Guru Rinpoche's Body Dissolves into Light

He announces it a week before it happens.

Padmasambhava gathers the assembled students — his consort Yeshe Tsogyal, the king, the monks who have received the teachings, the ordinary people who have come to the courtyard of Samye because they heard something was happening and could not stay away. He gives teachings for three days. The teachings are comprehensive: the completion-stage practices, the pointing-out instructions, the details of what will happen in Tibet after he is gone. He speaks the way a person speaks when they know there is a finite amount of time and intend to use it completely.

Yeshe Tsogyal stays closest to him throughout this period. She has been his closest student and his consort, the woman who preserved and transmitted more of his teachings than anyone else, who carried them through Tibet on foot, who hid terma in cliff faces and lake bottoms at his direction for centuries of future discovery. She knows what is coming. She makes herself useful in every way she can think of, which is the behavior of someone who cannot bear to be still.

He does not tell her the grief is wrong. He tells her the grief is appropriate and that she will be fine.

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On the morning of the departure, a horse-colored cloud appears above the cliff at Zangdok Palri.

This is not a natural cloud. It has a texture and a luminosity that witnesses describe as consistent with what is called in the texts ‘od kyi rol pa — the play of light. It is, in other words, not a weather phenomenon but a welcome: the vehicle by which the transformation will be accomplished.

Padmasambhava stands at the cliff’s edge. He is wearing his ordinary practice clothes — the brocade robe and the hat with its distinctive shape, the khatvanga at his shoulder. He turns to face the assembled students. His face has an expression that the accounts struggle to characterize: it is neither happy nor sad; it is what remains when both happiness and sadness have been completely understood and neither is required.

He speaks the last instructions. They are brief: practice; do not be deceived by the appearance of obstacles; call to me when you need me and I will come. He has made a specific promise about the twenty-fifth day of each lunar month — that on these days he is especially accessible to practitioners, that the distance between his location and the practitioner’s is not the distance between two points in space.

He steps off the cliff.

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There is no fall.

The cloud receives him. Or more precisely: the distinction between the cloud, the body, and the light dissolves. What the witnesses describe is a gradual process of expansion — the visible form becoming larger and simultaneously less opaque, the way a sugar crystal dissolves in water: it is there, it is present, and then it is inseparable from the medium. The rainbow colors appear in sequence: first the whites and blues at the edges, then the reds and golds at the center, then a moment in which the whole sky above the cliff has a quality of saturation, of luminosity.

Then nothing unusual. The sky is the sky. The cliff is the cliff.

A faint smell, present for a day — described variously as flowers, as incense, as something that has no name in the inventory of ordinary scents.

Yeshe Tsogyal weeps. King Trisong Detsen weeps. The monks and the ordinary people who had crowded into the courtyard weep. The weeping is not complicated — it is grief, plain and appropriate, the grief of people who have lost something irreplaceable from their immediate vicinity.

But the promise has been made. The twenty-fifth day of each lunar month, Padmasambhava returns to the human world. The terma texts are still in the rocks, waiting for the tertöns who will find them in future centuries. The vows he extracted from the Tibetan spirits still bind them to protect the Dharma.

He has not gone away. He has gone into the place where distance does not apply. Every practitioner who calls to him since that morning at the cliff has received, the tradition insists, an answer. Not always the answer expected, not always in the form expected — but an answer. The cloud is still there if you know how to look for it.