Abstract
AbstractThis article presents two cases from a collaborative study among Tibetan monastic populations in India on the postdeath meditative state called tukdam (thugs dam). Entered by advanced Tibetan Buddhist practitioners through a variety of different practices, this state provides an ontological frame that is investigated by two distinct intellectual traditions—the Tibetan Buddhist and medical tradition on one hand and the Euroamerican biomedical and scientific tradition on the other—using their respective means of inquiry. Through the investigation, the traditions
enact two paradigms of the body at the time of death alongside attendant conceptualizations of what constitutes life itself. This work examines when epistemologies of these two traditions might converge, under what ontological contexts, and through which correlated indicators of evidence. In doing so, this work explores how these two intellectual traditions might answer how the time course and characteristics of physiological changes during the postmortem period might exhibit variation across individuals. Centrally, this piece presents an epistemological
inquiry delineating the types of valid evidence that constitute exceptional processes post-clinical death and their potential ontological implications.
Funder
College of Letters and Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
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