Subsequently, the deceased becomes aware that he is ‘dead’. But as he carries over with him the recollection of his past life, he, at first, still thinks that he has such a physical body as he had before. It is, in fact, a dream-body, such as that of persons seen in dreams. It is an imagined body, which, as the Text says, is neither reflected in a mirror nor casts a shadow, and which can do such wonders as passing through mountains and the like, since Imagination is the greatest of magicians. Even in life on earth a man may imagine that he has a limb where he has none. Long after a man’s leg has been amputated above the knee he can ‘feel his toes’, or is convinced that the soles of his feet (buried days before) are tickling. In the after-death state the deceased imagines that he has a physical body, though he has been severed therefrom by the high surgery of death. In such a body the deceased goes through the experiences next described.
In the First Bardo the deceased glimpses the Clear Light, as the Dharma-Kāya, called by Professor Sylvain Lévy the ‘Essential Body’. This, which is beyond form (Arūpa), is the Dharma-Dhātu, or Matrix of Dharma-substance, whence all the Blessed Ones, or Tathāgatas, issue. This is the body of a Buddha in Nirvāṇa. The second body, or Sambhoga-Kāya, has such subtle form (Rūpavān) as is visible to the Bodhisattvas, and is an intermediate manifestation of the Dharma-Dhātu. In the third body, or Nirmāṇa-Kāya, the Void, or State of Buddhahood, is exteriorized into multiple individual appearances more material, and, therefore, visible to the gross senses of men, such as the forms in which the manifested Buddhas (for there are many and not, as some think, only one, or Gautama) have appeared on earth. If the deceased recognizes the Clear Light of the First Bardo, he is liberated in the
discovered to lay the ghost until an old witch-doctor declared that the ghost craved whisky and beer, to which it had long been habituated when in the flesh and which were the real cause of its separation from the fleshly body. The people, although religiously opposed to intoxicants, began purchasing bottled whisky and beer of the same brands which the sahib was well known to have used, and, with a regular ritual for the dead, began sacrificing them to the ghost by pouring them out upon the grave. Finding that this kept the ghost quiet they kept up the practice in self-defence.—W. Y. E-W.
