‘Strive after the Good before thou art in danger, before pain masters thee and thy mind loses its keenness.’—Kulārnava Tantra, I. 27.
The thought of death suggests two questions. The first is: ‘How may one avoid death, except when death is desired as in “Death-at-will” (Ichchhāmrityu)?’ The avoidance of death is the aim when Hathayoga is used to prolong present life in the flesh. This is not, in the Western sense, a ‘yea-saying’ to ‘life’, but, for the time being, to a particular form of life. Dr. Evans-Wentz tells us that according to popular Tibetan belief no death is natural. This is the notion of most, if not of all, primitive peoples. Moreover, physiology also questions whether there is any ‘natural death’, in the sense of death through mere age without lesion or malady. This Text, however, in the language of the renouncer of fleshly life the world over, tells the nobly-born that Death comes to all, that human kind are not to cling to life on earth with its ceaseless wandering in the Worlds of birth and death (Sangsāra). Rather should they implore the aid of the Divine Mother for a safe passing through the fearful state following the body’s dissolution, and that they may at length attain all-perfect Buddhahood.
The second question then is: ‘How to accept Death and die?’ It is with this that we are now concerned. Here the technique of dying makes Death the entrance to good future lives, at first out of, and then again in, the flesh, unless and until liberation (Nirvāṇa) from the wandering (Sangsāra) is attained.
- ↑ As to the title of this Foreword, ‘The Science of Death’, see Thanatology, by Dr. Roswell Parks, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, April 27, 1912.
