Comments on the Bardo in The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen

[90] Thus one must seek to "regard as one this life, the next life, and the life between, in the Bardo." This was a last message to his disciples of Tibet's great poet-saint the Lama Milarepa, born in the tenth century, in the Male Water-Dragon Year, to a woman known as "the White Garland of the Nyang." Milarepa is called Mila Repa because as a great yogin and master of "mystical heat" he wore only a simple white cloth, or repa, even in deepest winter: his "songs" or hortatory verses, as transcribed by his disciples, are still beloved in Tibet. Like Sakyamuni, he is said to have attained nirvana in a single lifetime, and his teaching as he prepared for death might have been uttered by the Buddha:

All worldly pursuits have but the one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings, in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death. Knowing this, one should from the very first renounce acquisition and heaping-up, and building and meeting, and ... set about realizing the Truth.... Life is short, and the time of death is uncertain; so apply yourselves to meditation. . . .

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