Tibetan Death Horoscopes, Mothers and Daughters, and Legacy-Breaking

In my grief over my grandmother’s death, I derived solace from the idea that something could still be done to benefit her, that she hadn’t left us but was just in a different place.

In the Tibetan custom, horoscopes are cast at birth and death. When my grandmother passed away in Darjeeling on November 30, 2004, the tsipa astrologer lama was summoned to the house. A grizzled man in horn-rimmed glasses and maroon robes, he worked out my grandmother’s death horoscope according to her birth year, sign, and time of death.

I’d never heard of this kind of horoscope, but in the Tibetan worldview, it made sense: One horoscope is drawn up for the passage from birth to death, and another for the crossing from death to rebirth. These journeys are known as “bardos,” or between-states. The death horoscope is intended to help the deceased go forth in the after-death bardo, as well as shed light on what family members can do to protect themselves since it’s thought that when someone dies, the surviving relatives may encounter obstacles and demon attacks.

I don’t believe in horoscopes (or I believe in them slightly, when the monthly forecast for my sign, Leo, is good), but in my grief over my grandmother’s death, I derived solace from the idea that something could still be done to benefit her, that she hadn’t left us but was just in a different place. It comforted me to hear that Tibetan lamas who’ve attained a high degree of enlightenment can ascertain where the deceased is on her bardo travels, and I liked picturing my grandmother walking down the road in bardo wearing her heavy black overcoat, her small, solid figure swaying from side to side in her characteristic gait, the usual optimistic and determined expression on her face.

My grandmother’s death horoscope indicated that those born under the sign of bird, mouse, or horse mustn’t touch her body. If they did, negative forces would arise between opposing elements—so much so that her corpse might sit up! The horoscope also specified that the most auspicious day for the cremation was that Friday, December 3. “Could we delay to the weekend?” my mother asked, since family members were on their way to Darjeeling from abroad.

The tsipa shook his head. “Saturday is not a lucky day for a funeral. As for Sunday, if the funeral is held on that day, nine members of your family will die.”

Startling as this pronouncement was, the part of the horoscope I found most unexpected said my grandmother’s mind lingered on four things. Within the parameters of this extraordinary idea, the first three items were ordinary: a red hat, a copper bowl, and a red dress. These objects must be located and taken to the right place—in this case, a monastery—since my grandmother’s mind would follow them. Then, looking like a modern-day therapist in monk’s garb, the tsipa added that my grandmother’s mind also remained attached to an unresolved relationship with one or more of her three daughters. What he said didn’t surprise me: My grandmother and my mother had struggled with each other for decades. But I found it remarkable that the ancient and esoteric Tibetan horoscope practice had turned up something so relevant to our family situation.

The attachments remaining in my grandmother’s mind were hindering her journey to the next life, the tsipa explained, but could be dispelled using astrological remedies. To carry out the remedies, we needed:

· the skull of a pig, complete with lips and ears
· the skull of a white horse
· a red horse carrying water
· a magpie
· a turquoise stone

I expected the tsipa to then tell us my grandmother would be trapped in limbo forever—we couldn’t possibly find objects like a white horse skull before the funeral in a few days’ time. But with the reassuring, all-possibility-encompassing Tibetan pragmatism I’d seen often in my grandmother, he said, “If these items can’t be found, you can make them with dough or draw them. Otherwise, you can imagine them.”

*

In the altar room at the family home, my grandmother’s body had been laid out on cushions and covered with white silk khada blessing scarves. Five lamas sat by the body night and day so my grandmother was never alone on her journey, reading out prayers and instructions from The Tibetan Book of the Dead—an eighth-century guide to traveling through the after-death bardo—and playing horns, drums, bells, and cymbals. At the far end of the room, the household staff stood in the doorway to the kitchen and watched, from time to time bringing tea for the lamas.

Listening to the lamas’ guttural chanting as they exhorted my grandmother to let go of her old life and move on to her new one, I mulled over what the death horoscope said about my grandmother and her daughters. Caught in the push-and-pull of the Tibetan Mother and the American Child, my mother and I also had our difficulties. My mother spent the first nineteen years of her life in India and, despite having emigrated to the US and become a doctor, harbored traditional expectations of me and my two sisters. In her Raj-era Darjeeling girlhood, parents knew best and children were meant to be neither seen nor heard; learning took place in convent schools by rote (you weren’t not taught to think, you were taught not to think); and girls were warned against being “bold.” Raised in America, where children are taught to speak and act for themselves; where, as you see in the natural world with, for example, penguin chicks, there’s a drive for independence (the mortality rate for those chicks can reach 90%, my mother would be quick to point out), I’d been on a collision course with my mother from an early age. Her fear I would turn out “too American”—ignorant of a hierarchy that would remain in place until the seas ran dry—had, in her view, been realized.

I’d never considered that mother/daughter conflict could be passed down through generations like eye color or foot size. Yet my grandmother—the only girl among six children—had battled her stepmother. “That stepmother never wanted to give us anything,” my grandmother often recalled. “I was the bold sow who went forward to fight with her, as among the lot, I was fat, chubby, and strong!” In the altar room with my mother, butter lamps burning and my grandmother in bardo, I thought about my young daughter. We had a good relationship, but would that change?

*

The day of the funeral, my mother, my cousin, and I washed my grandmother’s body in the altar room. My grandmother’s limbs felt heavy, cool, and supple. Even days after her death, rigor mortis hadn’t set in; this was believed to be a sign of advanced awareness as she left this life for the next. A young lama tied a length of string to my grandmother’s thumb, gave us one end to hold, then cut the string with a small knife, severing my grandmother’s attachment to this world. Male relatives lifted her body into a plain magnolia coffin and we put in holy juniper, followed by a few spritzes of my grandmother’s Elizabeth Arden perfume. The death horoscope was also placed in the coffin, to be burned together with the body.

As one of the relatives blew a conch shell and the lamas played horns, the coffin was carried from the altar room. We family members followed and, for the last time, my grandmother left the house she’d lived in for over sixty years. In a long line of cars, we proceeded to Ghoom Monastery, where our family has prayed for over a century and our dead are cremated. The coffin was placed on the pyre; we took turns lighting the wood with a blazing stick, the lamas chanting and preparing offerings of rice and tsampa barley flour. Above in the cloudless sky, a solitary eagle glided on the wind currents, and fifty miles distant, the snowy peaks of 28,000-foot Kanchenjunga glittered. Standing next to my mother, I watched the flames leap up around the coffin and thought about my grandmother’s body inside, the death horoscope next to it. Had my grandmother been fated to have an unresolved relationship with my mother because of her troubles with her stepmother? Was I doomed to follow the same pattern with my daughter and carry on a struggle that had endured over three generations?

In the altar room with my mother, my grandmother in bardo, I thought about my young daughter. We had a good relationship, but would that change?

“What will happen will happen,” my grandmother had often said, “and what will not will not.” (She also liked to tell me, “What is allotted cannot be blotted.”) I’d assumed she was talking about fate, the predetermined unfolding of our lives, but as I watched her body burn, I wondered about this. She’d always accepted what happened in life—including, in the end, her imminent death—and, at the same time, was the first to take action. In keeping with her beliefs as a devout Buddhist, her view seemed more in line with the idea of karma than fate: “what will happen will happen” after you’ve done everything you can. I didn’t think she passed away feeling regret over her relationships with her daughters, but rather, sadness that she’d no longer be there for them if they needed her.

In popular culture, karma is often thought to mean the same thing as fate, where what happens in life is “just desserts” for past-life deeds. It was my karma to lose that job, we may declare, convinced that what happened was outside our control. It was my karma that my house burned down. It was my karma to not get along with my daughter. But the Dalai Lama says, “Karma means action. [T]hings change through action, not by prayer . . . not by wish.” Karma as action is a concept with huge power in everyday life. We’re continuously engaged in the creation of our reality—what’s taking place now is a result of what we did last year, last week, yesterday. We can’t change the past, but we can change our present and thus our future. And the past isn’t a discrete entity; a continuum exists between past, present, and future, a flow that can be positive or negative depending on our actions. Not figuring out what I can do to have a good relationship with my daughter would be like hearing a hurricane is forecast and sitting idle on the porch, hoping the storm will veer off course. And the kind of mother I am to my daughter not only affects the two of us but future generations. Keeping these things in mind has helped me remember I have choice in what I say to my daughter, in how I act and react in our relationship.

Over the years since my grandmother died, I’ve thought often about the belief that the death horoscope can benefit surviving family members. My grandmother’s horoscope identified the demons that threatened her and how they could be subdued as she traveled through the after-death bardo, leading me to recognize and take steps to vanquish the demons on my journey from birth to death, to see that a legacy of mother/daughter strife, once named, can be broken.