Original subtitles

I've probably seen several thousand dead bodies,

but this was something that I had never seen before.

I mean, to see a person being able to sit upright

completely on its own without caving into their own weight after being

dead for a day is something that will never happen.

If I just came into the room and sort

of casually looked at him, I would have thought he's meditating.

He was sitting and his skin looked extremely fresh.

I don't presume to understand it,

but I do know that this isn't something

that makes sense from the physiology of a human body that I was taught.

In what Tibetans call Tukdam,

advanced meditators die in meditation.

Their bodies don't show the usual signs of death

for days or even weeks.

According to Tibetan Buddhist tradition,

consciousness is still present.

There are such cases.

That's a phenomena.

We must sort of investigate how it happened.

An old monk has died ten days ago,

but his body is not putrefying as one

would expect in such warm summer weather

in the hills above Dharamshala.

By entering a deep meditative state

at the time of dying,

some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners are

allegedly able to arrest the physical processes of death.

The monk's body is checked daily

to see if he remains in the sacred state of Tukdam.

(reciting)

With the support of the Dalai Lama, a team of scientists has,

for the first time, been given permission to study Tukdam.

Anthropologist Dylan Lott is the manager

of the Tukdam project in India.

He leads a cross cultural multidisciplinary team working

in the Tibetan resettlement communities of India.

This particular retreatant was known

to one of the doctors on our team while he was alive.

And so he was amazed how much healthier he looked after his death.

And this was another instance where there's no fan, there's no AC.

It's a mud floor, a few robes and scarves to adorn the body.

But we were permitted to do inspections

of the full body both morning and evening

and to record the data that we needed,

which was spaced around the rituals that were being done in the room.

Mm-hmm.

Just still has such amazing integrity.

That should not be.

The Centre for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin Madison

has been at the forefront of research into meditation,

mindfulness and healthy emotions.

Its Tukdam project is the first

scientific investigation into the phenomenon.

The project is headed by neuroscientist

Richard Davidson some years ago named by Time Magazine

as one of the hundred most influential people in the world.

How important is the colour?

We don't really know the answer to that.

No. That's an important question to ask the forensic experts.

Okay. Anything else?

He was suggesting that we begin to look at the amount

of antibiotics that they've been given

and whether or not they've had meals within 8 hours of their dying

because that's going to affect decomposition greatly.

So we need to start gathering that information.

And how many Tukdam cases are there?

We have a total of...

twelve that I think

where we have a good number of days postmortem.

What would be ideal is before you left for India if we had a file

that contained images of all the twelve practitioners twice a day

with the indication of the number of days

post mortem that the image was taken,

the time of day and the ambient temperature of the room.

Yeah that would certainly be ideal.

If we use the standard and I would say relatively superficial

criteria of modern Western medicine

I think we can say they're clinically dead.

We can say that their brain is showing a flat line,

that there's no heart rate.

We confirm that with EKG and there's no breathing.

That we can say.

But whether we can say that there's no brain function,

no we cannot say that.

We don't know that yet.

One of the reasons why we're doing the work

we're doing is to determine if there may be

some more subtle kind of brain activity

that is responsible for the signs of Tukdam.

The fact that you see a flat line does not

necessarily mean that the entire brain is dead.

The Tukdam project traces its origins

to conversations that I had with the Dalai Lama concerning

the relationship between the mind and the brain.

And of course in modern Western neuroscience the mind

is regarded as, if you will, what the brain does.

I don't think anybody would deny that they are somehow

extremely importantly related,

but whether they should essentially be regarded

as one and the same is a question.

In the phenomenon of Tukdam, there is said to be the presence

of the most rudimentary form of awareness

which still occurs after the point at which

they would be considered dead by a conventional western definition.

So if any of that is true,

it would raise serious questions about

the mind and the brain and it would begin

to introduce some problems in that conception.

And so the Dalai Lama encouraged me to start studying Tukdam.

(prayer)

That person was doing meditation practice all their life.

And their meditation has to be very deep and very profound.

It has to be mind meditation,

meditation to recognise the nature of mind.

So meditation you become.

You are not meditating, but you become the meditation.

And at that moment then your body remains in very unusual state,

just like alive and mind goes into perfect state of meditation.

(reciting)

Tenga Rinpoche was the abbot of Benchen Monastery

with both legs amputated due to diabetes.

Rinpoche was in such a bad state before he died

that he could barely sit up.

In the end, he died sitting in Tukdam

and remained in the state for more than three days.

This is a common duration for Tukdam

and matches the Tibetan idea that a subtle aspect

of mind may stay in the body for up to three days after death.

In rare cases, Tukdam can even go on for weeks.

Vanessa Lopez is a mortician from New York City.

At the time of Tenga Rinpoche's death,

she was in Kathmandu helping to preserve

remains of westerners who had died in mountaineering accidents.

Rinpoche's followers invited her to check the body in Tukdam.

When I initially walked into the room,

I had no idea that there was a dead person

in that room, because nothing sort of told me that there was.

I looked around the room and there was

some monks that were sitting and they were praying,

and there was a man at the end

of the room just sitting in a meditative position.

And so I thought that he was just another person that was there

who was doing their meditation and their prayers

for the person who had died.

But then Tempa sort of pointed to me and told me, this is Tenga Rinpoche.

This is our teacher who has just recently died,

and we just want you to take a look at him.

And I was very shocked because to me it looked like

a person who was just sitting in a meditative position

and just he looked pretty much alive to me.

They told me, as soon as he comes out of his Tukdam state,

then we will be contacting you so that you

can perform some kind of an embalming procedure on him.

There are signs for the ending of Tukdam.

If the person was sitting, the body will slump

and the normal physical phenomena of death will appear as

if the postmortem process has been stalled and is now released.

For Tibetans, these are signs that the meditation has

concluded and consciousness has left the body.

After Tenga Rinpoche's Tukdam ended,

Vanessa was called to embalm the old llama.

I was pretty surprised to be able to see that his blood was flowing

as easily as it was, especially for a person who

had already been dead for about four days.

The color of it would definitely change into a darker sort of colour,

and his was still reddish, like the normal color of blood.

And the procedure went amazingly well

compared to what I was expecting.

Unlike Vanessa,

Tukdam project scientists have not

been able to look inside a Tukdam body so far.

Blood and tissue samples could shed light

on cellular mechanisms involved,

but Tibetan concerns over disturbing

the sacred state have so far prevented collecting samples.

Instead, the project has focused on recording EEG brainwave data

and documenting the body's physical state.

This also requires great cultural sensitivity,

which is something the project's Tibetan collaborators bring on board.

The project has worked closely with Dr. Tsetan,

the Dalai Lama's personal physician and director of Delek Hospital,

as well as with staff from

the Tibetan Medicine Clinic Men-Tsee-Khang.

When it first began, we did a few Tukdam cases with my staff in

Udelek Hospital then I thought, if there is a way to connect

medical science and Western science,

Men-Tsee-Khang should be the partner.

There is a very major cultural factor in this, I think.

And also having to deal with Tukdam

subjects is a very sensitive problem, issue.

So unless we have people who have some

standing in a community as a medical doctor or being of the same culture

Tibetan, it helps to relate much better to people who,

at a time of loss, wouldn't want to deal with any other person easily.

This one should last a long time.

You're only having it on for a few minutes.

You don't have to leave it on the whole session.

And do you have any kind of device to read the false map, false map?

I'm glad you asked that question.

I have been doing some reading lately on gas spectrometry

and trying to see what it would be like to get something like

that for the field and I will let you know as soon as I do.

Nitrogen level, whatever the gas. Right. It's from the body.

Yeah. How do we begin...

..interview with the students.

Okay.

We're gonna start this.

R for peri mortem, and P for postmortem.

including those we think were in Tukdam because part of that...

Basically, the core description that we get is they meditate on

the clear light at the moment of death,

and then they don't die all the way.

And what you see from the outside is that the heart stops

and the breathing stops, but the body stays warm,

especially around the heart, for a long period of time.

So for heartbeat, there's two obvious ways

of measuring heartbeat. One of them is you put electrodes on the chest,

and the other one is you use one of those finger clip things.

So we have both of those. For respiration,

there are two main ways of measuring respiration.

One of them is you put a belt around

the rib cage, and the other one is capnograph,

where you have a tube that picks up the gas

and sees that you're breathing.

And then we had two ways of measuring warmth,

and one of them was a thermometer probe

that you would tape on somewhere, or you use this thermal camera,

which has to look at the exposed skin.

So then we get to the really complicated

part that we spent a lot of time going in and out of it.

This is brain stuff.

When you're neuroscientist, then you come in

and you put an EEG on it and then you see what it looks like.

And then we have these other things about the decomposition, which

at first we thought was an unambiguously physical prediction.

But then after talking to the people who are actually the experts

on the physiology of death, we learned that under normal

circumstances, there's an enormous amount

of variability in how bodies decompose.

There are cases where the body has remained without decomposing

for quite a long period of time, in certain cases up to 16 or 17 days

in conditions where it's quite hot in terms

of the ambient temperature, tropical,

where you'd expect decomposition to clearly occur at a faster rate.

So we consider that to be unusual.

Whether it's within this normal range or not,

we really can't say at this point in time.

We have the questionnaire about his mental clarity

and then a little bit about his practice history

and then what brought him to this life of retreat.

It this must be from a living partition? Right.

This is from living retreatant we were working with most recently.

And so this is what... we still have to work on

getting the graphs here, but we're getting.

This is the mismatch negativity.

Mismatch negativity.

What's the difference between these two standards?

So the red would be the deviant, the green is standard,

and the black is the difference,

and it's being plotted in the negative here.

One strategy is to sample a very large number

of people when they're still alive.

Then we can classify them post op.

We'll have one group that went into Tukdam,

another group which did not.

We can go back to their predeath,

to their living signals and apply machine

learning algorithms, for example, and see if there are any patterns

which distinguish the individuals

who go on to Tukdam versus those who do not.

And then we can interrogate those patterns

and see what the differences are.

What is the difference in the brain of a person who, when he

or she dies, goes into Tukdam compared to when they do not?

When someone dies in Tukdam,

it's important to start recording data as soon as possible.

However, the distances in India are great,

and the deaths often occur in remote areas,

so it can take days for the team to reach the bodies.

There are also cultural reasons for delays.

Within the Tibetan tradition,

it's customary to wait three days after

someone has died before you begin moving ahead with cremation.

But at that point, you would also know

whether or not somebody is in Tukdam.

And so oftentimes, people will not reach

out to us until that third day.

when we collect EEG data, we do two auditory protocols

to ascertain whether or not there's some activity.

Increasingly, the two types of auditory stimuli

we're using are proving to be diagnostic and assessment

tools across a range of minimally conscious states,

coma vegetative states.

The contention is that at least for a time after death,

there's some residual brain activity in the brain stem

that's responsible for the integration of the body.

In the absence of that, then we have a different question.

It becomes another challenging question.

Well, if there is no low level residual activity

in the brain stem and those who are observing in the state of Tukdam,

then how do we explain this delay in decomposition?

So there's the warmth around the heart.

And there were four cases during the time that I was involved

and we only got clear thermal imaging data one of the times,

and they were stone cold that you could see

very clearly in the thermal imaging

that there's the wall and then the body

and everything is all the same colour.

There was no variation whatsoever.

And every day a group of devotees would

come in and would carefully inspect the person,

and they would feel carefully

with the back of their hand, and they would be commenting on it,

and then they would agree that the person was still in Tukdam.

The hardest to explain is if all

these people are... they're not crazy at all,

they are, in fact legitimately putting their hand there,

and they really sincerely are experiencing

the feeling of it being warmer than it should be,

and the camera is not malfunctioning.

And it really is definitely showing

that from the point of view of physics,

the thermal vibratory energy is the same in the body and the wall.

When the Tibetan tradition talks about Tukdam,

they don't have thermal imaging cameras.

So when they say the body stays warm, the specific statement

that the tradition is making is that when you touch the body

around the heart, you experience the feeling of warmth.

Everything that I've ever experienced is

completely consistent with the idea that people

experience Tukdam exactly the way

the tradition says that people experience Tukdam.

Nothing that I've observed has contradicted that at all.

The more time that I spent on this project, the more striking

was the contrast between, as long as you weren't trying to do

a whole bunch of hard science with equipment,

everything looked one way.

And then as soon as you start bringing

the equipment in and trying to nail everything down and take a bunch

of physical measurements, then it all falls apart.

Several medical doctors interviewed for this documentary

reported feeling warmth around the heart area

of deceased monks said to be in Tukdam.

These included doctors who looked after the 16th Karmapa,

one of the most important Tibetan spiritual leaders

of the 20th century.

He died in Tukdam in a hospital in Zion, Illinois, outside Chicago.

The area around his heart,

when you felt it put your hand on his chest,

still felt warm for the first two to three days after he died,

which obviously, from a western point of view,

is not consistent with what we would expect.

And then beyond that, he did begin to look better after he died.

His colour was better, face almost filled out in an odd way,

and his body was really strong looking.

And vibrant in a way that was very striking for me.

For me personally,

it's hard to explain except to say that there must be some ability

of an individual or some unintended ability of an individual's

capability of somehow delaying some sort of a metabolic process

or a natural process that we all undergo of degradation.

And how that's done in terms of its mechanism,

I can't really figure out. But to me, it seems

that there is some control by something over the physical world,

basically. It kind of defies that.

But then it comes down to the issue of whether one believes

in a consciousness or a mind that travels from one state

to the next state, leaving the physical body

some sort of a subtle state that science has yet to discover,

basically, that is capable of doing something like this.

There's definitely a mind over matter control there.

That's what I'm trying to get at, I think. You know?

(birdsong)

The Tukdam project also includes anthropological investigation

into the Tibetan Buddhist theories,

practices and ways of life that produce Tukdam.

An expert meditator in his high Himalayan retreat,

has agreed to an interview with Dylan.

So mind become totally empty.

Mind remains empty...

So when someone pronounces death, if they're in Tukdam,

the heart is not active, but the body is preserved in a way.

Why does the skin stay supple?

Why is the face radiant?

How is that connection, that little mind. That subtle mind.

After decades of studies in monastic colleges,

this monk has spent over 20 years in isolated meditation retreat.

He embodies a system of knowledge arising

from a cultural and historical background very different to ours.

Here, meditative experience also informs

views about consciousness and its subtler aspects

said to be separate from the brain.

This is what reincarnates, continuing from one life to the next.

Tukdam makes sense within this Tibetan system of knowledge,

but has proved challenging for science

with its own cultural assumptions.

It's probably pretty clear to everyone now,

but only gradually became clear to us that just all these questions

of the cultural differences and the different views of

what is medicine and what is the body

and how does the body relate to the mind and things like that that

are really just very deeply culturally different.

And a lot of the cultural differences were

the ones that are actually the foundation of Western science.

So it was a scientific project

that only made sense in the context of being able to understand

the cultural construction of science itself.

But part of the whole thing about cultural constructions

is that you can't understand them from inside of them

because when you're inside of them, then you're just inhabiting them.

So it was very jarring to deal with it all

because it was really more an anthropology project

with a neuroscience component rather than a neuroscience project, period.

Dr. Tumden. Dr. Tsetan, Welcome.

Welcome, the rest of the team.

I know things have been busy,

so I'm just going to jump right in to the research.

There's much more we can go over,

but I want to give the highlights of what we have. Okay?

I'll skip this a little bit because they're here.

So then what I decided to do was to try and compare

the healthy subjects that we have with the actual Tukdam data.

And so this is an example.

You can see there's not much that's happening for the red line,

the Tukdam line, but we're getting a

real clear signal for the practitioner.

We cannot prove rebirth, we cannot prove mind,

we cannot prove subtle mind.

What we can do is look at the effects of those practices

on the body that are unusual and that western science

or medical science doesn't have a good explanation for.

With the EEG approach,

it has to be within this first few hours.

Even if we get informed of twelve Tukdam in the next month,

if we're only knowing about it day five,

it's not going to change anything.

After a decade of research,

Richard Davidson's team published a null finding.

They have not found brain activity in Tukdam subjects so far.

The research effort continues.

A team associated with the Russian Academy

of Sciences and Moscow State University

have also started studying Tukdam

and are now collaborating with Davidson.

So really at kind of the most fundamental levels,

this work can begin to raise questions about the ultimate nature

of consciousness and where that might come from.

And these are some of the most profound

and deepest questions in philosophy and science today.

And in many ways this relates to what

philosophers have called the hard problem,

which is how is it that experience, subjective experience,

can arise from the material matter of the brain?

And I think that if we're honest with ourselves,

really deeply honest, I don't think that we've made much

progress on that question in the last hundred years.

And this work relates to that issue and begins to ask different kinds

of questions about it and raises the question of perhaps there

might not be a complete identity between the mind and the brain.

Clearly, they're intimately related.

Exactly how they're related, nobody really knows,

if we're really honest,

I think with our observations.

Subtitling RTE 2023.