the man had been locked for seven days, there were many people present. And what they saw was that the man had left no body. Only his hair and nails, the impurities of the body, were left.
My uncle, the yogi, came to see me at my father’s house just after he had witnessed this event, and his eyes were full of tears as he told me about it. He said it was a terrible tragedy that none of us had known enough to recognize that this seemingly ordinary person, living so close to us, had actually been a very great practitioner, from whom we could have received teaching. But this is how it is with practitioners of Dzogchen. There is nothing to be seen on the outside.
When I visited Nepal in the spring of 1984 to give teachings and to practice at Tolu Gompa, a mountain monastery close to the Tibetan border, near Mount Everest, where Padmasambhava practiced, and at the cave of Maratika where Padmasambhava and his consort Mandarava realized the practice of long life, I had news of what became of my uncle Togden. This news came from a Tibetan who had just arrived in Kathmandu from Tibet, where he had been a government official in the region where Togden lived. It seems that my uncle continued to live in his isolated cave in retreat for many years after I left Tibet, but eventually, like many other similar yogis, he was made to come out of retreat in the period of the Cultural Revolution, when it was decreed that such persons were exploiters of the workers because they were provided with food even though they themselves didn’t do any work. My uncle was more fortunate than many others and was only placed under house arrest, rather than having to face a public trial and possible serious punishment.
The man I met in Kathmandu had, among many other responsibilities, been responsible for the continuing custody of Togden, whom he allowed to live in a small, wooden house built on the flat roof of an ordinary townhouse in the provincial capital, a house which belonged to a Tibetan family who provided for my uncle’s needs so that he was able to continue his retreat as before. Later, because this official vouched for him, my uncle was allowed to go and live in the country under less strict supervision. There he was allocated an isolated house which the official regularly visited to keep an eye on him.
As I recounted earlier, one day, when the official arrived there, he found the house closed up. When he managed to get in to it, he found Togden’s body on his meditation couch; but the body had shrunk to the size of that of a small child. The official was very worried: how was he to explain such a thing to his Chinese superiors. He was afraid they would probably believe that he was aiding Togden’s escape in some way, and so he went at once to inform them of what had happened.
But when he returned to the isolated house a few days later with all the high-ranking officers of the regional government, Togden’s body had disappeared completely. Only the hair and the fingernails were left. The official’s Chinese superiors were completely bewildered and anxiously asked for an explanation, but the Tibetan official could only say that he had heard that ancient texts spoke about yogis realizing what was called a ‘Body of Light’, although he had never expected to see such a thing himself.
This event made such an impression on him that he developed a strong interest in spiritual matters, and as soon as he could, managed to escape on foot into Nepal where he felt he would be free to receive teachings and practice, and where I met him. I was deeply moved to hear of my uncle’s realization. Knowing how serious a problem he had had with various mental disturbances in his early life, I did not expect him to achieve so much in one lifetime. His example shows what is possible for every individual.
To use the metaphor of the mirror once again, the realization of the Body of Light means that one is no longer in the condition of a person who is reflected in a mirror and who dualistically sees his or her own reflection in it, but one has become established in the essential condition of the mirror so that one’s energy as a whole now manifests in the same way that the energy of a mirror does. Knowing how one’s own energy manifests as Dang, Rolpa, and Tsal, one is able to integrate one’s energy completely right through to the level of actual material existence. This is accomplished either through the visions of the Longde that arise as a result of the practices of the four Da, or through the practice of the Four Lights that bring about the arising of the Four Visions of Thodgal, which develop in very much the same way as the visions of the Longde develop.
The first of these Four Visions of Thodgal is called the ‘Vision of nature of reality, and the second vision is the further development of the first. The third is the maturation of it, and the fourth is the consummation of existence. If, while alive, one has entered the third level of these visions, and to say one has ‘entered’ means that there are certain signs that this is so, then, when one dies, one’s body slowly disappears into the light. Instead of decomposing into its constituent elements in the usual way, it dissolves into the essence of its elements, which is light. The process may take longer than seven days to happen. All that remains of the physical body are the hair and fingernails, which are considered to be its impurities. The rest of the body has dissolved into the essence of its elements. This is the realization that Garab Dorje, and, more recently, many other masters, a few of whom I have mentioned as examples, achieved.
A practitioner who manifests this realization cannot really be said to have ‘died’, at all, in the ordinary sense of the word because he or she still remains spontaneously active as a principle of being in a Body of Light. The spontaneous activity of such an individual will be directed for the benefit of others, and he or she is actually visible to someone in a physical body who has sufficient clarity.
But a practitioner who perfects and completes the fourth level of the Thodgal visions does not manifest death at all, but while still living gradually becomes invisible to those who have the normal karmic vision. This level of realization is called the ‘Great Transfer’, and this is the realization that Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra manifested. Essentially, the realizations of the Great Transfer and the Body of Light are one and the same; the only difference is that those who attain the Great Transfer do not have to go through death in the clinical sense in order to move from manifestation in the material plane to manifestation in the plane of the essence of elements. These two modes of realization are particular to the practice of Dzogchen.