ON THE HISTORY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF THE 'DAS-LOGambivalent. Shneidman ( 1973) has observed a "complicated clustering of intel-
lectual and affective states" with marked alternating mood swings in dying
patients. The Tibetan tradition, of course, postulates that the processes and
visions presenting at the time of death have dual meanings, whose interpretation
may lead either to rebirth or salvation. In the pre-trance state, the "das-log 's
report that they are torn between conflicting desires: hunger and nausea, wishing
to arise from their beds and immediately feeling like lying down again, wishing
for companionship but being unable to communicate, and so on.
Perhaps more important are the statements that we can garner concerning the
'das-log 's affective states. Several remark that although they had been inclined
to follow a religious life, they were frustrated through the demands of their
parents, etc., who wished them to marry. Byang-chub-sengge quite explicitly
names doubt over the veridicality of a vision as the cause of his illness (X, A:
53). He plainly has failed to achieve the mature communion of meditative
success. Regarding the story of others we can only hazard a guess. Long-wa
A-drung provides us with no direct evidence, but in the interval between his lin-
gering at home and Bardo we note that his sister calls him "elder brother" (XVI,
A: 156 ff.), yet she is living at home with an adoptive bridegroom (mag-pa) who
usurps A-drung's place at table. We can only note the ethnographic peculiarity
of this living arrangement and ponder why this young man of twenty-five has
not married and taken his place at the head of his household, i.e., failed to
achieve a mature social role. This theme-the failure to achieve social or reli-
gious maturity-is also supplemented by reports of undergoing early emotional
distress and disillusionment with the world in related literature. The famous
female incarnate, the last Shug-gseb Rje-btsun Rinpoche, reports that she also
underwent a 'das-log experience. She remarks that although her relationship to
her mother was good-like being in the womb (p. 31 ), her father was a dissolute
drunkard, whose cruelty to the mother and herself caused them to be continually
uprooted, in debt and other sorts of trouble (29 ff.). These incidents were fol-
lowed usually by family reconciliations, again providing us with a general back-
drop of psychosocial ambivalence. It is also significant that Rje-btsun Rinpoche
was familiar with several 'das-log stories, including A-drung's, which she
learned from the Royal Chaplain of Ladakh, Bkra-shis-rnam-rgyal, who also
preached the Mw:zi to her and her family (p. 45 ff.).
The most informative set of circumstances, however, comes from the biogra-
phy of Karma-dbang-'dzin. As her soul lingers, invisible and unheeded, in the
company of her husband and the friends who try to comfort him, she comes to
understand the duplicity of men and the treachery of attachment to them. She
successively hears some neighbors' nasty gossip about her; sees a servant who is
supposed to prepare tea for the mourners filch some for himself; hears a family
steward in a misbegotten attempt to sooth her husband say she was an undutiful
wife. She begs for food and drink, but ignored by her husband and the company,
who are seeming to make merry, she lays bare the sources of her ambivalance
and reveals the systematic stresses to which Tibetan womanhood is subject.