VAJRAYANA practitioners of all levels of training are encouraged to cultivate some form of “death readiness,” the specific form being dependent on the meditative and yogic maturity of the individual.
The most basic form of this training is known as phowa, which can casually be translated as “blast off.” Every school of Tibetan Buddhism has several hundred manuals on phowa applications, with different sects often having their favorites. There also is a tradition of the professional phowa master visiting the home of a deceased practitioner and assisting them in the transference process. That said, I will here only address phowa from the perspective of a personal training.
The practice is mentioned by Karma Lingpa in his Bardo Thodol, published and translated in 1927 as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in which he writes about the necessity of making a choice in the hours leading up to one’s death. One option is to die while applying the higher tantric practices and then engage in bardo yoga, consciously plunging into the afterlife bardo with the objective of achieving enlightenment there. This is a dangerous option, because a single distraction can lead to one being propelled out of the bardo and into whatever rebirth is in vibrational accord with the negative response to the specific bardo vision being mismanaged. The suggestion is that a response characterized by anger can result in a rebirth in one of the many hell realms, a response characterized by attachment or craving can propel one into rebirth as a disturbed spirit, and so forth.
The safer option is to engage in a
