In 1998 a strange story emerged from a village in the remote Kham region of eastern Tibet. It is said that a rainbow appeared one day above the cabin of Khenpo A-chos, a devout lama who had continued to practice and teach Buddhism despite the severe restrictions of the Chinese government. He was in his eighties, but not sick. Nevertheless, he lay down on his bed, began reciting the Tibetan mantra “Om mani padme hum,” and died.
Shortly after the nuns, monks, and others who studied with him began the Tibetan Buddhist prayers that accompany death, they noticed that Khenpo A-chos’s skin began to turn soft and pinkish. His students hurried to another lama to ask about this, and he told them to cover the body and continue their prayers. They placed a thin yellow monk’s cloak over him, and as the days passed, they saw that his body was shrinking. By the end of the week, the students reported, nothing remained—just a few hairs left on the pillow. Khenpo A-chos had apparently become what is known in Tibetan Buddhism as a rainbow body.
This story spread through Buddhist circles, making its way to the United States, where Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, heard it. He realized that the miraculous event had implications for Christianity: “If we can establish as an anthropological fact that what is described in the resurrection of Jesus has not only happened to others but is happening today,” he has said, “it would put our view of human potential in a completely different light.”
Ascent in the Empyrean
by Hieronymous Bosch
Image courtesy of The Yorck Project
Brother David enlisted the aid of Father Francis Tiso, an associate director of the secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C., who also has a doctorate in Buddhist studies. Father Tiso journeyed to Kham with a translator and recorded the testimony of several people who had witnessed the events.
The lama who had been consulted by the students, Lama A-chos (no relation), told him that achieving the rainbow body “is a matter of inner realization. It’s not a philosophical idea. It’s not a metaphor.” He also showed Father Tiso photographs of himself
taken while meditating, indicating what looked like light radiating from his body.
Did these things truly happen? Certainly they were real to Lama A-chos and perhaps even to Father Tiso. “It’s one of my regrets that I couldn’t take a photograph of his photos. It was too dark, and a flash would have washed out the photos,” Father Tiso says. “People criticize the research, saying, ‘Well you didn’t do this or that,’ and of course, it’s unscientific. But there is an interface between what we might call mystical phenomena and observable phenomena that one day may be documented.”
The interface Father Tiso is referring to is the contentious place where people are searching for proof of the existence of the human soul. What information counts as evidence depends on how you define “evidence.” On one side there are the mystical phenomena reported by serious practitioners in all spiritual traditions. These experiences cannot easily, if at all, be measured or tested by scientific methods. On the other side are observable phenomena—the backbone of empirical experimentation—that so far have given only the vaguest hints of a consciousness that persists outside of the physical body. History is filled with attempts to prove that the soul is real. In 1921 physician Duncan MacDougall devised the famous “21 grams” experiment to detect the exit of the soul from the body by measuring how a person’s weight changes immediately after death. He monitored six deaths and reported that the people lost anywhere between 11 and 43 grams at death (not always 21 grams as is popularly reported), which he took as the material weight of the soul. Follow-up experiments failed to replicate MacDougall’s findings, and some researchers attributed the weight loss to straightforward processes like the evaporation of water from the body.
Nevertheless, Gerard Nahum, a physician and director of medical affairs for the pharmaceutical company Berlex, has been working on a different kind of follow-up experiment for the past two decades. All you need, according to Nahum, is an extremely sensitive scale and an array of electromagnetic sensors. “In principle, it’s a pretty simple experiment,” he says. He proposes surrounding the body with a spherical array of electromagnetic detectors (microwave, infrared, X-ray, gamma ray) to pick up any type of escaping energy. “When a conscious entity dies,” Nahum says, “all of what’s embodied in it cannot just simply disappear. It needs to either be transformed into something else within our space-time, or it needs to transcend its existence here and move on to someplace else where it could potentially remain intact.”
Nahum has tried to sell his idea to engineering, physics, and philosophy departments at Yale, Stanford, and Duke universities; they all turned it down. Even the Catholic Church took a pass. “They didn’t see that there was a significant upside to performing this type of experiment because they already knew what the answer would be,” Nahum explains. Researchers in England, the Netherlands, and the United States are searching for the soul in a different way, focusing on experiential as well as material evidence. At places like the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, researchers examine various aspects of consciousness to see if it functions independently of the physical brain, implying the existence of an independent life spirit.
