In the year 1998, in an obscure corner of the world bordered on all sides by mountains and cliffs, an esoteric ascetic passed away quietly in deep meditation at the age of eighty. He was well known, loved, and highly respected in his local region, having been well versed in several schools of philosophical and pseudo-theological practices native to the area, and more importantly, for having been a devoted ascetic master who worked extensively with spiritual pilgrims.

His name was Khenpo A Chö, and he died in eastern Tibet. Many attended his funeral, though it was not mobbed with throngs of crowds; for one thing, the region is to this day only sparsely populated, and for another, government authority in Tibet at the time actively hunted and persecuted public displays of religious organization. In the case of a middling ascetic passing, and the foregone conclusion that some amount of regional veneration for the man would occur in its wake, the decision by the local religious to keep his funeral somewhat on the down-low is understandable.

It is what happened after his death, however, that has caused him to be a name sometimes mentioned in paranormal circles an ocean away. The shrine erected for him, according to the region’s custom, contains no body or ashes, and indeed, no relics of the first class, as we would refer to them: nothing that was a part of his person, and this is not because the Tibetans tend to burn their dead. It’s because, after the week of grieving had finished, the body of Khenpo A Chö had disappeared.

The Rainbow Body Phenomenon

Tibetan Buddhism is well known in the west for its single distinguishing characteristic: its face of authority. Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, is the celebrity spiritual leader of the Tibetan people and the person whom most westerns associate as occupying a position analogous to the papacy for Catholics. While this comparison lacks quite a bit of nuance (and, frankly, isn’t even correct to assume in the first place), it nonetheless indicates the general public’s overall knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism outside of its native lands. This is to say: most people haven’t the foggiest idea what Tibetan Buddhism is.

This includes the writer of this article, for what it’s worth.

As it turns out, what we in the West might refer to as Tibetan Buddhism is in fact a blend of several related but somewhat distinct religious, ascetical, philosophical and ritualistic practices. The two of primary importance include the tantrism of the Vajrayana Buddhists who came to the plateau during two periods of proliferation in the middle ages, and Bon, the shamanistic and animistic religion native to the region. Over time, both came to resemble each other as they blended, in addition to the suffusion of the various strains of oriental thought to both Tibet’s west, in India and Persia, and its east, in China.

Sitting more or less at the middle not just geographically, but religiously, is the set of beliefs known as dzogchen. While related to both traditions of Tibetan religious mysticism, it is most strongly associated with Tibetan Buddhism and its Vajrayana antecedents from India. Tiso’s book also makes a lengthy and apparently strong argument for the influence on Syriac (Nestorian) Christianity on its development due to the presence of the Silk Road through and around Tibet. Such strains of Christianity flourished in the early middle ages across Persia and the near East, penetrating as far as China, which Tiso explores in the third chapter.

Like much of Buddhist belief, dzogchen tradition occupies itself with meditative practices and a philosophical approach that resembles self-mastery, though this mastery is framed in the usual Buddhist manner: the simultaneous self-nullification/maximum-fulfillment into the true reality. In the simplest (and reductive) possible terms, much like the end goal of Christian belief is for the soul to get to heaven, the end goal of Buddhist belief is for the soul to realize ultimate reality and, in so doing, ‘break’ the wheel of reincarnation that Buddhists believe trap the soul in the world of phantasms and illusion. In this, dzogchen is not different from other traditions of Buddhism in any sense relevant to Tiso’s book.

What does make dzogchen unique among them, however, is its consideration of the rainbow body. As Tiso explores in the second chapter, dzogchen’s conceptualization has antecedents that can be found in previous Indian Vajrayana strains of Buddhism, but it does not see its full realization until its development in Tibet. Tiso believes this to be the result of the combination and dialogue across the various religious sects that populated the Silk Road, and in particular, the cross-pollination of Christian mysticism into East Asian belief systems such as Buddhism and even Taoism. It seems reasonable that the practitioners of dzogchen, geographically sandwiched between these two worlds, would have become aware of Christian thought as well, particularly any mystical writings that may substantiate or corroborate their understanding of light mysticism.

Put simply, Tiso addresses this at the end of his introduction to the book:

the Christian doctrine of the resurrection merits consideration as a primary source for the notion of the rainbow body as it develops in the dzogchen milieu of imperial Tibet. This is not to say it is the only source, but it does seem to be crucial for the entire development, which is by no means complete in the period before the so-called second diffusion of Buddhism in Tibet (taken to be after 1000, and concluding perhaps in the final contacts between Tibetans and Indian Buddhist panditas in the 1500s). Not only is the bodily resurrection a distinct and emphatically Christian doctrine, it is sustained by claims made by Christian mystics of the Syriac tradition about light mysticism and its effects on the human body-mind complex. These claims are not found in other central Asian mystical traditions, but are attested to by an extensive body of literature datable to the period of the first diffusion of Buddhism in Tibet.¹

The book is less so much about the phenomenon itself and more about the placement of that phenomenon within both dzogchen’s teachings and its history, and how that these are related to the spread of Christian mysticism—specifically its Syriac form—throughout the Far East.

This seems to do little, however, to explain the phenomenon of the rainbow body. What the dzogchen practitioner realizes and what those left behind observe seem to be two different things, and what is observed in a particular yogi’s realization of the rainbow body is, in effect, disappearance and physical dissolution, accompanied by unexplainable phenomena such as the faint sound of pleasant tones, the appearance of many rainbows in the area, and unseasonable or an overabundance of pleasant fragrances or aromas. The latter, which Tiso points out, bears some resemblance to the incorruptibility phenomenon that is well documented by the Catholic Church. When the tombs of both Sts. Zita and Bernadette (and others) had been opened, not only were the bodies of the interred found to be free of expected decomposition, but rather than the smell of death or rot, an unexpected and overabundant scent of flowers was reported by witnesses in both cases. This has been noted in the cases of other incorrupt saints as well.

What Tiso is interested in connecting, however, is not the rainbow body with incorruptibility. Although both require and indicate, within their own systems of belief, great holiness and virtue, these two phenomena couldn’t be more different when considered according to their physical phenomena. Rather, he seeks to connect the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection—and the nature of the resurrected body itself, at least insofar as can be determined by sacred Scripture and deductions made thereof—with the dzogchen tradition of the rainbow body. Moreover, Tiso suggests that the concept of the rainbow body would not exist within dzogchen tradition were it not for the proliferation of Christian mysticism into the Far East.

The Case of Khenpo A Chö

After his introduction, Tiso begins his book with the ostensible manifestation of the rainbow body by Khenpo A Chö. He mentions that his investigation into this event was prompted by his spiritual advisor, who was himself familiar with the rainbow body phenomenon and had heard, through various connections, that a particular mystic had manifested it within the past year. That had been in 1998. by 2000, Tiso was in Tibet.

His first chapter gives a brief summary of Khenpo A Chö’s life, as well as a direct translation of the short memorial biography written by one of his religious brothers. Following this, Tiso includes the field notes of his Tibetan expedition; these are of particular interest not just because of the professional detachment he shows in his observations, recollections, and interviews, but also his brief, personal asides in private judgment over the reliability of the accounts given to him. The chapter concludes with transcriptions of audio taped interviews from several of A Chö’s religious brothers and associates, particularly those who witnessed the bodily dissolution and disappearance.

Of the dissolution itself, little is elaborated upon past what has already been described. Tiso interviews several monks who were close to A Chö, and all offered testimonies consistent with each other. They began to recognize signs of A Chö’s realization immediately after his death and described various other phenomena associated with the manifestation: how his face changed color, the sound of music could be heard outside of his hut, rainbows appeared directly above the building, and unseasonal floral scents surrounded the area. Then, as the week passed, his body—obscured by a funerary sheet—shrank in size until there remained nothing beneath the shroud.

The monks of Tibet did not dwell long on the outward appearances of the phenomenon, however. When Tiso went to visit Lama A Khyug, a longtime friend and colleague of A Chö, the lama spent more time speaking to them about philosophy, interior awareness, and his own manifestation of the rainbow body than he did commenting on A Chö’s death and disappearance. His emphasis on experiential knowledge was of particular note, as it shed light on why those who observed A Chö’s dissolution were, at least by western eyes, somewhat nonplussed by the phenomenon. It was not something that was necessarily out of the realm of ordinary belief for them:

Lama A Khyug frequently emphasized the contrast between bodily eyes (mig) and the eyes of the heart (sems). He also referred to his own mala that he held in his hand, saying, “You can recite many malas of mantras, but it is inner realization that matters.” The message seemed quite clear to me: neither philosophical study nor pedestrian forms of religious practice are sufficient. To realize the rainbow body requires a more advanced form of spirituality that must become an intimate part of the life of the yogin.²

The rainbow body, in theory, is the dissolution of the body into pure light. To reconcile this with materialist physics, chemistry and biology is impossible with the western secular understanding of the mind’s relationship to the body. For the dzogchen practitioners of Tibet, however, proper practice results in proper outcomes; the practitioner “embodies the heroic and extraordinary compassion toward all sentient beings,” and, as a result, “is not confined to a state of pure static consciousness.”³ The result, as Tiso remarks, is that he “abides nowhere and confers compassionate presence everywhere.”⁴ Taken to its extreme, what dzogchen thought posits is that, at least by the means of this particular path toward ‘enlightenment’, the rainbow body is the manifestation of exactly this notion: the body dissolves into pure light in order to ‘abide nowhere’ and exist ‘everywhere’ in order to further the practitioner’s mission of harboring total and absolute compassion toward all living things. More will be noted on this later.

This being said, it is certainly within the realm of possibility that the body of Khenpo A Chö was stolen away at some point, secretly burned or discarded, and that a ruse was played upon what devotional pilgrims had arrived to pay their respects. This seems unlikely, however, given the events attested to by so many witnesses. The reports of rainbows and the music similarly indicate the unlikeliness that the entire event was simply made up.

Mass hysteria, in which many people believe in events or facts that they didn’t witness, isn’t uncommon. Mass delusion, however, in which many people all have the exact same ‘hallucination’, is not something that has ever been reliably documented. One can think of the miracle of the sun at Fatima, for instance, wherein the events described by thousands of onlookers, including journalists who were sent to mock the events (who were unable to do so after their own eye witness to them), are impossible to dismiss as a simple mass delusion. Skepticism can be a healthy inclination to foster, but there’s a difference between questioning events with a belief set mostly open to recoordinating itself around new information, and that of the hardcore skeptic, whose belief set is so rigid that he’ll jump to erroneous conclusions before he’s even finished (or started, in some cases) evaluating the information at hand. As a result, certain monikers are drawn up to dismiss what otherwise cannot be explained within an inflexible belief set. The term ‘mass delusion’, not unlike ‘conspiracy theory’, is exactly such a term.

It’s reasonable to conclude that whatever happened in Khenpo A Chö’s manifestation of the rainbow body, it was not something that involved blatant trickery and manipulation on account of the religious leaders or the funeral organizers. The event itself was too obscure and the danger of attracting attention from hostile authorities too great to warrant immediate assumptions about the claims being fabrications. This is made all the more clear when Tiso recounts the passing of another dzogchen acolyte during his trip. While in northern India interviewing some witnesses to A Chö’s death, word reached that particular monastery that Rakshi Togden, of Bonpo mastery, had also achieved the rainbow body.

This ninety-two-year-old Bonpo monk of the Luphug Gompa passed away in Bachen, Nagchu, in eastern Tibet on January 3, 2001, about forty-five days before our interview with Loppon Tenzin Namdak in Kathmandu. This monk had already predicted the date of his own death. He had been doing spiritual practices from childhood. The body manifested signs of the rainbow body including special sounds, a particular kind of snowfall, birds sitting quietly while facing towards his room, circular and straight rainbows in the sky, and white light in the sky. In fact, these phenomena were continuing on the day of our interview, February 17, 2001.⁵

Tiso goes on to mention something more peculiar even than the phenomenon of the manifestation itself. Just before, he commented on how the rainbow body “does not arise for those spiritual masters who are manifestations of action in the Buddhist sense of the term,” instead arriving only for those “deeply committed to the contemplative path who chose not to perform charitable services on a grand scale.”⁶ As a result, some of what happened in the wake of Rakshi Togden’s death sheds even more mysterious light on the phenomenon itself:

Later we learned that the monk’s nephew decided to publicize the event and actually took a tape measure to determine the progressive shrinkage of the corpse. He then made the two-day journey by car to Lhasa to tell the story to some journalists. When he got back to the monastery, the shrinkage had stopped. To make matters worse, the publicity naturally attracted the attention of the authorities who arrested the nephew and harassed other people as well. Finally, in desperation, the nephew secretly cremated the remains. Now there is no mention of relics, and the whole matter is something of an embarrassment. At the same time, given the negative consequences, one can still make a case for the reality of the paranormal phenomenon in this case. Had there been no paranormal manifestations, the nephew would not have tried to publicize the event.⁷

Not only is the attainment of the rainbow body itself apparently by its nature seclusive, but its publicity over those who achieve it seems to affect how it manifests as a phenomenon after its achiever’s demise. It’s important to distinguish its outward manifestation from its inward one, however, though they are obviously related. Those who achieve it, as Lama A Khyug was keen to both explain and, after his passing, demonstrate, do not always shrink into nothingness, but this is not in any way indicative imperfect or insufficient attainment. According to dzogchen understanding, either one manifests the rainbow body or they don’t. Outward appearances of doing so may vary in the degree to which the body changes, but simply because one monk’s body shrinks to the size of ten inches⁸, or to the size of an eight-year-old’s⁹, or even disappears entirely means only that they did truly achieve the rainbow body. One monk’s attainment cannot be assumed as somehow more perfect than another’s based on the size of his corpse.

Tiso’s first chapter ends with the transcriptions of interviews that several direct witnesses to Khenpo A Chö’s death gave at the end of his trip. Most specifically, with a Bonpo master who, not unlike Lama A Khyug some months beforehand, used the opportunity to speak at length about interior mastery and seeing true reality rather than the specifics of A Chö’s death. From here, the book switches gears; Tiso shifts his focus to an intensely researched study of dzogchen practices and history, which for the rest of the book, entails the study of dzogchen itself, its position with relation to mystical Buddhism, and more interestingly, what influence—if any—Christianity had on its development.

Christian Influences on Dzogchen

At first glance, Christianity and mystical Buddhism could not seem to be more different. Christians believe that men only get to live one lifetime, that they are judged for their actions, that God is both an active sustainer of the world at-large as well as a personable force at work in the life of every man, and of course, that God incarnated as the Lord Jesus Christ who lived at a certain time in history, was murdered and knowingly took on death to atone for the sins of man, rose from the dead, and ascended into Heaven with His resurrected body. Tied up in all of this, but especially in the latter, is the significance of the Eucharist, Real Presence, and by extension, the liturgical practices of what is today called Apostolic Christianity.

None of this is going to sound terribly unfamiliar to readers of The Pillarist. Followers of Vajrayana Buddhism, however, believe in none of these things. The closest point of departure might be a similar sense of one’s actions in life playing a role in one’s afterlife, but this bears only a loose comparison to the Christian sense of final judgment. As for the rest, mystical Buddhism entails reincarnation, has—at best—a convoluted sense of the divine, where any schools of Vajrayana even touch on the subject, and certainly does not believe, at least in any obvious way, that God is a personable force who made Himself known to His creation by way of physical incarnation. Much of mystical Buddhism, not unlike its more scholastic counterparts across the Mahayana branch as a whole, is chiefly concerned with interior psychology and union with the true reality by way, arguably, of a sort of mystical via negativa; this is a far cry from the systematized and coherent sense of theology that Christians are more immediately able to recognize.

And yet, having understood this, the similarities between these two opposites make themselves more apparent. What is God if not the true reality, the super-reality beyond our immediate senses and beyond the world of His creation? Christianity has its own forms of a via negativa, too, both in its scholastic theologies as well as its mystical ones. One cannot help but think of St. John of the Cross or of the desert fathers at Scetis. True, too, is the shared interest in monasticism, dedicated prayers, acute awareness of one’s interior state or life, and, related to all of these of course, their ascetical components, such as the need for some practice of self-mortification, various forms of penance, emphasis on charity and alms-giving, and a recognition that one must harbor some degree of detachment from the world.

How related these aspects are with their intended goals is more mysterious, however. The end purpose of Christian mysticism and asceticism are, of course, the same goals as those found in the Gospels and the New Testament writings: the salvation of souls. In Tiso’s book, this is relevant to the East in how salvation is accompanied by the resurrection of the body—first demonstrated by Our Lord, as well as promised by Him to all at the end of time. “One of the hardest connections to make,” Tiso writes,

is that between the New Testament assertions about the resurrection and an actual contemplative process that involves the believer in some sort of systematic training that might give rise to a specific result. This is what the Nyingma and Bonpo are claiming for the phenomenon known as the rainbow body. There is evidence for bodily transformation connected to saintliness throughout the Christian centuries: resurrection, stigmata, postmortem apparitions, miracles, light phenomena, imperviousness to the elements, incorruption, etc. Still, many people who are only conversant with the New Testament complain that it seems to lack a path, meditation instructions, and skillful means, in apparent contrast to Hindu, Daoist, Jain and Buddhist traditions.¹⁰

Tiso is careful with his wording: he does not assert per se that the dzogchen practices associated with the rainbow body are themselves pathways toward ‘achieving’ a resurrected body before the end of time. Instead, wherever similarities are noted, the rainbow body and the resurrected body are considered as roughly comparable ideas: mysterious and paranormal activity occurring to those who died in a state of tenacious virtue. The cases of those saints whose bodies became incorrupt or who appeared to devotees after death are much easier to explain due to their proximity and practice of the True Faith. Cases such as Khenpo A Chö and the other dzogchen adherents, however, although not identical phenomena, are much harder to put into context with Catholic eschatology.

Tiso does not believe that these similarities are coincidental, nor necessarily the sole result of a common psychical or social need of all men to seek out the transcendental truth. In order to address this, he tracks the spread of Syriac Christianity from the Levant, across Persia to the foothills of the Himalayas, and upward out of northern India and into the Tibetan plateau. This path follows one of the many routes of the Silk Road that connected ancient China first to Rome and later to Christendom and medieval Europe.

Over the years, many historical studies have been conducted to connect Tibetan Buddhism and dzogchen practices to regional esoteric religions, but until Tiso’s book, none—or at least, none for popular audiences—have done so with association to mystical Christianity. Developments in Tibetan practices were always made with reference to, for instance, the Ch’an Buddhism and Taoism of China, the Zoroastrianism of Persia, or, more naturally, the Vajrayana Buddhism of India, among others. The mark left upon the Silk Road by Syriac Christianity is one partially explored by scholars but left in total darkness by the general public.

To help make his case, Tiso references the apparent cross-pollination of Christianity (by way of “the Schools of Edessa and Nisibis, and the Evagrian trajectory,” referring to schools across Persia and Evagrius Ponticus, the hermit) with the Buddhism and Taoism of China contained in the ‘Jesus Sutras’, a collection of paper scrolls written by Eastern Christians and discovered in the Mogao Caves. These contain openly Christian teachings and references, but also

references to the Daoist teachings, such as non-action (wu-wei), and to Buddhist notions of merit, bodhisattvas, compassion, emptiness, imperturbability (as in the Buddha Akshobya), saddharma (the good, or sound, teaching of Buddhism), relative and supreme reality, mindfulness, and many other technical terms typical of Mahayana Buddhism in China.¹¹

This establishes Christianity as an organized presence in China by the Tang dynasty, and possibly even earlier, but moreover, establishes also a regularized use of regional and ‘foreign’ terminology with which to express Christian teaching. It may be necessary to note, however, that whether this diluted the fundamentals of Christian belief is unrelated to Tiso’s study here, as his interest is in the possible affect Christian thought had on the development of the rainbow body in dzogchen belief. Tiso’s work earlier in the chapter establishes Tibetan dialogue with neighboring religious traditions, including those from the area that became areas populated most by Christians at the time, such as where these scrolls were found. It’s not hard to presume that Christianity, either from China or from Persia, had some influence on the religious thinking of Tibet in the early middle ages.

Interreligious Study

For the Catholic reader, one must always tread carefully when traversing the psychosocial landscapes of foreign religions. Tiso’s treatments of interreligious study span nearly the length and breadth of the entire Old World, touching briefly on the shores of France and stopping only just past the foothills of Tibetan plateau in China. There is little doubt that Tiso takes his own religious background seriously, with his references to the Eucharist, his brief treatment of the liturgy and his more lengthy treatment of the Gospels all making it clear that he is not lukewarm in his faith. That being said, however, his definition of Christianity, within the scope of the book, includes those schismatic sects who lapsed into theological heresies back in antiquity.

It is true that Syriac Christianity flourished the areas in which extreme Christian ascetic mysticism arose and developed. One can point to the aforementioned desert fathers at Scetis, for instance, as well as, somewhat tangentially, orthodox saints like the Cappadocian Fathers (whom Tiso mentions), St. Maximos Confessor, and the yet-unidentified monk who wrote under the pseudonym of Dionysius. It’s also true, as Tiso briefly explains, that the Eastern Syriac Church embraced the Nestorian heresy in the first half of the fifth century, which led the Church of the East—whose lands held the totality of Christianity in the areas most concerned in this study—to fall into schism and eventually wilt away.

Nestorianism itself plays very little into the comparative study he puts forward with regard to Christian mysticism and dzogchen practice. Likewise, the focus on this branch of Christianity is only sensible when one considers its proximity to Tibet, its Christian roots, and the time period in which whatever influence took place would have occurred. Still, despite the book’s publication bearing the appearance of one for popular audiences, Tiso writes with the assumption that his readers already have a certain foreknowledge of a few ideas that he talks about. Consider his treatment of the Syriac Patriarch’s condemnation of John of Dalyatha:

In a later homily the author discusses how the vision of the light in the soul leads the contemplative towards a vision of the divine. These and other mystical teachings were condemned in the Synod of 786-87, a summary of which has been preserved in Arabic. One of the purported errors was the teaching on “the creature able to see its Creator.” Another view that earned condemnation was: “If you wish to receive the gift of the Spirit, do not remain faithful to prayer or the Divine Office, but flee to hide yourself in dark places in which you cannot hear even the voice of a bird.” (Dark retreat?) And also: “When someone has attained perfection, he no longer has need of prayer, psalmody, reading, or labor, for he has become perfect.”¹²

Tiso comments that it “would not take a great deal of effort to transmute these Syriac-Christian statements into statements compatible with the earliest texts of dzogchen,”¹³ and while he’s right, it seems to take some considerable effort to transmute them into statements compatible with apostolic Christian thought. Patriarch Timothy seemed to think so, as John of Dalyatha was—rightly or wrongly—condemned for statements such as these.

However, if one actually looks up John of Dalyatha, his posthumous condemnation, and more specifically, the statements in question, it gets quite a bit easier to see what John—and by extension, Tiso—was getting at. The most striking statement is taken from Letter 49 of his correspondences:

As long as the intellect remains in this place [of stillness], O my brother, this state is much better than all the different actions which occur in the soul. And those who are wise say that in this state, food is given in a hidden way to the intellect by the Holy Spirit, and also the body is nourished by it and does not require its usual food. Thus the immersion of the intellect in this state is the same as that of blessed Moses on the top of Mt Sinai. As long as you are in this state, do not desire reading or the office of the psalms, but only keep your intellect in purity—that is, do not leave this stillness in any way at all; and if possible, on the days that you remain in this condition, do not meet with anyone, nor even listen to the sound of a bird, if possible. But enter your inner cell, shut all the doors, and be certain about what comes to pass in you.

But when this state passes from you, the state of the operation of insights comes after it. Here watch out for the demon of distraction! As long as insights appear in the intellect from within, keep silence and keep the rule of the previous state.¹⁴

Far from suggesting one abandon prayer, John of Dalyatha in fact counsels a monk to dive deeper into it! While Tiso’s brief use of John as an example above hasn’t the space to expand on this subject, the example’s briefness is enough to make a casual reader pause.

And this deserves a word of caution. Fr. Tiso uses a wide range of sources, most of which—even when he calls them Christian—originate from thinkers and movements that diverge from Catholic thought or were condemned by it. As a book of interreligious study, this is somewhat expected, but for the average reader, some difficulty might remain in squaring exactly to what extent even, say, the Syriac Christian writings have to say about developing a healthy, inspired, daresay Catholic interior life, much less what dzogchen might. The only reason this is worth discussing is because, after all, Fr. Tiso is himself a Catholic priest, and part of book’s appeal is exactly the fact that a Catholic priest took interest in a paranormal phenomenon seemingly limited to esoteric ascetics in Tibet.

On the topic of tantric practices, too, some caution should be exercised by the casual reader. Those of us in the West who have heard the word ‘tantra’ are often quick to associate it with particular practices of ‘sexual yoga’, particularly if one has had any dialogue with self-professed New Age types or ex-hippies. It is true that the more radical forms of mysticism practiced by various sects of Vajrayana Buddhists engage in recognizably pagan sexual practices which would only serve to scandalize the casual reader were they to be described. This does not account for the entirety of the tantric understanding of being, the world, and its end goal of ultimate realization, nor do the more extreme practices of certain radical sects describe the entirety of tantric tradition.

This only deserves mention because, due to the nature of the volume, Tiso never makes substantial note of what tantrism is, keeping most of his focus on what the belief system primarily encompasses and how it is relevant to dzogchen. He does, however, make a brief note of this aspect of tantric Buddhism when discussing the nature of the early dzogchen tradition. “Virtually every early dzogchen text” references tantric ritual, Tiso explains, and in fact, “the very term dzogchen arises in the context of tantric initiation”.¹⁵ In this, he refers specifically to such practices, but in a very broad sense; dzogchen itself uses the terminology with the awareness of its origin, but removes from it, apparently, the practice of sexual yoga itself.

He makes this a little clearer when he goes on to explain how dzogchen’s definition of enlightenment, ultimate being, or harmonization with the true reality differs from the more purely tantric view that was brought to it from Tibet’s west, as well as the formless sense of it understood by the Ch’an Buddhists to Tibet’s east:

the distinction between dzogchen and Ch’an Buddhism, recognized by Nupchen (gNubs Sangs rgyas ye shes) in his Lamp for Contemplative Seeing (bSam gtan mig sgron) and reaffirmed many times in the contemporary writings of Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, lies in the distinction between the formless, spontaneous mindfulness practice characteristic of Zen, and the tantric view of the primordial presence of enlightenment requiring attuned recognition of the natural state. Moreover, the distinction between tantra and dzogchen lies in the same insistence on contemplative awareness: being present to the natural state of primordial purity, without pursuing the path of imaginative transformation typical of tantric ritual and meditation. However, dzogchen leaves the practitioner (sadhaka) free to explore the ritual sphere of religiosity in the manner of Buddhist tantra.¹⁶

In other words, the perception of ultimate reality, within the Ch’an understanding, can only be attained through rigorous meditative practice and self discipline. The end result of this is a perfect acknowledgment of (self-) emptiness, where personal stillness allows true reality to manifest. Meanwhile, according to the tantric belief, ultimate reality is perceived by a sort of ritualized attentiveness to living experience and spontaneous, immediate recognition of things-as-they-are.

This paraphrasing is by way of analogy, of course, as perception itself, according to Buddhist thought, does not exist once the state of perfection is realized. Rather, a total union of being with ultimate reality nullifies the distinction between perceiver and perceived. This is partly what is meant by the notion that those who have reached this state of perfection, according to Buddhist thought, “abide nowhere yet [exist] everywhere.” Dzogchen thought takes this notion that we might consider to be purely interior and applies it to all of reality, all of the observable world and to every aspect of it, which then explains the rainbow body phenomenon: the body of the practitioner ceases to abide anywhere and instead exists everywhere. Or so they believe.

Conclusion

“For the gods of the gentiles are demons.” So St. Paul reminds us, and so we ought never to forget. The difficult subject at hand, however, is not the subject of worship or even of liturgy, but rather of comparative religion. Tiso’s book—and if his words are as accurate as they seem to be, the rainbow body phenomenon itself—has nothing to do with the worship of false gods. This is what makes the subject so hard to reconcile with Catholic doctrine: such a phenomenon seems like it shouldn’t happen at all.

In the end, Tiso’s book does very little to shed light on what is going on with these Tibetan ascetics. It could be possible that the entire ordeal is a hoax perpetrated by mysterious religious tricksters, though the evidence on hand seems overwhelmingly unlikely. An established religious practice whose goal is exactly this phenomenon stretches back nearly a millennium, and the witness testimonies of its manifestation for hundreds of years, which includes the case of Khenpo A Chö, make the notion that the entire thing is a ruse untenable.

On the other hand, taking the claims about reality that dzogchen and Buddhism make at face value are also impossible to hold to. The errors in Mahayana Buddhist metaphysics are ones exacerbated or otherwise carried over into Vajrayana belief, which dzogchen also imports. It’s impossible to avoid infinite recursions with regard to defining what the self is with relation to reality, what reality is, and how perception affects both. All are questions avoided by Buddhist thinking; any Buddhist master would vaguely respond that requesting definitions eschews true reality. This is just a convenient way of saying that it must not be important, but even arriving to such a conclusion requires entertaining the questions in the first place.

Nonetheless, the body of an ascetic disappeared, and this is not altogether an unheard of phenomenon in that corner of the world. Neither the reader nor Tiso seems to have any idea as to what’s going on. Tiso did his best to present an account of the phenomenon and, more interestingly, associate the development of doctrines pertaining to it with the spread of light mysticism best encapsulated by Christian practices. The book is not, however, an attempt to reconcile this witness of dzogchen belief with the True Faith, nor should it be considered one. At best, it’s an attempt to dispassionately study something seems to avoid all attempts at scrutiny.

It is often as easy as it is reductive to accuse paranormal religious activity as either totally fraudulent or the work of demonic forces. Consider the stories of the Navajo skinwalkers: witch doctors who barter their humanity for special powers from forces that the Navajo consider evil or profane. Such accounts bare all the marks of willful demonic possession. The near religious zeal with which DMT advocates are convinced of receiving private revelations from their planewalker trip guides also mirrors a sort of parlay with the demonic in return, in this case, for what the rube believes is genuine knowledge. Other equally primitive superstitions about interaction with the super- or preternatural tend to follow similar courses.

As evidenced, however, the rainbow body phenomenon is markedly different. There is no deal being made with dark forces, no matter how illuminating they seem. Rather, as Tiso points out, the means by which a dzogchen adherent achieves the rainbow body is by a process not that dissimilar, at least in terms of aesthetics and all outwards indications of moral inclinations, from the long standing tradition of harsh and devout asceticism in the Christian tradition. The parallels between the writings on divine light as observable only by an interior (meditative) sense found in Christian mysticism and that of the discipline used to achieve the rainbow body are likewise impossible to dismiss. And furthermore, at least from what Tiso’s book indicates, there are no trappings of preternatural observance to be found in their devotional meditations and mantras.

“Both the rainbow body and the resurrection are claims that make statements about human possibilities attainable by all human subjects under certain conditions,” Tiso writes in the opening pages of the book’s introduction.¹⁷ If the book has a fatal flaw, it would be the ambiguity about this sentiment. We know that saintliness is not something achieved by sheer force of human will alone. Grace comes wholly and totally from God, and the only acts of the will made to achieve it are those made in cooperation with that gift. And it is only by grace that one is made a saint.

One might try to argue—which Tiso goes to great lengths not to—that the rainbow body, within dzogchen’s own muddled way of understanding it, is the manifestation of some similar phenomenon; and yet that would require the extension of supernatural grace to those not only removed from the True Faith, but to those who are unbaptized, as well. It needs not be said how contradictory such an argument would be.

One might then try to argue, conversely, that the phenomenon is demonic after all, but then one would have to wonder, why bother? Encouraging largely unheard of ascetics who are not famous people practice all the trappings of selfless charity and disciplined interior awareness and then making their bodies shrink—all while apparently enriching the lives of those around them—seems like a colossal waste of time for the demonic. Especially when it would seem more appropriate to have them indulge in the witchcraft and pagan ritual still practiced in the region. One could even cite Milarepa here, an historic figure within Tibetan religion who, as Tiso notes several times, repented of his catastrophic use of witchcraft to instead seek a more virtuous life. And this is to say that, again, the phenomenon fits none of the profiles associated with demonic activity that one can find attested to by any number of exorcists.

It can’t be denied that something weird is going on with the rainbow body phenomenon, and that it fits neither obvious indications of preternatural activity (demonic) nor does it meet the requirements of the supernatural (saintliness). Paranormal? Certainly. Mysterious? Most definitely. Worthy of further study? Absolutely, were it possible.

119.

247.

392.

4Ibid.

580.

679-80.

780.

8Lama Pena, according to Rinchen Tsering (67).

9Lama A Khyug himself.

10145-146.

11172.

12247.

13Ibid.

14Mary T. Hansbury, The Letters of John of Dalyatha, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity Volume 2 (New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2006), 294.

15Tiso, 212.

16213.

17Tiso, 5.

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