Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/37

Rh The vital current at length escapes from the place where it last functioned. In Yoga, thought and breathing being interdependent, exit through the Brāhmarandhra connotes previous activity at the highest centre. Before such exit, and whilst self-consciousness lasts, the mental contents are supplied by the ritual, which is so designed as to secure a good death, and, therefore (later on), birth-consciousness.

At the moment of death the empiric consciousness, or consciousness of objects, is lost. There is what is popularly called a ‘swoon’, which is, however, the corollary of super-consciousness itself, or the Clear Light of the Void; for the swoon is in, and of, the Consciousness as knower of objects (Vijñāna Skandha). This empiric consciousness disappears, unveiling Pure Consciousness, which is ever ready to be ‘discovered’ by those who have the will to seek and the power to find It.

That clear, colourless Light is a sense-symbol of the formless Void, ‘beyond the Light of Sun, Moon, and Fire’, to use the words of the Indian Gītā. It is clear and colourless, but māyik (or ‘form’) bodies are coloured in various ways. For colour implies and denotes form. The Formless is colourless. The use of psycho-physical chromatism is common to the Hindu and Buddhist Tantras, and may be found in some Islamic mystical systems also.

What then is this Void? It is not absolutely ‘nothingness’. It is the Alogical, to which no categories drawn from the world of name and form apply. But whatever may have been held by the Mādhyamika Bauddha, a Vedāntist would say that ‘Being’, or ‘Is-ness’, is applicable even in the case of the Void, which is experienced as ‘is’ (asti). The Void is thus, in this view, the negation of all determinations, but not of ‘Is-ness’ as such, as has been supposed in accounts given of Buddhist ‘Nihilism’; but it is nothing known to finite experience in form, and, therefore, for those who have had no other experience, it is no-thing.

A description of Buddhist Mahāyāna teaching which is at once more succinct and clear than, to my knowledge, any other, is given in the Tibetan work, The Path of Good Wishes of Samanta Bhadra, which I have published in the seventh