Introduction: Embodying a Liberated Mind at Death

Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (2025) 49:405–415 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-025-09918-3 Introduction: Embodying a Liberated Mind at Death Tawni L. Tidwell1 Accepted: 17 May 2025 / Published online: 10 June 2025 © The Author(s) 2025 Abstract The Tukdam Project directed by affective neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2013 has investigated Buddhist practitioners in India entering a Tibetan Buddhist post-death meditative state called tukdam (Tib., thugs dam), where the body demonstrates attenuated decomposition and presents an altered postmortem chronology process. Through a collaboration of Buddhist monastics, Tibetan medical physicians, and biomedical researchers as well as neuroscientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences led by Svyatoslav Medvedev since 2020 and India-based National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) Centre for Consciousness Studies since 2022, an international collaborative team has investigated the phenomenon from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural lens. Yet, despite the varied paradigms and intellectual lineages of the research teams, they have skillfully employed instruments of knowledge, markers of physiological processes, definitions of consciousness, and varied paradigms of ontological and epistemological realities in Euroamerican traditions of biomedicine and science and Indo-Tibetan traditions of Buddhism and medicine. This special collection explores perspectives from the anthropologists who have served as researchers, managers, and leaders of the Tukdam Project since its inception, striving to collaboratively integrate competing and synergistic investigative regimes in exploring the biocultural nexus of suspended life and embodied mind in meditated deaths of liberation. Keywords Death and dying · Ontology · Epistemology · Postmortem meditation · Tukdam · Tibetan Buddhism Guest Editor: Tawni L. Tidwell. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry Special Collection on: Liberating Mind at Death: Ontological Realities and Discourses with Science in Tibetan Tukdam Post-death Meditative State * Tawni L. Tidwell 1 Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 625 W. Washington Ave, Madison, WI 53703, USA Vol.:(0123456789) 406 Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (2025) 49:405–415 Introduction In the human condition, as for living beings everywhere, we all experience death. But how we die and what dying might mean for us spiritually, socially, and culturally—in our communities, families, and belief systems—varies greatly. Although people across all cultures arguably try to die well and seek conditions to “achieve” “good deaths” for themselves and relations near and dear, what a good death looks like might have different characteristics and conditions (Ariès, 1975; Hertz, 1960; Kaufman & Morgan, 2005; Seale & van der Geest, 2004). At the threshold of life and death, what constitutes life and what constitutes death, what underlies presence or absence of consciousness, and what animates mind embodied or mind released—the liminal suspensions of existence and being, have little consensus across cultural perspectives let alone in the Euroamerican biomedical tradition. How to facilitate or “choreograph” a good death and what purpose it might serve for the individual and their sociocultural context has significant variation (Stonington, 2020). In the Tibetan and greater Himalayan communities as well as among Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, the phenomenon of tukdam (Tib., thugs dam) is a meditative state achieved at the time of death. The individual appears radiant and alive for days to weeks at times beyond clinical death, bringing into stark relief the question of the demarcation of life as it transitions to death. From the Euroamerican perspective, it problematizes the “hard problem of consciousness” in the philosophy of mind of whether consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of the brain (Chalmers, 1995), a systemic integration of information for our conscious experience (Tononi, 2004), or otherwise. The state of tukdam prompts us to interrogate the potential social, ontological, and epistemological implications of a model of mind in the “age of the brain” where the brain is seen as a mere organ enacting the “chemistry and physics of the soul” implementing the current neuroscience maxim that “mind is what the brain does” (Davis & Scherz, 2022; Gazzaniga, 2018; Minsky, 1988; Pinker, 2009; Stone, 1997). Though changes in the brain attributed to meditation and other contemplative practices as well as spiritual experience have been a focal area of research the last several decades (Davidson, 2021; Davidson & Dahl, 2018; Davidson & Schuyler, 2015; Davidson et al., 2003; Goldberg & Davidson, 2024; Goldberg et al., 2018; Richter et al., 2024), little work has looked at how such practices might change the body, the processes of embodiment, and their culminating expression in the dying and post-death state. Recent work has sought to untether brain-centric views of consciousness by positing understandings of consciousness as expressing through embodied and socially embedded forms, cognition as enacted through “a complex set of capacities and situated agents” (Noe & Thompson, 2004), and mind as intersubjective and intercontextual in experience (Fuchs, 2013; Noë, 2010; Thompson & Varela, 2001; Varela, 1996; Varela et al., 1992; Worthman, 2009). These boundaries continue to be pushed and thresholds probed (Thompson, 2010, 2017). The phenomenon of tukdam highlights the possibilities and potentialities of cultural practices that center the seat of consciousness at the heart and enacts Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (2025) 49:405–415 407 not only how “culture gets under the skin” but epitomizes the life course possibilities of intentional forms of embodiment cultivations in the living (Worthman & Costello, 2009; Kirmayer et al., 2020; Worthman et al., 2023a, 2023b). It probes possibilities of affecting the expression of embodiment in the dying process and the critical embodied mind in all its phenomenological experiences described by spiritual traditions. Background As the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan community, has engaged in conversations and collaborations with scientists over the years (Lama, 2018; Lama et al., 1999), he has encouraged the investigation of the psychophysiology related to contemplative practices to provide evidence for their benefits and encouraged greater familiarity with the skills to support greater happiness and wellbeing globally. He also motivated the investigation of the specific phenomenon of tukdam as well, leading to the formation of the Tukdam Project, the history of which is recounted in this collection of papers. Why did he promote inquiry of this state? He proposed that understanding this phenomenon from the perspective of various scientific disciplines in the Euroamerican tradition could shed light on this hard p (...truncated)