What remains when the story falls silent.

In the Tibetan tradition, teachers begin with what turned them on to the Dharma—the teachings. Then come the masters they met along the way, and how those masters carry the lineage. When the personality of a guru or teacher disappears, the lineage continues. That is really where the teaching comes from.

The ancient texts speak of those who died with the fruit—or, more precisely, the signs—of enlightenment: seated in meditation, passing the last breath consciously, the body remaining in meditation. In this tradition, the elements—earth, water, fire, air and space—are understood to dissolve through practice and purification. I think of them as little subroutines; as a practitioner, I experience them as living beings in the astral realm that can be freed. The accounts describe a dissolution different from the ordinary coarseness of a body rotting. You can find these accounts, and the academic debates around them, online.

These are living cultural understandings, alongside accounts of perfected yogis with extraordinary relationships to food and sleep. They challenge the habits of thought we bring to them. In the Tibetan teachings as I understand them, ignorance means not recognizing ourselves as beings of light, instead taking this temporary simulation of a body—which ages, becomes ill and dies—as all that we are. That is samsara.