The-Tibetan-Book-of-Living-and-Dying

THE UNIVERSAL PROCESS 353tion of Rigpa, the nature of mind. Nothing less will bring usthat calm and blissful freedom from our own habitual tendenciesand conflicting emotions that we all long for. The teachingsmay tell us that this freedom is hard to win, but the factthat this possibility really exists is a tremendous source ofhope and inspiration. There is a way to understand thoughtand emotion, mind and its nature, life and death completely,and that is to achieve realization. The enlightened ones, as Ihave said, see life and death as if in the palm of their hand,because they know, as Tsele Natsok Rangdrol wrote: "Samsarais your mind, and nirvana is also your mind; all pleasure andpain, and all delusions exist nowhere apart from your mind."And this clear knowledge, stabilized through long practice andintegrated with every movement, every thought, every emotionof their relative reality, has made them free. DudjomRinpoche said: "Having purified the great delusion, the heart'sdarkness, the radiant light of the unobscured sun continuouslyrises."THE ENERGY OF DELIGHTI often think of what Dudjom Rinpoche wrote: 'The natureof mind is the nature of everything." I wonder if this threefoldprocess the bardos reveal is true not only, as we discovered, ofall the different levels of consciousness and of all the differentexperiences of consciousness, both in life and death, but alsoperhaps of the actual nature of the universe itself.The more I reflect about the three kayas and the threefoldprocess of the bardos, the more fertile and intriguing parallels Ifind with the innermost vision of other spiritual traditions, andmany seemingly very different fields of human endeavor. Ithink of the Christian vision of the nature and activity of Godas represented by the Trinity, of Christ the incarnation beingmanifested in form out of the ground of the Father throughthe subtle medium of the Holy Spirit. Could it not be at leastilluminating to envision Christ as similar to the Nirmanakaya,the Holy Spirit as akin to the Sambhogakaya, and the absoluteground of both as like the Dharmakaya? In Tibetan Buddhismthe word tulku, incarnation, actually means Nirmanakaya, theconstantly reappearing embodiment and activity of compassionate,enlightened energy. Isn't this understanding very likethe Christian notion of incarnation?I think also of the Hindus' threefold vision of the essence ofGod, called in Sanskrit satcitananda (sat-cit-ananda), which