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Delog: Journey to Realms Beyond Death
This vivid personal account of a journey through the "bardos" and "pure realms" was recorded by 16-year-old Dawa Drolma of Eastern Tibet, a renowned female lama and a "delog"-one who crosses the threshold of death and returns to tell about it. What she saw during her five days of travel through other realms engendered in her a limitless compassion for sentient beings.
- GenresBuddhism
162 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1995
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June 1, 2014
It's a little hard to know what to make of this odd and intriguing short book. A "delog" is a shamanic visionary in the Tibetan cultural sphere who has spontaneous trances in which they visit other worlds - particularly the heaven and hell realms. This particular book contains several brief testimonials of one Dawa Drolma, describing her experiences touring other realms, in which she saw the virtuous rewarded, and especially the non-virtuous punished, and was sent back by the Lord of Death to give crude didactic instructions to the living.
It's easy to see why teachings of this kind are characterized by Tibetan literati as teachings "for beings of lesser capacity." At essence, they land as very crude moral fables on a par with reading Dante's "Commedia," rewritten for naughty children, and with the moral of each canto clearly spelled out. For a reader of essentially European sensibilities, I also found it odd that the author is so consistently self-aggrandizing, speaking often of the praise she receives from the goddess/bodhisattva Tara and various other enlightened beings. I'm not altogether sure that's commonplace in this kind of visionary autobiography.
Most perplexing to me, though, is what relationship these testimonials have, if any, to actual experiences undergone by the author. That these visions are presented in crude literary terms, there can be no doubt. They are full of stock descriptions and expressions, and leave the reader with questions like "If this is truly an experience that you had, how do you know that there were 108 skeletons outside the doorway? Did you count them? And how did you know the sacred pool contained all eight virtues, instead of seven or six?"
So the reader may have their doubts. On the other hand, certain aspects of the experiences here described correspond closely to shamanic experiences reported over an enormous geographical region, and well-described by Professor Eliade in his "Shamanism." We have the spontaneous stupor of the adolescent, the magical flight, the initiation, and the tutelage that could just as easily be elements of a story told in Siberia or among the Native Americans of British Columbia.
So there's that too. Difficult to know what to make of all this.
As an aside, I was motivated to read this book, which had languished on my shelf for years, by Miguel Asin's classic study on Muslim and Sufi sources for Dante's Commedia. Asin takes as principle evidence for his theory the fact that prior to Dante, we don't have anything like a guided tour of the moral cosmos in Europe, except in Muslim Spain, where it's a major literary theme.
I was curious to see if this conception is perhaps an archetype of universal distribution, and for evidence I recalled this book, and confirmed that it does in many respects correspond to the basic structure of Dante's Commedia, despite being vastly inferior as a literary work. But we do have a tour of the ordered cosmos, which is divided into levels, organized by punishment and reward, and based around a cosmic mountain. Drolma's Tara is not so different from Dante's Beatrice.
Of course, Muslims have been in Tibet for a long time, so there's that on top of it. Some scholar could probably have a field day digging into the Tibetan sources to see where it comes from. I don't believe it is of Indic origin, though I may be mistaken.
It's easy to see why teachings of this kind are characterized by Tibetan literati as teachings "for beings of lesser capacity." At essence, they land as very crude moral fables on a par with reading Dante's "Commedia," rewritten for naughty children, and with the moral of each canto clearly spelled out. For a reader of essentially European sensibilities, I also found it odd that the author is so consistently self-aggrandizing, speaking often of the praise she receives from the goddess/bodhisattva Tara and various other enlightened beings. I'm not altogether sure that's commonplace in this kind of visionary autobiography.
Most perplexing to me, though, is what relationship these testimonials have, if any, to actual experiences undergone by the author. That these visions are presented in crude literary terms, there can be no doubt. They are full of stock descriptions and expressions, and leave the reader with questions like "If this is truly an experience that you had, how do you know that there were 108 skeletons outside the doorway? Did you count them? And how did you know the sacred pool contained all eight virtues, instead of seven or six?"
So the reader may have their doubts. On the other hand, certain aspects of the experiences here described correspond closely to shamanic experiences reported over an enormous geographical region, and well-described by Professor Eliade in his "Shamanism." We have the spontaneous stupor of the adolescent, the magical flight, the initiation, and the tutelage that could just as easily be elements of a story told in Siberia or among the Native Americans of British Columbia.
So there's that too. Difficult to know what to make of all this.
As an aside, I was motivated to read this book, which had languished on my shelf for years, by Miguel Asin's classic study on Muslim and Sufi sources for Dante's Commedia. Asin takes as principle evidence for his theory the fact that prior to Dante, we don't have anything like a guided tour of the moral cosmos in Europe, except in Muslim Spain, where it's a major literary theme.
I was curious to see if this conception is perhaps an archetype of universal distribution, and for evidence I recalled this book, and confirmed that it does in many respects correspond to the basic structure of Dante's Commedia, despite being vastly inferior as a literary work. But we do have a tour of the ordered cosmos, which is divided into levels, organized by punishment and reward, and based around a cosmic mountain. Drolma's Tara is not so different from Dante's Beatrice.
Of course, Muslims have been in Tibet for a long time, so there's that on top of it. Some scholar could probably have a field day digging into the Tibetan sources to see where it comes from. I don't believe it is of Indic origin, though I may be mistaken.
Displaying 1 of 1 review