In September 1998, a Tibetan Buddhist master named Khenchen Tsewang Rigdzin died in eastern Tibet. Over the days that followed, witnesses reported that his body began to shrink. Light was seen emanating from the room. A fragrance, described by those present as unlike anything natural, persisted through the process. By the time it was complete, only hair and nails remained.
The case was formally investigated by Father Francis Tiso, a Catholic priest holding a doctorate in Tibetan Buddhism from Columbia University, operating under Vatican academic auspices. Tiso interviewed multiple witnesses, assessed the physical evidence, and drew a direct parallel, explicitly and on record, between what he had documented and the resurrection of Christ. His collaborator, the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast, framed what that parallel meant: not that the rainbow body proves Christianity, nor that the resurrection proves Dzogchen, but that if this is documented and recurring, it belongs to human capacity rather than supernatural exception.
Older Than the Record
The rainbow body—jalü in Tibetan—is the stated endpoint of Dzogchen practice, a discipline whose name translates as Great Perfection. It is a systematic training, built around a single recognition: that beneath the ordinary movement of thought lies rigpa, pure awareness, the fundamental nature of mind. The entire path is oriented toward stabilising that recognition until it becomes unbroken, and the body follows.
That lineage runs deeper than the name suggests. Dzogchen itself predates Tibetan Buddhism. It is indigenous to the Bön tradition, the pre-Buddhist spiritual system of the Tibetan plateau. Bön predates Buddhism by an unknown span of time, and its origins reach beyond any dateable record. When Buddhism arrived in Tibet in the seventh century, it encountered this teaching already there, already fully formed.
The practice divides into two stages that must be undertaken in sequence. The first, trekchö, meaning to cut through, establishes the foundation: resting in rigpa without grasping, allowing thoughts to arise and dissolve without reinforcing their solidity. Built on that foundation comes tögal, direct crossing, which works with light itself. Practiced through sky gazing and in periods of complete darkness, using specific body positions and directed gazes, tögal is understood to allow the body’s inner luminosity to manifest outward as visible phenomenon.
The Practice and Its Endpoint
Through tögal, four progressive visions unfold. Spheres and chains of rainbow-coloured light appear in the visual field, then intensify, then take on complex luminous forms, before dissolving back into the expanse. Completing all four visions is what makes the rainbow body possible at the moment of death. The tradition’s understanding is precise: the physical body is composed of five elements—earth, water, fire, air, and aether—and through the completion of the path, those elements revert to their primordial state as five pure lights.
From these visions, the signs at death follow directly. The body does not decay but begins to shrink, with the standard Tibetan measure set against the length of a forearm, while rainbow light appears in the surrounding space. A fragrance described across accounts as sweet and wholly unlike anything found in nature persists through the process and often beyond it. Hair and nails remain. The process typically unfolds over several days.
In the higher attainment, the Rainbow Body of Great Transference, jalu powa chemo, nothing remains at all. Padmasambhava, who brought Dzogchen to Tibet in the eighth century, is held to have attained this form, as did Vimalamitra. The Bön master Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen’s Heart Drops of Dharmakaya contains direct eyewitness accounts of disciples whose bodies shrank as rainbows appeared in the sky at their deaths. Dudjom Lingpa, a nineteenth-century master, is documented with thirteen disciples attaining rainbow body.
Within Living Memory
Khenchen Tsewang Norbu, one of the most respected Nyingma masters of the twentieth century, died in 2023. Witnesses reported the same sequence: the body reducing over days, rainbow light, the distinctive fragrance, the physical residue limited to hair and nails. In the case of Khenpo A Chö, the master Tiso investigated, the local Chinese press reported the body had shrunken to the size of a bean by the eighth day and disappeared entirely by the tenth. Within living memory, the phenomenon continues.
The Same Observation, Every Continent
The Tibetan record is far from alone. The Hebrew scriptures return to this phenomenon repeatedly, across centuries and different figures. Moses descended from Sinai with his face radiating light so intense he had to veil it before the people. The prophet Elijah does not die. Before his disciple Elisha, he is taken up in a whirlwind of fire, his physical form simply dissolving from the world. And in the New Testament, the Transfiguration places Christ on a mountain with three witnesses: his face shone like the sun, his garments became white as light, a luminous cloud descended. Each describing light emanating from within the body as a witnessed physical event.
The Shroud of Turin, examined by forty scientists in 1978, preserves what the physical evidence suggests is an energy release from within the body at the moment of death. It may be the same event the Tibetan tradition has been documenting for centuries. The Egyptian sahu, the Hermetic pneuma, the Sufi latifa: each describes a luminous refined form of the physical body, cultivated through specific discipline, capable of persisting beyond ordinary death.
Yet the standard explanation is convergent myth: human beings confronted with mortality independently construct similar consoling narratives. That reading becomes difficult to sustain the more precisely the accounts align. Consolation does not typically produce matching physical detail across unconnected civilisations—the shrinking, the light, the fragrance, the residue. The deeper question is whether these traditions were ever as unconnected as that explanation requires. If the Old World was more connected than the official timeline allows, a shared body of knowledge about the body’s luminous nature is precisely what we should expect to find distributed through its remnants, preserved in whatever institutional language each culture had available to hold it.
The Body Is Already Light
The rainbow body becomes less extraordinary when placed alongside what the body is already doing.
Fritz-Albert Popp, a German biophysicist, demonstrated from the 1970s onward that living cells emit coherent light: measurable photons, structured and ordered in ways that distinguish them from ordinary heat radiation. What Popp found was not a biological side effect but a regulated system, the body actively managing its own luminosity. Healthy cells emit less light and more coherently. Stressed or damaged cells emit more but with less order. The body is luminous, managing that luminosity as a continuous feature of being alive.
The coherence finding carries further. Popp observed that cancer cells lose this regulation, emitting more light but chaotically, the ordered field breaking down into noise. Health, in biophotonic terms, is coherence. What traditions across the world have called life force, prana, qi, the animating principle that living bodies carry and depleted bodies lack, may be precisely this: a coherent biophotonic field, actively maintained, tending toward order under conditions that support it and leaking into noise under conditions that do not. A life lived in stress, poor health, and distraction depletes that coherence gradually. A life oriented toward its cultivation preserves and deepens it.
A System Brought to Order
At death, that dynamic reaches its conclusion. As cellular regulation breaks down, the coherent field releases, and emission increases sharply. Whatever the body has been holding, quietly and coherently, throughout a lifetime, it releases at the end. A depleted field releases what remains of it. A maximally coherent field releases everything.
That state of maximum coherence is not, however, unique to the moment of death. Newborn babies carry a fragrance that adults find instinctively compelling and that no one has fully explained through chemistry alone. The rainbow body tradition documents a fragrance at the moment of dissolution, described consistently across centuries as sweet and wholly unlike anything natural. If biophotonic coherence has a sensory correlate, if a maximally ordered light-management system leaves a signature the nose detects as well as instruments measure, then the fragrance of new life and the fragrance at the moment of dissolution may be pointing at the same phenomenon from opposite ends. The infant has not yet leaked anything. The master has recovered what the world gradually takes.
What the Dzogchen tradition describes is a lifetime of practice oriented toward exactly this kind of coherence: rigpa stabilized until it becomes unbroken, the body’s luminous nature progressively clarified through trekchö and tögal until nothing remains that obscures it. In biophotonic terms, it is a description of a system being brought to its maximum possible order. The rainbow body is not the body becoming something it is not. It is the body becoming fully what it already is: its light, held coherently across a lifetime of practice, released completely at the moment of death.
