In the Cave (Kyoto Journal)

On a golden fall day in Darjeeling, hometown of my family on the Tibetan side, I stopped in to see an acquaintance who’d promised to arrange a visit with monks at a local monastery. I was researching a novel and had questions about death rituals and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. “The monks have gone to the cave,” the man informed me with an apologetic smile. I told him I’d come again later in the week, but he shook his head: the cave was in the south of India and the monks would be there till spring.

Although the monks’ departure was a setback for my project, it directed my thoughts onto a path I’d been exploring as I studied The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Composed by Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century Indian saint who brought Buddhism to Tibet, the book is a guide to navigating the bardo interval between death and rebirth. I’d been ruminating on the metaphorical significance of bardo; that afternoon, as I strolled through the Darjeeling town square past elderly Tibetans counting their prayer beads in the shadow of 28,000-foot Mount Kanchenjunga, I thought about the monks who’d “gone to the cave.” What happened when we left behind our usual way of being and entered an alternate reality?

Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has thrust us into a different kind of existence, I’m wondering the same thing. Not only in relation to bardo and caves but, more than thirty years since moving to Tokyo, in connection with the Japanese concept of ma, a between-space that allows for something new.

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