We will be entering a discussion on the concept of attaining a “Rainbow Body” in either next week or the following week’s Saturday discussion of Expounding the Absolute Truth through the Heart Sutra. I wanted to provide some background information for those of you who are not familiar with the concept. I and many others are fascinated with this concept and the Buddha Master sheds light on what it is and isn’t and how you can achieve it and can’t. What this BLOG article will offer is what others–even non-Buddhists–are saying about it. I am not offering any assessment of the validity of any of these articles, but providing them as background on what is current about the matter. When I started researching this phenomena over 20 years ago, I could find almost nothing. It is fairly well known that there are records of 100,000 who achieved this level at the Kathok monastery in Tibet and another 60,000 at the nearby Dzogchen monastery. Now we have more stories, but very few from recent times.
The book above, Rainbow Body and Resurrection: Spiritual Attainment, the Dissolution of the Material Body, and the Case of Khenpo A Cho, is by a Catholic priest, Father Francis Tiso, who has a PhD in Tibetan Buddhism from Columbia with a thesis on Milarepa. He became fascinated with the idea that the Rainbow Body might explain what happened to Jesus and that it was the result of a spiritual practice that could be learned. Through a series of very serendipitous events, he found himself in Tibet interviewing Lama Achuk, the master of Khenpo A Cho who left this world in 1998 as an abundance of rainbows.
I frankly was disappointed in the above book, billed as a Christian perspective on the rainbow body phenomena. Maybe this was because I had followed Father Tiso when he was a humble priest in I think Marin County and first went to Tibet to research the Rainbow Body. As I remember it, He claimed that Lama Achuk (I think he spelled it differently) already partially had the Rainbow Body himself when he visited him. However, I would be amiss not to mention the book as it is the only thing that I am aware of that does link the process to Christianity. Michael Sheely does give a review of the book in the 2016 issue of Buddhadharma that is also in the March 7, 2018 issue of Lion’s Roar under the title of “Investing the Rainbow Body.” This article does provide a listing of others who achieved this level of realization, including Lama Achuk. However, I do not believe Lama Achuk did achieve that level, but did experience the body shrinking as noted later.
There is a detailed account of Khenpo A-Chos (A Cho) located at our Xuanfa Institute website on “The Most Superb Manifestation of the Rainbow Body at the End of the Twentieth Century,” that I do recommend.
I also recommend two earlier articles from our Xuanfa Institute website on Father Tiso: one by Gail Bernice Holland in IONS Noetic Sciences Review in 2002, “The Rainbow Body,” that gives the history of how Father Tiso became interested in the Rainbow Body phenomena and another that is a summary of a talk given by Father Tiso in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001 titled “The Tibetan Rainbow Body & the Christian Resurrection.”
Lama Achuk (1927-2011), known as H.H. Dharma King Omniscience Jamyang Lungdok Gyaltsen Achuk Lama in the big blue book H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III, A Treasury of True Buddha Dharma (G01(A)), entered samadhi and recognized our Buddha Master as an incarnation of Venerable Vimalakirti, who was also an incarnation of Dorje Chang Buddha. H. H. Jamyang Lungdok Gyaltsen or Lama Achuk (Also referred to as Khenpo Achuck Brioche or Achiu Kamabu or Lama A-chos) is an incarnation of the great terton Rigdzin Longsal Nyingpo (1625-1682) of Kathok Monastery. He was the head of the Nyingma Sect in China and the foremost person of great holiness and virtue in all Tibet.
Lama Achuk was born in 1927 in Eastern Tibet and spent 43 years in retreat with his master, Tulku Arik Rinpoche. On July 23, 2011 he entered into paranirvana. His Holiness lived at Yarchen Uddiyana Meditation Monastery, an encampment (gar) of thousands of monks, nuns, and lay practitioners, that he established in an isolated valley near Ganzi (Kandze) in Baiyu (White Jade) County, in Sichuan Province, China. This was the largest concentration of rinpoches and lamas in the entire world. The cremation ceremony of Lama Achuk commenced on August 29, 2011. The body of Lama Achuk shrunk from a height of almost six feet (1.8 meters) to about 1 inch tall, a sign of very high realization. From time of Lama Achuk’s paranirvana to the cremation, many auspicious signs appeared, five colored rainbows were often sighted in the sky and five colored pure lights often appeared in the area surrounding Lama Achuk’s body. More than 100,000 sangha members and lay devotees attended the puja and paid respect to the sacred body of Lama Achuk. As noted above, one of his disciples, Khenpo A-chos, achieved the rainbow body earlier in 1998. Father Tiso, a Catholic priest who went to Tibet to investigate the rainbow body phenomena at the suggestion of the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast, found evidence that H. H. Lama Achuk himself had already achieved the rainbow body as well.
There is an article in the Xuanfa Institute Archives on Ayu Khandro Dorje Peldron (1839-1953) that has been reported in a number of places on a female Dzogchen adept who also experienced the body shrinking. The article listed here is taken from The Treasury of Lives: A Biographical Encyclopedia of Himalayan Region.
I found what I thought was going to be a Wikipedia article on the Rainbow Body, but it turned out to be a reference to a popular classical musical composition of the same name. What is also on Wikipedia is an article on the Rainbow body, which defines it as a level of Dzogchen realization. It contains links to other articles many already covered in this BLOG.
There is another article on that website about certain disciples seeing and realizing the Rainbow Body State linked to the Xian Liang Great Perfection Dharma Initiation that document the experience of very senior practitioners who follow H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III.
There is an article provided by Jinghan on our temple website about “The True Story of Khenchen Tsewang Rigdzin” that took place in China in 1958 during the cultural revolution. I have heard that this sort of thing was not so unusual. When the Communist tried to capture or imprison these great yogis they would turn into light and fly away, resulting in some pretty hilarious and absurd situations.
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