Traveling in Bardo

Ann Tashi Slater: There’s always a possibility for new insight when we are in between spaces like that, when we have a kind of emptiness, and emptiness not in the sense of nothing, but in the sense of a kind of open possibility. One way that it’s thought of is like if you had a blank page in front of you. So as a writer, for me, if I have a blank page in front of me, that’s a state of possibility where anything can happen, and I can arrive at new perspectives and create something new. 

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Ann Tashi Slater. Ann is a writer and Tricycle contributing editor based in Tokyo. Her new book, Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World, explores how Tibetan Buddhist teachings on bardo, or in-between states, can help us navigate change and transition with wisdom and creativity. In my conversation with Ann, we talk about the legends surrounding the bardo teachings, her own experience of illness and how it paralleled the bardo journey, how what we pay attention to determines the nature of our reality, and how The Tibetan Book of the Dead can teach us how to live. So here’s my conversation with Ann Tashi Slater.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with writer and Tricycle contributing editor Ann Tashi Slater. Hi Ann. It’s great to be with you.

Ann Tashi Slater: Hi James. Thanks so much for inviting me on.

James Shaheen: So Ann, we’re here to talk about your new book, Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World. So to start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Ann Tashi Slater: The book is a combination of family history, memoir, and Buddhist philosophy, and it is about, very basically and simply, how we can live well in a world of impermanence, in a world where everything changes and nothing lasts forever, including us. What inspired me to write it is I’ve actually been writing about these topics for many years now, and researching it, writing about it, publishing about it, talking with people about it, and so this seemed like a really great way to bring it all together into one book.

James Shaheen: So to give some background, could you tell us a bit about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Bardo Thodol? What is bardo, and how does the Bardo Thodol serve as a guide through the bardo experience?

Ann Tashi Slater: Bardo basically means between state or the between. In Tibetan Buddhism, it is the time between death and rebirth. It’s also the time between birth and death, and it’s any stage of suspended reality, actually. It could be when you’re ill, for example, or you have an accident. It’s not necessarily a negative thing. It can also be when you’re on a trip, for example, or something like that. And the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol, is from the 8th century and is a guide to navigating bardo.

One of the really interesting things as I’ve become familiar with it over the years is that it’s actually intended for both living in the dead. I always thought it was for the dead, whatever that exactly meant. I wasn’t sure, because if people are dead, in what ways is it benefiting them? But I saw this when my grandmother died, my Tibetan grandmother, and I went to her funeral in Darjeeling. What happens is the lamas or the monks sit next to her body and read from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And so the idea is that they’re guiding the dead person from death to the next birth, to rebirth, through that passage. And at the same time, they’re guiding the living—us who are listening to the prayers—through our own kind of bardos. It could be, for example, the bardo of the end of one life and the beginning of another. In this case, for example, it’d be the end of our life with her because she’s gone, and so helping us to see how we might come to terms with that. And at the same time, you might be thinking about other things in your life that have come to an end and perhaps you haven’t really thought about or faced, and so in that way, it can be very much of a guide as well for the living.

James Shaheen: It can be as simple as losing your job and not yet having a new one in that in-between period. Is that right?

Ann Tashi Slater: That’s right. It’s very much related to what we think of in the West as denial, where something has come to an end and we refuse to see that. And so you mentioned about a job, and it could be that your job has actually come to an end for you, or lost meaning, but you’re still in it and you’re still doing it, and if people say, “Well, do you think this is really the right job for you?” you say, “It’s OK, maybe it’s just kind of a slow period,” or whatever, when in fact maybe it’s very distant from what you care about and what your passion is. And in that sense, you’re spinning your wheels or wasting your time.

James Shaheen: Right. So there are many legends surrounding the bardo teachings, which are considered terma, or treasure texts. So can you tell us about the legends of how the bardo terma were unearthed and the story behind what is now called the Tibetan Book of the Dead?

Ann Tashi Slater: Yeah. For the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the legend is that Guru Rinpoche, who is also known as Padmasambhava, composed it, meaning he dictated it to his consort Yeshe Tsogyal, who transcribed it, and then he directed that it be hidden, and it was hidden, according to legends, in caves and in mountains. Some of my favorite hiding places are in the sky and in dreams and in the minds of disciples who weren’t born yet in future generations. And of course, that all sounds very fantastical, but the idea is that this wisdom would carry forward in the future, like how you and I are talking about it now, and in that sense, it could come forward so it could be discovered. It didn’t mean that you would hike up to some mountain and dig it out with your shovel but rather that if you had the right frame of mind, it was there to be revealed to you or discovered.

James Shaheen: Mmhmm. So your great-grandfather played a part in publishing the text. Can you tell us about that?

Ann Tashi Slater: What happened was the editor of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the first translation, was a man named W. Y. Evans-Wentz. He was from Trenton, New Jersey, and he made his way to, well, many places in the world, but one place is Darjeeling, and he came to Darjeeling in 1919. He was very interested in translating the Bardo Thodol. Of course, there are many versions and texts and so on, but the manuscripts he had acquired, he wanted to have translated. And so I don’t actually know, and I don’t know if the story was known after my great-grandfather died, of how they actually met. But in any event, my great-grandfather was chief of police in Darjeeling at that time, and so he and Evans-Wentz met, and my great-grandfather gave him a letter of introduction to a lama in Sikkim, in Gangtok, who was a translator. And then Evans-Wentz, I love this story. He took the letter and on this rainy morning, he walked from Darjeeling to Sikkim with this letter in his pocket, and he met Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup in Gangtok, and then together they began translating. Well, Evans-Wentz didn’t speak Tibetan, so Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup would translate and then Evans-Wentz would edit. And so they would meet every morning over these endless cups of tea in Sikkim. And that’s what happened. And then one may wonder, of course, how did it go from there to Oxford University Press, right? So that was 1919. How did this get published in 1927? And what happened was Evans-Wentz took it to England, and then essentially that was the introduction to this book. That was the first translation. And the book in that translation and subsequent ones has sold over a million copies. So I guess in that sense, you know, the legend, I mean, Guru Rinpoche’s wish, has come true, right? It’s carried down through the generations, and people have found in it what they have found, whatever they see that has helped them.

James Shaheen: Well, it was very influential in how people saw Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. But in any case, you say your great-grandfather had great faith in the bardo teachings and in Guru Rinpoche, or Padmasambhava, in particular. Can you tell us about his near-death experience? How did his faith in the Bardo Thodol, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, save his life?

Ann Tashi Slater: It is a great question, and it’s a great story. I heard this story from my grandmother. What happened was he was riding down from Tibet to India after a mission in Tibet in the early 20th century, and he and his party were caught in an avalanche. Many of them, including my great-grandfather, were buried along with their pack animals. He was buried under the snow, and he started praying to Guru Rinpoche. He was a very devout Buddhist, and he prayed to Guru Rinpoche, and he was holding his prayer beads and he thrust his hand up through the snow and he said, “Save me, Guru Rinpoche, save me.” He was waving the prayer beads back and forth above the surface of the snow, and so some of the men who were still above ground saw him and pulled him out.

The way that this relates to what we’re talking about is that I think the central lesson of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and of the bardo teachings, or one of the central lessons, is to accept reality but not give up. And so for him, the reality that he had to accept was like, “This is really bad. This is really bad, and I have very little time to do something before I suffocate.” And so it’s very much about taking action, right? And if he had been, for example, we were just talking about denial. If he had been in denial and said, “You know, this isn’t that bad, I’ll be out soon, and I’m just going to like chill, as it were. I’m just going to relax here,” he would’ve died, right? And if he had done what we often do when the reality we’ve known comes to an end, which is that we wish it hadn’t and we long for the reality we had, he could have spent his time daydreaming and saying, “Why can’t I just be riding along on a sunny morning on my way back home to Darjeeling?” Again, then he probably would’ve died. And so what I find so moving was that he put into action the teachings of Guru Rinpoche, which is to accept your situation and then take action.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you write that the Tibetan Book of the Dead was “not only a religious text but a manual for everyday existence that guided his thoughts and actions.” So this is something he lived by, your great-grandfather.

Ann Tashi Slater: Yes, yes, very much so. Very much so. And so it’s an interesting thing because again, if he had just—I mean, I put “just” in quotation marks, but if he had just prayed, he would’ve died as well. He had to actually do something, you know what I mean? So if he had just stayed under the snow where nobody could see him, then he wouldn’t have survived either. And so this is one of the stories my grandmother loved to tell, which is about how actually his faith in these teachings had, in an extremely practical way, saved his life.

James Shaheen: So, Ann, you say the Tibetan Book of the Dead speaks to our urge to seek greater meaning in life, or in the words of Evans-Wentz, it helps us “not to fritter away in the worthless doings of this world the supreme opportunity afforded by human birth.” So can you say something about that? I like that quote.

Ann Tashi Slater: Yeah, I write about it in the book as this idea that actually there’s no time to waste. We live as if we’re immortal, and we think, “Oh, I’ll do it tomorrow,” whatever it is.

James Shaheen: I’ve never said that before.

Ann Tashi Slater: I haven’t either, but I know some people do. [laughs] One of the things I talk about in the book is the Tibetan sky burial. My grandmother used to tell me about the sky burials that she saw in Tibet when she was there in the 1920s and how you see the body is being chopped up into pieces and the vultures are coming to take away the different pieces of the body and the lamas are praying. She said that throughout her life, Westerners would ask her about this custom and say, “Isn’t it barbaric and horrible?” And she said, actually, no. She said that she found it very inspiring because it was a reminder that actually there is no time to waste.

That is very much also what the bardo teachings are about, is that we think it’s better, like why should we spend time while we’re alive thinking about death? You know, who wants to do that? You know, it’s just like we want to have a good time. But that awareness of death actually allows you to have a better life and to live more fully. And so what Evans-Wentz is saying about not frittering away time, it’s basically speaking to that tendency that we have. It’s all too human to put things off, to put things off and to think that we’ll do it some other time.

You know, one of the things I talk about is Proust, who was of course always one of my heroes and also wrote a lot about time, was asked by a newspaper once if the cataclysm came, if the world was going to end, what would people do? And he says that people would say, “Oh, I’m going to visit the new galleries of the Louvre, and I’m going to go to India, and I’m going to throw myself at the feet of Miss X.” And then the cataclysm doesn’t come, he said, and then we fall back into our usual ways. We don’t go to India and we don’t throw ourselves at the feet of Miss X. And the Dalai Lama says that too. The Dalai Lama says that we never know. We might die tonight, so do what’s important to you so that you won’t have regrets.

James Shaheen: Mmhmm. You know, you also note that the bardo teachings frame between states as transformative spaces. So can you say more about the transformative power of liminal states?

Ann Tashi Slater: The transformative power has to do with this idea of the between. The way I talk about it in the book is in two ways. One is about the idea of caves, and the other is about the Japanese idea of what is called ma. It’s an empty space. Well, the cave obviously is an empty space. For example, when I was in Darjeeling once and I was doing research for a book, I set up an interview with these lamas, with these monks, and I went to talk with them and they were gone. And I said to the guy there, “Where have they gone?” He said, “Oh, they’ve gone to the cave.” And I said, “Oh.” I didn’t really understand what that meant. What it meant was that they had gone on retreat to the south of India until the spring, and they were going to be in a cave, right? And so that idea is that, in their case, literally, they’re in a cave meditating, finding new perspectives in that space.

And then in the Japanese idea of ma, it means a space where something can happen. It could be like a moment of silence in conversation, where you have a moment of silence, and in that silence, some other kind of understanding might arise or some other kind of perception might evolve. There’s always a possibility for new insight when we are in between spaces like that, when we have a kind of emptiness, and emptiness not in the sense of nothing but in the sense of a kind of open possibility. One way that it’s thought of is like if you had a blank page in front of you. So as a writer, for me, if I have a blank page in front of me, that’s a state of possibility where anything can happen, and I can arrive at new perspectives and create something new.

I talk about Alexandra David-Néel, who was a French Buddhist explorer, an amazing woman actually. She traveled through Tibet and so on, and she spent time in a cave. One of the things I talk about is that we have kind of voluntary and involuntary times where we are in between states and where  there’s a possibility for insight. So voluntary might be that you go into a cave and you go on retreat for six months or two months, or whatever it is. And then involuntary would be something like the bardo of illness. You know, we don’t choose that, but we’re thrust into it. So for her, for example, she went into the cave willingly, voluntarily, and she hated it.

James Shaheen: It’s like Montaigne, who found that being in solitude wasn’t so easy.

Ann Tashi Slater: That’s right, because you’re like, “Oh, here I go, you know, I’m going to have all these insights,” and she’s like, “Oh, this is terrible.” But what’s interesting is that by the end of that period, she was enthralled, because she had had all these new insights and new perspectives. And the involuntary would be, for example, I write also about an illness, a very serious illness I had, where I was in the hospital for six weeks. And that was, of course, very involuntary. But I really saw a lot of new things and understood a lot of new things from that experience that I would not have if I had not been thrust into that.

James Shaheen: Right, I’ll ask you about that in a minute. But, you know, there’s a funny irony here. You say that a fundamental part of the bardo journey is realizing that you’re dead. Can you say more about this stage and our reluctance to acknowledge endings?

Ann Tashi Slater: Yeah. It is a funny thing because I remember when I first heard that, I was like, what? How can you realize you’re dead if you’re dead? And what it means is that in the Tibetan belief, it takes us up to four and a half days to realize what’s happened. And so my grandmother always said this. She said that the dead person hovers. She said that he or she hovers around the altar room calling to the weeping family members saying, “I’m over here, why are you so sad? What’s going on? What the heck is going on here?” And then at some point they look in a mirror and there’s no reflection, or they look where they’ve just walked and there are no footprints, and it dawns on them what’s happened.

And so the idea is that, and again, it goes back to what I said about, let’s say you have a job that you’re unwilling to admit is no longer suitable for you, or let’s say that your marriage actually ended a long time ago, but you’re still in it, right? And so those are examples of hovering around, where you’re actually dead in the belief of going through from death to rebirth, you’re dead. But also in life, we can be dead in that sense. My grandmother used to say that. She’d be like, “Oh, that person’s more dead than alive,” that you’re just sort of going through the motions and not really facing the reality of your situation.

James Shaheen: Well, you mentioned denial earlier, so denial that a relationship is dead or a job is dead because then you would have to actually deal with it if you admitted it, and likewise, the person between death and the next life is in a kind of denial that they’re gone, you know?

Ann Tashi Slater: Right. And one of the stories I heard from my grandmother’s time in Tibet was she said at one of the funerals they went to, the lamas could see that the dead person was trying to get back into his corpse, which I find to be a fantastic metaphor.

James Shaheen: I’ve tried crawling back into my corpse before.

Ann Tashi Slater: How’d it go?

James Shaheen: It didn’t work out.

Ann Tashi Slater: Yeah, it doesn’t work out, right? It’s this incredible metaphor for our clinging, you know, that we cling, and of course the great irony is that we’re clinging to something that is lost, where there’s nothing there. You know, it’s over.

James Shaheen: Right, you note that accepting change is essential to our survival, and in order to move forward, we have to face this truth and let go of whatever we’re clinging to that no longer exists, and that’s the great lesson here for the living. So what are some of the rituals that facilitate this letting go? You mentioned the ritual of cutting strings at your grandmother’s funeral, for instance.

Ann Tashi Slater: At my grandmother’s funeral, there was a ritual where they tied a string to her thumb, and her end of the string was black and our end of the string was white. We had to hold the other end, and then the lama took this small knife and cut the string. And so that’s one of the rituals to help her let go, but also to help us let go.

And then I was really shocked at first that the family was invited or expected to light the funeral pyre. That really surprised me because in America, you know, my American grandfather had died previously, and there was an open casket and they had put makeup on his face and we kind of filed past, and that was the extent of it, whereas here her body was taken down to the cremation ground behind a monastery in Darjeeling and put on the pyre. My mother was first. She lit the pyre and then handed me the flaming stick, and then I had to light it. And then we watched my grandmother’s body burn. That is a tremendous non-attachment ritual. It was very moving. You know, I thought it would be upsetting, but it wasn’t. It was very moving. It was this unbelievably beautiful day in Darjeeling, and she was cremated at a monastery called Ghoom, and Ghoom is the mistiest place. I don’t think I had even ever seen the monastery in its entirety because it was always shrouded in mist. And on this day it was totally clear. There was not a cloud in the sky. And it was very moving because she died at a hundred, and she had spent a hundred years of her life in this town, and when she died, her body was burning facing toward Kangchenjunga, which is the Himalayas, the mountains toward Tibet. And there were prayer flags next to the pyre that were blowing in this beautiful breeze over the tea gardens. You know, the smoke was blowing and it felt just very right as a way to say goodbye to her. And she would’ve been the first one to say, you know, when it’s time to go, time to move forward, it’s time to go. And so she was not attached at all in that way. And so for us, that kind of ritual, the pyre and the cutting of the string, was very helpful.

James Shaheen: You know, you talk about practices to prepare us for letting go to understand impermanence better, and you quote the philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who I mentioned earlier, who had a difficult time getting used to solitude, like we all do, and he wrote, “To practice death is to practice freedom.” So how do you understand this quote, and what does it look like to actually practice death?

Ann Tashi Slater: Yeah. It’s an interesting idea, right? Because in his essays, which are an important part of the book, he talks about the old Egyptian custom, where in the middle of feasting and drinking and merrymaking at some kind of party, they would bring in a corpse. They would bring in a mummy just to remind people.

James Shaheen: You know, like you do at dinner.

Ann Tashi Slater: That’s right. We just did that the other night. That’s right. And that this would be again, just to remind people, and again, it might seem very morbid, but in fact it was a way of reminding people to live fully and to really embrace life. And so this idea of practicing death, in my case, I had the chance actually to, as I just talked about, light my grandmother’s pyre and sit next to her body. The prayers went on for days in her house, and we were sitting next to her body. But most of us aren’t going to do that, right? It’s not something that comes up. And that’ll probably be the only time I do it, because that hers was one of the very last traditional Tibetan funerals I think that will ever take place. But the idea of practicing death is just to start noticing, for example, and this is what Montaigne talks about, when a tile falls from a roof, or a horse stumbles, you might think, “Oh, what if that was death itself?” And I’ve actually practiced this myself, and it’s pretty interesting because you can, like anything, I think you actually can get used to it in a good way. And so for example, I’ll think, “Oh, this is the beginning of a trip I’m taking.” And at the end, I’ll take a moment and I’ll be like, “This is the end of this trip,” whereas normally we don’t mark things necessarily in that way. And so it can be that, or it can be thinking about it sometimes in meditation, but it doesn’t mean you have to be a meditator, but just reflecting. For example, sometimes I’ll reflect on my grandmother’s house, and I go through her house room by room, and I look at all the things that she wore to the night dances at the Gymkhana Club and the thangka scroll paintings of the Buddha’s life and all these things that are there even though she’s not. And that, again, is a reflection on death, but death in the sense of impermanence. And sometimes I even think, like think for a minute about who you were thirty years ago compared to who you are now, right? It’s different. You’re different. And so that also is a kind of reflecting on change, on the change that takes place. And I think that even a few moments of that gets us used to it. And that’s why the Dalai Lama says he meditates on death every day, and again, not in a morbid way, but he says it’s like anything else—if you practice it, it would be like a tornado drill or something, except most of us get aren’t going to get caught in a tornado, but we’re definitely going to die. Not just that we’re definitely going to die, but we’re definitely going to experience endings. Do you know what I mean? And so it doesn’t have to mean we’re going to die, but different things: A relationship will come to an end. We might lose our parent. We might have a child, which means our pre-child life is over, whatever it is. I mean, it’s happening all the time.

James Shaheen: You know, like Pico Iyer, whom we’ve also interviewed, and I believe he’s how we met, I think at Asian Society, we met through Pico Iyer. Like him, you talk about how living in Japan, there are constant reminders of impermanence, and you mentioned tornadoes. I think you would think more in terms of earthquakes and cherry blossoms.

Ann Tashi Slater: Here, yes. It is remarkable how many earthquakes there are here, and fortunately, most of them are just small shaking. But I think Montaigne would find those to be excellent reminders because it’s like when he says whenever a horse stumbles or a tile falls, well, whenever the earth shakes or you see the light swinging on the ceiling, it reminds you. And also Japan is really remarkable in that way, where there’s a real awareness of impermanence in the way that we’re talking about, in a good way, and that’s part of awareness of it. You mentioned the cherry blossoms, which I talk about, and so the cherry blossoms, it depends on the variety, but there are some that really only last a week and they’re just beautiful. And it’s, again, a metaphor for us: We’re born, we have these beautiful lives, and we die. But awareness of their fleeting nature is considered here part of what makes them so beautiful. And so there’s this idea of beauty and sadness. Beauty and sadness being intertwined is very strong in Japan. So it’s really filled with all these reminders. For example, there are always things being torn down. It’s not like in the US where you might move into a hundred-year-old house or something like that. Here, if we sell our house, or when we leave the house that we live in here, it’ll most likely be torn down and a new one will be built. And shrines, there’s a very famous one called Ise Shrine that every twenty years is torn down and rebuilt. And I find it paradoxical because on the one hand it’s an acknowledgment of impermanence, and it’s also an acknowledgment of the unchanging truth of impermanence. And so that’s the one thing that we know.

James Shaheen: You know, when we talk about practicing death, part of that is cultivating attention, and you say that the room where the lama’s chanted by your grandmother’s body was the embodiment of focused attention. Can you say more about that?

Ann Tashi Slater: That was my grandmother’s altar room. Yeah, it was very much because it was such a beautiful room and everything was always in its place and everything was taken care of every morning and every evening. So the offering bowls would be filled with water every morning, and she would light incense. If I was there, I would do it with her and we would light the butter lamps. And then in the case on the top of the altar were statues of Guru Rinpoche, the coming Buddha, and then there were photographs of the dead relatives and there were some thangka scroll paintings. So it was all just beautifully, not just beautifully arranged, but with this incredible care and attention that was paid. And also, because every morning and every night she said her prayers there, and prayer again, whether or not one prays, or whether or not one is religious, is a matter of taking time for focused attention, something which she did. And so it always felt like that to me. And then of course, when she died and her body was laid out there, the tremendous focused attention of the lamas as they read the prayers from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There’s always somebody with you, so day and night they read these prayers as her companions to guide her into and through bardo. It’s not about being distracted or thinking about other things you have to do. It’s just like that moment, that place, that is what is important and that’s what’s happening.

James Shaheen: You know, Ann, more specifically, you focus on how the bardo rituals can help cultivate attention to our interdependence and how they demonstrate how what we pay attention to determines the nature of our reality. How so?

Ann Tashi Slater: The question about interdependence and how it determines the nature of our reality is that often these days people say, “Oh, we don’t pay attention. We’re distracted, we don’t pay attention.” And I would say we do pay attention, but it’s really just what we are paying attention to is the question. So are we paying attention to our daydreams or things we’re not happy with or whatever? And so, the idea of interdependence comes up. So, for example, the Dalai Lama talks about this in a way that I think is very moving and very true, that of course we all want to be happy, right? Everybody wants to be happy, and everybody deserves to be happy and to have happiness, and when we don’t pay attention to other people’s welfare or well-being, and we don’t see ourselves as connected to other people, that is actually a kind of failure. He doesn’t put it this way, but it’s a kind of failure of attention in a kind of ethical way. So we might fail to pay attention within our personal sphere, you might fail to pay attention to your children or to your relationship or to your job or whatever it may be. And then the larger manifestation of that would be failing to pay attention to things that are in society, for example, not having compassion for other people, or kinds of injustice in society, or people who are less fortunate, so that kind of attention there. I think there are two kinds of attention, and so there’s the one where we have our personal sphere, and then there’s the larger attention that we pay to society and what’s going on in society. And that’s related to interdependence, right? I think that what happens sometimes is that we think we’re too busy to do that, and you’re like, “I can barely keep my stuff together. How can I get out there and do a bunch of stuff in society?” But in fact, what this can end up doing is making us feel isolated, because there’s a lot of talk these days about people feeling disconnected. So if we shift our attention, for example, to other people and to other people’s welfare and to what’s going on in a larger societal way, in fact, that benefits us as well. And if we don’t do that, we can end up sort of feeling like we’re living in a bubble.

James Shaheen: Right. I mean, service does break our isolation.

Ann Tashi Slater: Right. Exactly. But in order to do that, in order to do that service, you would have to look up. We have to look up from our own stuff and go, “Oh, I see, something is happening over there.”

James Shaheen: Yeah. You pay attention to what’s needed in the moment, right?

Ann Tashi Slater: Right. Exactly.

James Shaheen: You know, Ann, you mentioned your own illness, and we kind of passed over that, but one of the most powerful chapters in the book focuses on your experience of illness, and I’ve discussed this with you before, but you discuss illness as its own form of bardo. So can you tell us about your experience of sudden illness and how it paralleled the bardo journey?

Ann Tashi Slater: What happened is I woke up one day, and actually I was about to take a trip. I was about to leave for the US from Tokyo, and I woke up the day before and I was very, very, very ill. I had terrible joint pain. I had a terrible headache. I had a fever of 103, nausea, and so on. And so I was diagnosed with food poisoning, which turned out not at all to be what it was. So anyway, to make a very, very long story short, I ended up in the ER and was admitted, and I was in the hospital for nine days and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I had been traveling in Indonesia, and they thought that I might have dengue, I might have malaria. They did all these tests, and there was no conclusion. And so finally, one of the doctors rushed in one day, and he said that one of the blood cultures had developed and I had something called endocarditis. Endocarditis is an infection of the lining of the heart. And he said there was so much bacteria in my heart valve that he was surprised I hadn’t had a heart attack and I had to stay in the hospital to have IV antibiotics and so on. And so that was dire. And then things got much more dire, because it looked like it was responding really well. The bacteria was declining, you know, getting reduced because of the antibiotics. And then they said that it reduced like 40 percent or something like that. And my husband and I were like, “That’s incredible. That’s so great.” I was looking around like, “I’m going to pack up my stuff and be out of here like the next day.” But it turned out what happened was that it had broken off and gone to my brain. The bacteria had gone to my brain, and so I had an abscess in my brain, and they really thought that I wasn’t going to make it, which fortunately they didn’t tell me. I found that later. So what happened, I mean, this was really a classic bardo, like the involuntary kind as I was saying earlier, where you’re just suddenly ripped out of the life you know and thrown into this place where you have no idea what’s happened or what’s going on or what’s going to happen. And I had two small children, so that period for me was very, very, very difficult. But I really learned a lot from my time. I had plenty of time to reflect on things in the hospital. And one of the things that I learned from that was that I always had thought that the idea is that, you know, there’s this idea of impermanence, right?

James Shaheen: Yeah, you say that you were thrown face-to-face with impermanence and groundlessness in a very visceral way.

Ann Tashi Slater: Right, exactly. And so I always thought that the idea was, so for example, in Buddhism, the Buddha talks about suffering. And I thought it was suffering that we endure because of impermanence, right? So old age, sickness, death, we feel all the sadness it brings us when it happens to other people or happens to us. And what I understood from this experience that I had with endocarditis was that actually it was the suffering that we bring upon ourselves because we don’t accept it. So it wasn’t the actual impermanence, but it was the struggle. You know, it’s that we struggle against impermanence, but it’s like struggling against the setting sun and trying to keep it from setting. And so when we accept that this is the nature of life, it’s a much different experience of life, I found.

James Shaheen: Well, I think of your grandfather. You know, you accept it, but you didn’t give up. And at your grandmother’s funeral, one of the lamas taught you something about faith. So how have you come to understand the faith that your grandfather showed, or perhaps the faith that you developed during this illness?

Ann Tashi Slater: Yeah. His experience, I thought a lot about it in the hospital because he was suddenly thrown into the bardo of being buried in the avalanche, and he was sort of entombed in the snow, and I was in this white cubicle in the hospital with these white curtains around me and the white ceiling, and that’s all I could see. So it was eerily similar in some ways to what happened to him. And I really thought about this idea of faith, because you kind of feel like, “Oh, there’s nothing I can do,” or “This terrible thing has happened to me and I’m just trapped here.” And so I really thought about him and it really helped me a lot, and that story, I hadn’t thought about it for a really long time, and then it came back to me. The story about the avalanche really helped me to feel like I was not giving up, I wasn’t going to give up hope, because really, at some point the doctors really just didn’t know what to do, and they were talking about brain surgery and heart valve replacement and all these things. And so that really helped me. And then I remembered that when I was in Darjeeling, when my grandmother died, they did this obstacle-removing ceremony for me and the other relatives, because it’s believed that when someone dies, it can create problems or obstacles for the surviving relatives. And so they have an obstacle-removing ceremony where the lama comes and does prayers and so on to benefit you and to protect you, for protection. Of course, I was there at the ceremony, but I didn’t know what exactly it was about or what was going to happen. And the rinpoche who was there said, “It’s OK. There’s nothing you have to do exactly. You can have faith or not have faith, and that this will still benefit you.” And I thought about that when I was in the hospital as well. So what I realized is that I was thinking of the obstacle ceremony in a very literal way, like removing some obstacles from my path. And I thought, of course, when I was in the hospital with endocarditis, that that was the obstacle that had to be removed, right? In other words, remove that sickness so I can be well. And then at some point after I left the hospital, it occurred to me that the ceremony was less about removing obstacles in some kind of magical way, like illness, than about defeating inner obstacles, and the inner obstacles would be this idea of for me, or for my great-grandfather to spend time longing for the life that you no longer have, so that would be an example, so if I spent my time saying, “Why did this happen to me? Why me? Why did this have to happen, and why can’t I go back to the beautiful life I had here in Tokyo with my family and my work and so on?” But what I realized reflecting on the obstacle-removing ceremony was that the obstacle that it helped me to overcome was this inner obstacle of longing for something, for example, that was already lost.

James Shaheen: Well, I can read something from the book that kind of gets at this. You write, “Impermanence is the way of the world. We can live happily ever after not by striving to fortify ourselves against change—an impossible goal that makes us miserable—but by accepting it as the essence of our beautiful, brief time here together.” So how was this the case for you, and how is accepting impermanence in this way also life-changing?

Ann Tashi Slater: It’s life-changing, and it is the case for me because partly, you know, you hear it all the time where we just have a different appreciation for things when we experience something like a near-fatal illness. And so for me, partly, it just gave me an incredible appreciation and gratitude, well, first of all, that I lived. I couldn’t believe it. That was like a miracle.

James Shaheen: Especially with small children.

Ann Tashi Slater: Oh my gosh. Yeah. And so just gratitude for that, and then awareness in a way that it wouldn’t matter how many times somebody told you, “Things can end at any time,” you would be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” but when it actually happens, I was younger then, and I really hadn’t experienced very much. We don’t when we’re young, or a lot of us don’t. Of course, some of us do. But, you know, I had not really experienced it. I mean, my family was still alive. My parents were alive. My grandmother had died, but not too long before, but she was 100. And so for me, I was in my forties, and I was like, “This is not supposed to happen.”

James Shaheen: And yet it does.

Ann Tashi Slater: And yet it does, you know, and we see it all the time. And also, one of the things I realized is I thought, “Well, it’s not going to happen to me because I can’t die before my time.” And in the Tibetan way of looking at things, there is no such thing as before your time, because when you go is when you go. And so it’s helped me, that experience as well as all the writing and research and so on that I have done and I’m doing around this bardo idea, to really accept that and to notice it. I mean, that doesn’t mean, it’s not like, “Oh, no problem.” It’s still strange. And I think partly impermanence that we see in the small ways we talked about, like the end of the day or snow melting or that kind of thing, but also I think Freud said that we find it impossible to imagine the world without us in it. And it is a really odd idea because, I think, “Oh, I’ll still be here, or my consciousness will still be here perceiving things.” But no. And so I wouldn’t say, for me anyway, it’s possible to completely get my head around that, but I certainly am more accepting and comfortable with impermanence than I was.

James Shaheen: So one last question, Ann. You say that the Tibetan Book of the Dead shows us that we can be the artists of our own lives. So can you say more about what it means to be the artist of one’s own life?

Ann Tashi Slater: It means that we are able to, to a very large extent, determine our path with the choices we make. And so often we feel buffeted around by things happening—you know, this happened or that happened and there was nothing I could do about it. But that we actually can, you know, it’s the idea of karma actually, which we often think of as fate in a common understanding of it, but it’s actually action. And so in this case, action means activities of body, mind, speech, so physical activities, what you do; mind, what you think; speech, what you say. And so with our activities, we determine to a large extent, obviously not if there’s an earthquake or something like that, but I mean in our lives, you know? And so what I do tonight or what I did this morning or what I do tomorrow morning will greatly influence what happens next for me, whether it’s the next day or the next year and so on. And so in that sense, we’re always, if you will, designing our lives with the choices we make: we are in this relationship, or we take this job. or in an even more minute way, we decide to say this or not say this to our partner at breakfast, or whatever. And then all of those little decisions, you know, I see this with my children, you know, when I was raising my children, these moments of inflection, these kinds of inflection points come up and you can see a clear choice: You can say this or you can do this, or you can go in this direction or that direction. And in that one moment it might not make a huge difference, but cumulatively it makes a really big difference. And so that would be in my own path as well as in my relationship with, for example, my children.

James Shaheen: Yeah. I mean, that’s all true for where we have agency, and where we don’t, then acceptance becomes central. Is that right?  

Ann Tashi Slater: Exactly. Yeah. Beautifully said. It’s that pairing, right, of what we can control and what we can’t control.

James Shaheen: Yeah. Well, I’ll complete the thought with a quote from you “I’d returned from death and would do all I could to practice what I discovered about how to live.” I thought that was very nice. Anything else before we close, Ann?

Ann Tashi Slater: No, not that I can think of. I just really appreciated this conversation a lot and appreciate the chance to share some of these thoughts with you and with the listeners.

James Shaheen: It’s been wonderful. So Ann Tashi Slater, it’s been a great pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Traveling in Bardo, available now. Thank you, Ann.

Ann Tashi Slater: Thank you, James.

James Shaheen:  ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Ann Tashi Slater. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!