Today is the 34th aniversary of HH the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa's parinirvana. On this auspicious day I start this blog, which is dedicated to the life of this great Buddhist master. I post two articles, one of Dr. Mitchell Levy about HH's sickness and one of Mark Tatz which depicts the cremation of the kudung, the remains of HH the 16th Karmapa.
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from: http://16th-karmapas-life.weebly.com/sickness-and-parirvana.html
Today is the anniversary of the 16th Karmapa’s
parinirvana
16th Karmapa
in Vermont
From: http://blog.dwbuk.org/buddhist-teachers/16th-karmapa/today-is-the-anniversary-of-the-16th-karmapas-parinirvana/
Today, 5
November, is the anniversary of the parinirvana of H.H.
16th Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje in 1981. We reproduce an excerpt
from Reginald A. Ray’s book Secret of the Vajra World
– The Tantric Buddhism of Tibet (Shambhala, 2001) which presents
the 1981 interview with Dr. Mitchell Levy, the 16th Karmapa’s personal
physician, who was together with Karmapa during the last remarkable moments
of his life.
Dr. Levy’s Account
The Early
Illness
“I first saw
His Holiness in May of 1980. Now he had cancer and had come to America to
get worked on and to see if he had any further cancer in his body. His
cancer was on top of serious diabetes, which he had had much of his life.
I was engaged as his primary physician at that time.
“When he
arrived, we did a full workup on him. That was somewhat uneventful. A few
things do stick out in my mind about that period. First of all, there was
a thread that began here and ran through all the rest of my contact with
him as physician. There was nothing other than a feeling of business as
usual from His Holiness’ point of view. This was just another experience,
and this happened to be an experience of finding out whether his cancer
was going to kill him or not. But, in a way, to him, it didn’t make any
difference one way or the other. You could have been talking about chicken
soup.
“From this
time until the moment when he died the next year, there was always this
thread of basic and tremendously overwhelming presence. His warmth and the
clarity of his own mind through all these experiences were unfailing. It
was very simple. I would say, ‘Do you have this pain or do you have that
pain?’ And we would get rather complex with our questions. Almost
inevitably, our line of questions led to a lot of smiling on his part, and
the response, ‘No, no, there is nothing.’ Then we would say, ‘Well, how
about…?’ and he would say, ‘No,’ and we would say, ‘Well, how about…?’ and
he would say, ‘No.’
“We were
always running into this kind of vastness of his state of mind. He was
never willing to narrow things down and focus on himself. It is sort of
like when you have questions about your meditation experience and you have
the same feeling of just spinning your wheels. And he smiles at you. Well,
the same thing would happen when we said, ‘Are you in pain? Are you having
discomfort after eating?’ We would run into that same vast space.
“I think
that that was very much a teaching situation for the medical people taking
care of him. All of us, Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike, saw that there
was no end point for His Holiness even in medicine, in bodily things. It
wasn’t, ‘Yes, now you have hit upon it. That is where I have my pain.’ We
never got to that. So we would be frustrated and awed at the same time.
The way he approached his own death is just another tool for working with
others and trying to help them. I think this was a commonly shared
experience among all of us taking care of him: wonderment and also
confusion about why he wasn’t following what we thought he should be
doing, and amazement at his warmth and concern for others, no matter what
was happening to him. This was the thread that ran up until the moment he
died.
“The same
day we did the workup, later we went in and had a meeting with His
Holiness. I started to ask him the same sort of questions, and he would
keep smiling and saying no or yes to certain of them.
Finally, at
the end, he said to me, ‘There is one thing that is very important for you
to understand. If I am needed here to teach sentient beings, if I still
have work to do here, then no disease will ever be able to overcome me.
And if I am no longer really required to teach sentient beings, then you
can tie me down, and I will not stay on this earth.’ This was certainly an
interesting way to get introduced to one’s patient.
The 16th
Gyalwa Karmapa
Hong Kong
“The second
time I saw His Holiness was in Hong Kong a number of months later. The
first thing that impressed me was how much more weight he had lost and how
much weaker and sicker he was, and also, at the same time, how he hadn’t
changed at all, in terms of his presence and his warmth.
“There was
still this person lying in this bed who was absolutely dying of cancer,
and he looked like he could have been there for a tonsillectomy. Every
time I would walk into the room, he would smile and light up, and my mind
would stop. And I would think, ‘Wait a minute, who is taking care of whom
here? He is supposed to be sick, not me.’ And I started to want to go,
‘Well, uh, here’s what happened to me yesterday.’
“So,
instead, I would look at him and say, ‘How are you today?’ And he would
smile and say, ‘I’m okay.” And then I’d say, ‘Well, are you having any
pain?’ And he would laugh and say, ‘No. Not today.’
“This sort
of became an ongoing joke of ‘You have to look at me like I am sick, so go
ahead and do your job. You know, and we will both pretend, that this is
what is really happening.’
“This began
to affect the nursing staff as well, because you have a fixed idea of what
a sick, dying patient should be like, and he never would do it. He would
always lie there and people would feel totally uncomfortable that they
couldn’t help this ‘poor invalid person.’ And this is the way it happened
over and over again. He was just there doing what needed to be done for
everybody else.
“What came
out of my experiences in Hong Kong was the realization that His Holiness’
state of mind was fundamentally unchangeable and that he was continually
helping those around him. He was especially helping the four young tulkus
[in their teens and early twenties] who were with him, the Rinpoches whom
he had been training at his monastery in Sikkim since their childhood. His
Holiness was helping them to accept what was going on.
“When I got
to Hong Kong, I began to ask myself, ‘Why is he dying now?’ And I began to
watch the way he dealt with the younger tulkus. He had brought up the four
major Kagyu tulkus, and for some reason it turned out that they were all
the same age and ready to go out now and teach in the world. He was their
daddy, in some real sense, and he had brought them up to this point, and
now this was another step in their education, the fact that he was dying.
There was
something that felt to me very right about the whole thing. To me, in
many ways, he had fulfilled his life work. But this may be just my
own simple-minded view.
“The younger
tulkus would say to me, ‘Oh, he has so much else to do, this thing and
that thing.’ And I would think that if he lived another fifteen years, he
would start more projects, and at the end of fifteen years they would
still say, ‘How could be die now?’ You could never imagine His Holiness
retiring. And so I really felt the consistency of the whole thing: he had
very much brought the tulkus up to the point where they were ready to go
out into the world, and now he was exposing them to death.
“Trungpa
Rinpoche said something that made sense to me, later, when the younger
tulkus were having such a hard time. He said, ‘Well, if we were living in
Tibet, we would see death all the time. A real charnel-ground quality.
Even at a young age. On the other hand, having grown up at His Holiness’
monastery at Rumtek [Sikkim], and now having been exposed to the West,
they are not that familiar with death.’
“And now,
given that it was His Holiness himself who was dying, they were initially
unable to reconcile that for themselves. And in many ways, it felt as if
he were teaching them about death. I couldn’t help but feel that he was
letting his own death be drawn out so that they could just slowly come to
grips with it and watch the process and explore it, so that they could
digest it later on.
“And that is
also what impressed me in my experiences with His Holiness in Zion,
Illinois, where he finally died. I saw His Holiness’ presence and realized
how he was taking care of the tulkus. They were young, and they might
have had varying degrees of realization, but still, emotionally and
chronologically, in terms of living in the world, they were young. And so
this was part of their own growth process.
Zion, Illinois, USA
“The third
time I saw His Holiness was near Chicago, in a cancer hospital in Zion,
Illinois, at the time when he died. People there — the hospital staff as well
as visitors-were just completely overwhelmed by him. To appreciate this,
you have to keep in mind that ICU [intensive care unit] personnel are
typically quite jaded. They see death all the time, and this is their work
— and the reason they are good is that they aren’t too affected by it, they can
‘take care of business.’
“So to see a
staff like that be so overwhelmed by His Holiness’ gentleness was very
impressive. And that is what happened. Most of them were Christian, and
none of them knew the first thing about Buddhism, but they had no
hesitancy whatever in calling him His Holiness. They never once said,
‘Karmapa,’ it was always ‘His Holiness.’
“And people,
after a while, couldn’t understand how he wasn’t having pain or responding
in the way people do in his situation. Then they began to just feel so
much concern about taking care of him.
“As you
know, each Karmapa is supposed to write a letter before he dies,
indicating the circumstances of his next birth. The staff expressed
concern about the letter. And it was so amazing to see, because, you see,
everybody’s concern switched from ‘What are we going to do for this
patient today?’ and ‘did you give him his bath?’ to ‘Did he write his
letter? Is this lineage going to continue?’
“They had a
nurse in the intensive care unit who came to me one day with tears in her
eyes and said, ‘I am so worried that this lineage is going to end here in
this hospital.’ I mean, mind you, we were in Zion, Illinois. It’s a dry
town. It is very traditionally Christian. So, to me, it was very
moving to see how completely they were taken with His Holiness.
“The staff
couldn’t stop talking about his compassion and about how kind he seemed.
After four or five days, the surgeon — a Filipino Christian — came up to
me and he said, ‘You know, every time I go in to see His Holiness, I feel
like I am naked and that he sees me completely and I feel like I should
cover myself up.’
“He kept
saying to me, ‘You know, His Holiness is not an ordinary man. He really
doesn’t seem like an ordinary person.’ And everybody kept having that
experience before his final days. Just the force of his will and his
presence were so powerful, that they were completely taken with it.
“This was a
continuation of what I had experienced in New York, which was that he just
kept going, and whether he was in shock or eating grapes, there was some
complete unchangeability about his state of mind that radiated to everybody,
and no one knew how to compute it.
“His
Holiness really seemed to have changed a lot of the staff of doctors and
nurses. As it was, we left books for them, and beyond that, people were
saying to me, ‘You know, I am Christian and I don’t believe in Buddhism,
but I have to say the His Holiness is a very unusual person.’ They said
this almost apologetically, not knowing how to combine both beliefs, but
so obviously and deeply touched by His Holiness.
“As the days
went on, His Holiness seemed to deteriorate physically. Then he did a few
things that, from what the Rinpoches were telling me, had some precedents
in his life. Apparently when he was thirteen or so, when he was very ill,
the doctors came to see him and said that his illness was very, very
serious and that he had only a matter of hours to live, or a day at most.
You have to realize that Tibetan doctors will never say something this
negative as long as there is any hope. They will never say something like this
until they believe that imminent death is certain. Yet His Holiness paid
no attention to them, and he recovered quickly.
The doctors
couldn’t understand how that had happened. But this was in Tibet, and it
was perhaps easier for them to accept, him being His Holiness.
“But the
same thing happened in Zion. One day after examining him and finding that
drastic deterioration had set in, I came out and said, ‘His Holiness has
two hours to live, maybe three hours.’ He had every symptom I have seen in
that situation, and he was going downhill very rapidly. Every system was
failing. He was having trouble breathing, he was vomiting up blood and
coughing up blood, his blood pressure was dropping, even on blood pressure
support medication.
“When you
have worked with a lot of critically ill patients, you get a very definite
feel when a patient is about to go. You just feel it because you see the
stress their body is under, and you know that it won’t be able to carry on
much longer. You know they are going to collapse. And so I could just feel
it.
“I said, ‘We
should wake him up if you feel a letter is important.’ And so I woke him
up with some medication that we have that reverses some of the sleepiness.
“The tulkus said, ‘Will you excuse us, now we need to talk to His Holiness
in private.’
“They came
out in about forty-five minutes and they said, ‘Well, His Holiness said
that he is not going to die yet, and he laughed at us. He laughed at us!’
They said that a few times, ‘He just laughed at us. And he said, ‘Don’t
give me that pad. I am not writing any letter.’
“I walked
into the room and he was sitting up in bed. Just up. And his eyes were
wide open and the force of his will was immense, and he turned to me and
said in English (of which he knew only a few phrases), ‘Hello. How are you?’
“And within
thirty minutes, all his vital signs got stable and to a normal level, and
he stopped bleeding. I walked out after about an hour of being in the
room, and one of the staff from the intensive care unit came up and he
said, ‘Look at my arms.’ and I looked and he had goose bumps all up and
down his arms. No one had ever seen anything like this in their
lives. The force of his will was so strong, and he wasn’t ready to
die yet. I am completely convinced that he willed himself back into
stability. I had never seen anything remotely resembling this, or even
read or heard about such a thing.
“The
reaction of the young tulkus was interesting. They interpreted my telling
them His Holiness was dying as me panicking. Maybe it was part of their
not wanting to let His Holiness go. But I have seen enough so that I was
just telling them what was going on. He was dying. I knew it. Everyone on
the staff knew it. And yet, he woke up and just sat up. He literally
opened his eyes and he willed himself back to health. He filled his
body out with his will. Visually, I could almost see his will coming out
of his body. I have never experienced anything like that. Trungpa Rinpoche
later said to me, ‘Now you see what is really possible.’
“It was
almost as if someone had unplugged the monitors and fiddled with them and
then plugged them back in, and they were normal. The blood pressure was
normal. He stopped bleeding, but not from anything that we had given him;
he just turned the whole process around. After that, he was healthy for
another nine or ten days. He was completely stable.
“After this,
it became a running joke in the hospital that we should let His Holiness
write his own orders. We should just bring in the order book at the
beginning of the day and say, ‘What would you like us to do today?’ The
whole intensive care unit staff way saying, ‘Well, what does he want done
today?’
“Then about
nine or ten days later, suddenly his blood pressure dropped precipitously,
and we couldn’t get it back up with drugs. I said, ‘This is very bad.’ I
had gotten out of the habit of saying that he might die soon. I just
looked at the tulkus and said, ‘This is very bad, very, very bad.’ And that
is all I would say. And so they would lean over to His Holiness and say
that Dr. Levy thinks it’s very bad. And usually, he would smile.
“At this
point, he was in DIC-disseminated intervascular coagulation. It means,
that there is so much infection that the bacteria, when they break apart,
liberate something called endotoxin. The endotoxin in turn affects the
clotting mechanism of the blood; it uses up all of your ability to keep
the blood clotted, so you start bleeding from everywhere.
“This is
more or less uniformly fatal even. And again I said, ‘This is very bad.’
“I said it to His Holiness, and he sort of looked up and gave an attempt at a smile and, within two hours, not even two hours, he stopped bleeding completely. His blood pressure went back to normal, and he was sitting up in bed and talking.
“I said it to His Holiness, and he sort of looked up and gave an attempt at a smile and, within two hours, not even two hours, he stopped bleeding completely. His blood pressure went back to normal, and he was sitting up in bed and talking.
“By this
time, the intensive care unit almost had a chalk board, and everyone said,
‘Chalk up another one for His Holiness.’ It really became almost humorous.
Given a patient with terminal cancer and diabetes and massive infection in
his lungs, already recovering from shock, to go into gram negative shock,
someone in that condition just doesn’t come back, ever. And yet, here
he was.
“Then the
day after that, he went into what we call respiratory failures, which was
that his lungs weren’t working because he was so filled up with pneumonia.
At this point it was clear that if we didn’t intubate him, he was going to
stop breathing. We did that, and so prolonged that for thirty-six hours.
“Then early
on the day he actually died, we saw that his monitor had changed. The
electrical impulses through his heart had altered in a way that indicated
that it was starting to fail. And so we knew, the surgeons knew, that
something was imminent. We didn’t say anything to the Rinpoches.
“Then his
heart stopped for about ten seconds. We resuscitated him, had a little
trouble with his blood pressure, brought it back up, and then he was
stable for about twenty-five minutes, thirty minutes, but it looked like
he had had a heart attack. Then his blood pressure dropped all the way
down. We couldn’t get it back up at all with medication. And we kept
working, giving him medication, and then his heart stopped again.
“And so then
we had to start pumping his chest and then, at that point, I knew that
this was it. Because you could just see his heart dying in front of you on
the monitor. But I felt that we needed to demonstrate our thoroughness as
much as we could, to reassure the Rinpoches. So I kept the
resuscitation going for almost forty-five minutes, much longer than I
normally would have.
“Finally, I
gave him two amps of intra-cardiac epinephrine and adrenaline and there
was no response. Calcium. No response. So we stopped and this was the
point as which we finally gave up. I went outside to make the call to
Trungpa Rinpoche to tell him that His Holiness had died.
“After that,
I came back into the room, and people were starting to leave. By this
time, His Holiness had been lying there for maybe fifteen minutes, and we
started to take out the NG tube, and as someone goes to pull the nasal
gastric tube out of his nose, all of a sudden I look and his blood
pressure is 140 over 80. And my first instinct, I shouted out, ‘Who’s
leaning on the pressure monitor?’ I mean, I was almost in a state of
panic: ‘Who’s leaning on the pressure monitor?’ I said to myself, ‘Oh, no,
here we go again.’ Because I knew that for pressure to go up like that,
someone would have to be leaning on it with… well, it wouldn’t be
possible.
“Then a
nurse almost literally screamed, ‘He’s got a good pulse! He’s got a good
pulse!’
“And one of
the older Rinpoches slapped me on the back as if to say, ‘This is
impossible but it’s happening!” His Holiness’ heart rate was 80 and his
blood pressure was 140 over 80, and there was this moment in that room
where I thought that I was going to pass out.
“And no one
said a word. There was literally a moment of ’This can’t be. This
can’t be.’ A lot had happened with His Holiness, but this was clearly the
most miraculous thing I had seen. I mean that this was not just an
extraordinary event. This would have been an hour after his heart had
stopped and fifteen minutes after we had stopped doing anything.
“After this
happened, I ran out of the room again to call Trungpa Rinpoche and tell
him that His Holiness was alive again. ‘I can’t talk. Goodbye.’
“To me, in
that room, it had the feeling that His Holiness was coming back to check
one more time: could his body support his consciousness?’ He had been on
Valium and morphine, and that disconnected him from his body. It felt to
me that, all of a sudden he realized his body had stopped working, so he
came back in to see if it was workable. Just the force of his
consciousness coming back started the whole thing up again — I mean, this
is just my simple-minded impression, but this is what it actually felt like, in
that room.
“His heart
rate and blood pressure kept up for about five minutes, then it just petered
out. It felt as if he realized that it wasn’t workable, that his body
couldn’t support him anymore, and he left, he died.
“Trungpa
Rinpoche arrived at the hospital shortly after that, not knowing whether
His Holiness was alive or not. So I had to tell him that he had
died. And that was it. Those were his comebacks, which were very
remarkable.
“Even in
death, His Holiness did not cease to amaze the Western medical
establishment At forty-eight hours after his death, his chest was warm
right above his heart. This was how it happened.
“Situ
Rinpoche [one of the younger tulkus] took me into the room where His
Holiness was lying. First I had to wash my hands completely and put a mask
on. And Situ Rinpoche walks in and puts his robe over his mouth, as if even
breathing might disturb the samadhi of His Holiness. And he took my hand,
and he put my hand in the center of His Holiness’ chest and then made me
feel it, and it felt warm.
16th Karmapa
inNepal 1976 with Tilkus (Beru Khyentse Rinpoche and others)
“And it’s
funny, because since I had washed my hands in cold water, my Western
medical mind said, ‘Well, my hands must still be a little cold.’ So I
warmed my hands up, and then I said to Situ Rinpoche, ‘Could I feel his
chest one more time?’ He said, ‘Sure,’ and he pulled down His Holiness’
robe and put my hand on his chest again. My hands were warm at this point,
and his chest was warmer than my hand. To check, I moved my hand to either
side of his chest, and it was cool. And then I felt again in the middle,
and it was warm.
“I also
pinched his skin, and it was still pliable and completely normal. Mind
you, although there is some variation, certainly by thirty-six hours, the
skin is just like dough. And after forty-eight hours, his skin was just
like yours and mine. It was as if he weren’t dead. I pinched his
skin, and it went right back. The turgor was completely normal.
“Shortly
after we left the room, the surgeon came out and said, ‘He’s warm. He’s
warm.’ And then it became, the nursing staff was saying, ‘Is he still
warm?’ After all that had happened, they just accepted it. As much as all
that had happened might have gone against their medical training, their
cultural beliefs, and their religious upbringing, by this point they had
no trouble just accepting what was actually occurring.
“This is, of
course, quite in keeping with traditional Tibetan experience, that
realized people like His Holiness, after their respiration and heart have
stopped [the outer dissolution], abide in a state of profound meditation
for some time [the 'ground luminosity' that follows the inner
dissolution,] with rigor mortis not setting in during that period.
“One thing I
should mention is the quality of the room where he was lying. The tulkus
said, ‘His Holiness is in samadhi’ [i.e., resting in the dharmakaya
of ground luminosity]. What people experienced in that room seemed to
depend on varying levels of perception.
I asked
Trungpa Rinpoche about it. He said that when he walked into that room, it
was as if a vacuum had sucked out all the mental obstacles. There was no
mental chatter. It was absolutely still. Everything was starkly simple and
direct. He said that it was so one-pointed that there was no room for any
kind of obstacle at all. And he said that it was absolutely magnificent.
“My
experience wasn’t quite like that. To me, the air felt thin and there
was a quiet that was unsettling in a way. There was no familiarity, no
background noise. It was like being in some other realm, one that was
absolutely still and vast. It was just His Holiness’ body in the center of
the room, draped in his brocade robe, and you felt as if you didn’t even
want to breathe. That was my experience. It felt as if anything I did
would disturb that stillness. My actions screamed at me. I mean, all of my
coarseness and vulgarity just shouted at me.
“It felt as
if in each movement I made toward his body, I was hacking away at
something thick to get through it. And everything I did was clumsy. And
from a normal point of view, it wasn’t. I was just walking. But there was
an air of stillness, an awareness in that room that was overpowering. I
understood what Trungpa Rinpoche meant about vacuum, because it felt like
that.
“After about
three days, His Holiness samadhi was still continuing. It was
interesting, because the doctors and nurses were as concerned as the younger
tulkus that we leave his body there and not move it until the samadhi
ended. This was unusual, because ordinarily when someone dies, hospital
staff want to get rid of the body as quickly as possible. That’s just the
way we do it in the West.
“After three
days, the samadhi ended. You could tell because His Holiness was no longer
warm, and rigor mortis finally set in. And also the atmosphere in the room
changed, becoming more normal…
“The entire experience had had very pronounced
effects on everyone involved, especially the non-Buddhists, who were
the majority of those there. Just to give one example, the assistant
administrator, one of the people who had been close to these events, one
night was reading in some of the books on Buddhism that someone had lent
her. She came to me the next morning and said the thing that she liked
about these books was that after reading them, they pretty much matched
some conclusions that she had come to on her own. They really made sense
to her. And so I think that people there made very powerful connections
with His Holiness and Buddhism. It will be interesting to see who he
brought in, even in his death…”
Photo: The remains of HH, the kudung, arrives in Rumtek
Mark Tatz: Special Report Cremation of the 16th Karmapa
TIBETAN REVIEW, JANUARY 1982
Clouds mass in dark shapes as winter settles over the Himalayas.
Strange lights are seen in the flight sky. In a pavilion on the roof
of the temple, monks in two rows surround a throne, guarded in its
four comers by uniformed policemen, rifles at rest, heads bowed. From
sunup past sundown the monks are chanting funeral ceremonies. In the
middle of the pavilion, through a maze of rich brocades and yellow
lira-pings fluttering in if slight breeze, one call glimpse the
Buddha Karmapa seated in great samadhi. His sanctity is deeper than
ever, now that the body, nude, marked with magical letters, is Kagyu
lamas from across India and around the world, as well as
representatives of other Kagyu schools, are gathered to honour, to
commiserate and to chart their future course.
Seven thousand stood in sorrow and in awe as a rainbow marked the
lighting of the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa's funeral pyre on 20 December.
One week later, several hundred residents and visitors remained for
the distribution of relics.
His Holiness passed away, aged 57 (Western count), at 9 P.M. of 5
November (local time) in the American International Clinic, Zion,
Illinois, after a protracted stomach illness. The physical remains
were returned to his seat by air five days later. Funeral ceremonies
were held for the traditional 49 days. Each of the high meditational
deities of the Karma Kagyu was invoked for a week in turn, the
rituals sponsored by various governmental bodies and private
individuals. During that period tens of thousands of persons climbed
to the roof of the main temple at Rumtek to pay their last respects
to the mandala containing His Holiness in the flesh. Over a thousand
followers from abroad took advantages of temporarily relaxed
guidelines to visit Sikkim.
Adjacent to the main temple, construction proceeded on the four
storey Karma Shri Nalanda University. the lower floors of which were
used to house visiting lamas. The university was inaugurated on 18
November, the anniversary of the Buddha's descent from Trayatrimsha
Heaven (22nd day of the 9th Tibetan month), thus fulfilling one of
the 16th GyaJwa's last wishes (See Shamar interview in this issue).
The first classes, under Trangu Rinpoche, were held on 29 December.
Eventually, it will accommodate 500 students.
At 6 A.M. of the morning of the cremation the remains were carried
outside and deposited, through its top, into the crematory stupa
which has been constructed on the roof of the temple in red clay and
decorated with gold paint. The residents of Rumtek, both lay and
monastic, and hundreds of visitors filed by, succeeded by crowds from
Gangtok, Cremation of the "state guru" of Sikkim was
witnessed by numerous high officials, from the past and present
governors on down, as well as hosts of other officials and private
persons. The kingdom of Bhutan was represented by a large contingent
headed by the royal sister Ashi Sonam Chodron, and Nepal by its
leading Buddhists. His Holiness' 250 Dharma centres abroad sent
representatives, with especially large contingents from Singapore and
Malaysia, northern Europe and the United States.
Photo: The cremationof HH in Rumtek
Crowds thronged the roofs of the temple and surrounding buildings,
filling the courtyard and the hillsides at 11.05 in the morning when
Shamar Rinpoche and Damchoe Yongdu, General Secretary of the
Dharmachakra organization, offered handfuls of red flowers and set
the pyre alight. State riflemen fired three volleys and the police
band broke into Handel. Soon, clouds of multi-coloured smoke billowed
aloft and a second rainbow appeared as the previously clear sky
filled with lustrous masses of cloud. Among other traditional omens
displayed overhead, a solitary eagle descended over the stupa, and
the same occurred a week later shortly before it was reopened.
During the
course of the afternoon Situ Rinpoche, as be later announced,
discovered the physical heart of His Holiness to have fallen into the
northern gate of the stupa, took possession of it, as a gift to the
Karmapa's "heart disciples", for eventual enclosure in a
gold stupa to be built at Rumtek.1
The sixteenth Gyalwa left a letter containing details regarding his
next rebirth, but its contents have not been revealed for fear of
attempted counterfeiting.2
Until the next Karrnapa is enthroned, leadership of the school
devolves upon his four chief disciples: Shamar, Tai Situ, Jamgon
Kongtrul and Gyaltsab Rinpoches. At a meeting of foreign leaders the
day after the cremation, Shamar said, "On behalf of the four of
us: I won't promise to do as well as His Holiness has done. But we
promise to do our best."
-Tatz Mark
1
For decades there was the myth that the heart had fallen to the
feet of Situpa, but the he himself announced later: “Someone
nearby, I don't remember who, pointed to the opening in the
cremation stupa and said something was falling out.” Lea Terhune,
Politics of Reincarnation, pg. 131.
Most people I interviewed for the Biography about the 16th
Karmapa told me, that the heart came out of the stupa, and was
quite a while later shown to Shamar Rinpoche, Situ Rinpoche and Beru
Khyentse Rinpoche.
2
This was told to the disciples, in order to hide that many years
passed without any indications about his reincarnation.