Tenzin Choe Dorol, a great woman and mother of Menri Lopon Trinley Nyima Rinpoche, has passed away on Sunday, April 8, in the afternoon at 4pm.
Menri Lopon says: "Please pray for her!"
The day of her passing was Easter Sunday in our Western calendar, the day of Christ overcoming death and suffering.
Three days prior, on Thursday, those wondrous rainbows enveloped Menri, brought about by the urgently needed and prayed for rain.
Then two days before, on Good Friday, the first blue cockoo of the year could be heard, symbol of the presence of Tonpa Shenrab, the founder and Buddha of Bon.
Tenzin Choe Dorol has given an amazing example for how dignified and gentle life can be lived and also ended.
As it had become clear to her that her life in this body was soon to run out, she completely accepted reality and manifested a very peaceful and easy passing over.
On her last day she asked for a blessing from His Holiness, the abbot of Menri Monastery. He introduced her directly into the natural mind. She stood up, prostrated before him, and had his foot touch her head.
With Ponlop Rinpoche, her son she recited the Bardo prayers from memory, also she arranged with clear voice and mind what should be done with all her belongings and with her own body, all on her last day.
On her last breath she predicted that in her transition only 5 days will be a little difficult and then she will be able to liberate.
What a wonderful completion of a lifetime!
And what a superior way of dealing with death. We in the West would do well to think deeply about what her example can show us.
Tenzin suffered from cancer of the liver, the last stage of chronic hepatitis B, a condition which would send people in the so-called civilized world into a nightmare of hospital treatments, immobilised by tubes and gadgets, body chemistry thrashed by powerful drugs, squeezed for the last reserves of vital energy, propped up mindlessly to gain a few more days of breath entering and leaving the body.
She, however could even go to the bathroom until the very end.
Whenever I thought of her in those last days of her life, I had a German poem on my mind by J. Eichendorff, which I try to share in English, just because it seems to fit her so well:
It was...
As if the Sky had quietly kissed Earth
That decked with blossoms' glow
Of Him She now must dream
Air moving through the fields
Grain ears are swaying gently
And softly rustle tree tops
So clear, the stars of night.
And Soul was spreading wide
My wings and soared
Through silent lands as if
...She flew home.
The Pomegranate trees have begun flowering in the valley..
