Nothing Happens

"Nothing Happens."
~ His Holiness The 16th Gyalwa Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje

“The third time I saw His Holiness was near Chicago, in a cancer hospital in Zion, Illinois, at the time when he died. People there — the hospital staff as well as visitors-were just completely overwhelmed by him. To appreciate this, you have to keep in mind that ICU [intensive care unit] personnel are typically quite jaded. They see death all the time, and this is their work — and the reason they are good is that they aren’t too affected by it, they can ‘take care of business.’ So to see a staff like that be so overwhelmed by His Holiness’ gentleness was very impressive. And that is what happened. Most of them were Christian, and none of them knew the first thing about Buddhism, but they had no hesitancy whatever in calling him His Holiness. They never once said, ‘Karmapa,’ it was always ‘His Holiness.’ And people, after a while, couldn’t understand how he wasn’t having pain or responding in the way people do in his situation. Then they began to just feel so much concern about taking care of him…

The staff couldn’t stop talking about his compassion and about how kind he seemed. After four or five days, the surgeon — a Filipino Christian — came up to me and he said, ‘You know, every time I go in to see His Holiness, I feel like I am naked and that he sees me completely and I feel like I should cover myself up.’He kept saying to me, ‘You know, His Holiness is not an ordinary man. He really doesn’t seem like an ordinary person.’ And everybody kept having that experience before his final days. Just the force of his will and his presence were so powerful, that they were completely taken with it. This was a continuation of what I had experienced in New York, which was that he just kept going, and whether he was in shock or eating grapes, there was some complete unchangeability about his state of mind that radiated to everybody, and no one knew how to compute it.

His Holiness really seemed to have changed a lot of the staff of doctors and nurses. As it was, we left books for them, and beyond that, people were saying to me, ‘You know, I am Christian and I don’t believe in Buddhism, but I have to say the His Holiness is a very unusual person.’ They said this almost apologetically, not knowing how to combine both beliefs, but so obviously and deeply touched by His Holiness. As the days went on, His Holiness seemed to deteriorate physically.

One day after examining him and finding that drastic deterioration had set in, I came out and said, ‘His Holiness has two hours to live, maybe three hours.’ He had every symptom I have seen in that situation, and he was going downhill very rapidly. Every system was failing. He was having trouble breathing, he was vomiting up blood and coughing up blood, his blood pressure was dropping, even on blood pressure support medication. When you have worked with a lot of critically ill patients, you get a very definite feel when a patient is about to go. You just feel it because you see the stress their body is under, and you know that it won’t be able to carry on much longer. You know they are going to collapse. And so I could just feel it. I said, ‘We should wake him up if you feel a letter is important.’ And so I woke him up with some medication that we have that reverses some of the sleepiness. “The tulkus said, ‘Will you excuse us, now we need to talk to His Holiness in private.’ They came out in about forty-five minutes and they said, ‘Well, His Holiness said that he is not going to die yet, and he laughed at us. He laughed at us!’ They said that a few times, ‘He just laughed at us. And he said, ‘Don’t give me that pad. I am not writing any letter.’

I walked into the room and he was sitting up in bed. Just up.  And his eyes were wide open and the force of his will was immense, and he turned to me and said in English (of which he knew only a few phrases), ‘Hello. How are you?’ And within thirty minutes, all his vital signs got stable and to a normal level, and he stopped bleeding. I walked out after about an hour of being in the room, and one of the staff from the intensive care unit came up and he said, ‘Look at my arms.’ and I looked and he had goose bumps all up and down his arms. No one had ever seen anything like this in their lives. The force of his will was so  strong, and he wasn’t ready to die yet. I am completely convinced that he willed himself back into stability. I had never seen anything remotely resembling this, or even read or heard about such a thing.

The reaction of the young tulkus was interesting. They interpreted my telling them His Holiness was dying as me panicking.  Maybe it was part of their not wanting to let His Holiness go. But I have seen enough so that I was just telling them what was going on. He was dying. I knew it. Everyone on the staff knew it. And yet, he woke up and just sat up. He literally opened his eyes and he willed himself back to health. He filled his body out with his will. Visually, I could almost see his will coming out of his body. I have never experienced anything like that. Trungpa Rinpoche later said to me, ‘Now you see what is really possible.’ It was almost as if someone had unplugged the monitors and fiddled with them and then plugged them back in, and they were normal. The blood pressure was normal. He stopped bleeding, but not from anything that we had given him; he just turned the whole process around. After that, he was healthy for another nine or ten days. He was completely stable.

After this, it became a running joke in the hospital that we should let His Holiness write his own orders. We should just bring in the order book at the beginning of the day and say, ‘What would you like us to do today?’ The whole intensive care unit staff way saying, ‘Well, what does he want done today?’ Then about nine or ten days later, suddenly his blood pressure dropped precipitously, and we couldn’t get it back up with drugs. I said, ‘This is very bad.’ By this time, the intensive care unit almost had a chalk board, and everyone said, ‘Chalk up another one for His Holiness.’ It really became almost humorous. Given a patient with terminal cancer and diabetes and massive infection in his lungs, already recovering from shock, to go into gram negative shock, someone in that condition just doesn’t come back, ever. And yet, here he was…

Then the day after that, he went into what we call respiratory failures, which was that his lungs weren’t working because he was so filled up with pneumonia. At this point it was clear that if we didn’t intubate him, he was going to stop breathing. We did that, and so prolonged that for thirty-six hours. Then early on the day he actually died, we saw that his monitor had changed. The electrical impulses through his heart had altered in a way that indicated that it was starting to fail. And so we knew, the surgeons knew, that something was imminent. We didn’t say anything to the Rinpoches. Then his heart stopped for about ten seconds… Finally, I gave him two amps of intra-cardiac epinephrine and adrenaline and there was no response. Calcium. No response. So we stopped and this was the point as which we finally gave up. I went outside to make the call to Trungpa Rinpoche to tell him that His Holiness had died.

After that, I came back into the room, and people were starting to leave. By this time, His Holiness had been lying there for maybe fifteen minutes, and we started to take out the NG tube, and as someone goes to pull the nasal gastric tube out of his nose, all of a sudden I look and his blood pressure is 140 over 80. And my first instinct, I shouted out, ‘Who’s leaning on the pressure monitor?’ I mean, I was almost in a state of panic: ‘Who’s leaning on the pressure monitor?’ I said to myself, ‘Oh, no, here we go again.’  Because I knew that for pressure to go up like that, someone would have to be leaning on it with… well, it wouldn’t be possible. Then a nurse almost literally screamed, ‘He’s got a good pulse! He’s got a good pulse!’ And one of the older Rinpoches slapped me on the back as if to  say, ‘This is impossible but it’s happening!” His Holiness’ heart rate was 80 and his blood pressure was 140 over 80, and there was this moment in that room where I thought that I was going to pass out.

And no one said a word. There was literally a moment of ‘This can’t be. This can’t be.’ A lot had happened with His Holiness, but this was clearly the most miraculous thing I had seen. I mean that this was not just an extraordinary event. This would have been an hour after his heart had stopped and fifteen minutes after we had stopped doing anything. After this happened, I ran out of the room again to call Trungpa Rinpoche and tell him that His Holiness was alive again. ‘I can’t talk. Goodbye.’ To me, in that room, it had the feeling that His Holiness was coming back to check one more time: could his body support his consciousness?’ He had been on Valium and morphine, and that disconnected him from his body. It felt to me that, all of a sudden he realized his body had stopped working, so he came back in to see if it was workable. Just the force of his consciousness coming back started the whole thing up again — I mean, this is just my simple-minded impression, but this is what it actually felt like, in that room. His heart rate and blood pressure kept up for about five minutes, then it just petered out. It felt as if he realized that it wasn’t workable, that his body couldn’t support him anymore, and he left, he died.

Trungpa Rinpoche arrived at the hospital shortly after that, not knowing whether His Holiness was alive or not. So I had to tell him that he had died. And that was it. Those were his comebacks, which were very remarkable. Even in death, His Holiness did not cease to amaze the Western medical establishment At forty-eight hours after his death, his chest was warm right above his heart. This was how it happened. Situ Rinpoche [one of the younger tulkus] took me into the room where His Holiness was lying. First I had to wash my hands completely and put a mask on. And Situ Rinpoche walks in and puts his robe over his mouth, as if even breathing might disturb the samadhi of His Holiness. And he took my hand, and he put my hand in the center of His Holiness’ chest and then made me feel it, and it felt warm.

And it’s funny, because since I had washed my hands in cold water, my Western medical mind said, ‘Well, my hands must still be a little cold.’ So I warmed my hands up, and then I said to Situ Rinpoche, ‘Could I feel his chest one more time?’ He said, ‘Sure,’ and he pulled down His Holiness’ robe and put my hand on his chest again. My hands were warm at this point, and his chest was warmer than my hand. To check, I moved my hand to either side of his chest, and it was cool. And then I felt again in the middle, and it was warm. I also pinched his skin, and it was still pliable and completely normal. Mind you, although there is some variation, certainly by thirty-six hours, the skin is just like dough. And after forty-eight hours, his skin was just like yours and mine. It was as if he weren’t dead. I pinched his skin, and it went right back. The turgor was completely normal.

Shortly after we left the room, the surgeon came out and said, ‘He’s warm. He’s warm.’ And then it became, the nursing staff was saying, ‘Is he still warm?’ After all that had happened, they just accepted it. As much as all that had happened might have gone against their medical training, their cultural beliefs, and their religious upbringing, by this point they had no trouble just accepting what was actually occurring. This is, of course, quite in keeping with traditional Tibetan experience, that realized people like His Holiness, after their respiration and heart have stopped [the outer dissolution], abide in a state of profound meditation for some time [the ‘ground luminosity’ that follows the inner dissolution,] with rigor mortis not setting in during that period. One thing I should mention is the quality of the room where he was lying. The tulkus said, ‘His Holiness is in samadhi’ [i.e., resting in the dharmakaya of ground luminosity]. What people experienced in that room seemed to depend on varying levels of perception.

I asked Trungpa Rinpoche about it. He said that when he walked into that room, it was as if a vacuum had sucked out all the mental obstacles. There was no mental chatter. It was absolutely still. Everything was starkly simple and direct. He said that it was so one-pointed that there was no room for any kind of obstacle at all. And he said that it was absolutely magnificent. My experience wasn’t quite like that. To me, the air felt thin and there was a quiet that was unsettling in a way. There was no familiarity, no background noise. It was like being in some other realm, one that was absolutely still and vast. It was just His Holiness’ body in the center of the room, draped in his brocade robe, and you felt as if you didn’t even want to breathe. That was my experience. It felt as if anything I did would disturb that stillness. My actions screamed at me. I mean, all of my coarseness and vulgarity just shouted at me. It felt as if in each movement I made toward his body, I was hacking away at something thick to get through it. And everything I did was clumsy. And from a normal point of view, it wasn’t. I was just walking. But there was an air of stillness, an awareness in that room that was overpowering. I understood what Trungpa Rinpoche meant about vacuum, because it felt like that.

After about three days, His Holiness samadhi was still continuing.  It was interesting, because the doctors and nurses were as concerned as the younger tulkus that we leave his body there and not move it until the samadhi ended. This was unusual, because ordinarily when someone dies, hospital staff want to get rid of the body as quickly as possible. That’s just the way we do it in the West. After three days, the samadhi ended. You could tell because His Holiness was no longer warm, and rigor mortis finally set in. And also the atmosphere in the room changed, becoming more normal…

The entire experience had had very pronounced effects on everyone involved, especially the non-Buddhists, who were the majority of those there. Just to give one example, the assistant administrator, one of the people who had been close to these events, one night was reading in some of the books on Buddhism that someone had lent her. She came to me the next morning and said the thing that she liked about these books was that after reading them, they pretty much matched some conclusions that she had come to on her own. They really made sense to her. And so I think that people there made very powerful connections with His Holiness and Buddhism. It will be interesting to see who he brought in, even in his death…”

~ Dr. Mitchell Levy, the 16th Karmapa’s personal physician, was with Karmapa during the last remarkable moments of his life.

~ "The sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje (1924–1981) was spiritual leader of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He was born in Denkhok in the Dergé district of Kham (Eastern Tibet), near the Yangtze River.Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, as with all other Karmapas and tulkus, is accepted by Tibetan Buddhists as a manifestation of an enlightened being. The 16th Karmapa was very found of watches. He had a collection of various kind of watches. One of his favourite was a 1800s pocket watch, which he gifted to Gyan Jyoti." ~ Wikipedia