To Hell and Back, Again

Alyson Prude, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Georgia Southern University

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey

Delog (‘das log) is a Tibetan word meaning “died and returned.” It refers to people who seem to die but revive several days later to describe postmortem realms and deliver messages from and about the recently deceased. 

Seated on the earthen floor of a small farmhouse on a hill high above Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, Maya relayed the fate of a woman who had been forced to eat food purchased with illicit funds. “She fell into hell for three years. Three years! It was food some Sherpas had bought with money earned from human trafficking… ‘You won’t eat our food? Then what will you eat?’ they demanded, and they kept at her, pulling her hair and forcing her face into the food.” Even though it was against her will, sharing the profits of human trafficking led the woman to be reborn in hell. “We shouldn’t sin,” Maya reflected. “People shouldn’t sell their sons and daughters to Bombay… saying they are sending them [abroad] for work.” 

Based on their firsthand reports of the afterlife, delogs may be compared to near-death experiencers, but after their first death journey, delogs continue to depart and return, often visiting the dead on a monthly schedule tied to the lunar calendar.

“When it’s time for me to go, I collapse. If I’m supposed to leave from here at two o’clock, I go at two o’clock. If I’m called for three o’clock, I go at three o’clock… Wherever I am at the time, I collapse right there,” Maya explained. She kept a straw mat close at hand to cushion her fall in case she lost track of the time. 

In a valley several days’ walk from Maya’s, Ebi described her repeated deaths as “a type of ‘order’ work,” an ongoing task she was “ordered” to complete. “It’s hard,” she attested. She had no control over how long her body lay cold and motionless while her consciousness toured the land of the dead. “I have to stay until they’re finished talking with me. They speak to me about this and that, and I have to listen properly.” Should she be distracted and fail to commit to memory the messages of the deceased, she would be beaten there in the postmortem realms, and once she revived, her body would bear marks of her punishments.

After their initial death experience, when and how often delogs return to visit the dead varies. Maya was summoned every new and full moon. For Ebi, new moons were too dark for undertaking a trip along an already dark route. She made her returns on full moons and on the tenth day of the lunar month, the day dedicated to Guru Rinpoche, the legendary Buddhist tantric master. 

Across the Himalayas in Tibet, Kunzang’s journeys were less frequent or predictable, and their timing could be problematic. At least once a year, Kunzang received a sign from the bodhisattva Drolma that indicated she best prepare. Drolma once appeared while Kunzang was imprisoned for crossing the border into India. “Again, it was time for me to die. There was a small window there [in the cell], and at midnight, Drolma came through it. Her body was green. She brought three pieces of fruit and a leaf of wild rhubarb… and told me to eat them… Then she was gone,” and Kunzang found herself in the land of the dead. 

Delogs’ travels to heavens and paradisical Pure Lands are pleasant. Maya relished her journeys upward to “God’s country” where she sang and danced, but her descents to the hell realms were arduous. Having witnessed the sufferings experienced by businessmen who cheated their clients and by monks who lived comfortable lives at the expense of hard-working benefactors, Maya would never have chosen to revisit hell. But she was commanded by God. 

The one that Maya called God, other delogs identified as the Dharma King, Lord of Death. In Tibetan Buddhist teachings, he is an impartial judge who oversees the weighing of the dead’s good and bad karma and decrees their next birth. Despite his terrifying appearance—buffalo-headed, crowned with skulls, surrounded by flames—he derives no satisfaction from dispatching sinners to a life in hell, so he employs delogs to warn people of the consequences of their actions. “The Lord of Death can’t go to the human world to speak to the living,” one lama explained, so he chooses someone to send back to life as a delog.

Again and again delogs return from death, serving as messengers between the dead and the living. In the Buddhist Himalayas, these spontaneous physiological crises transform into rituals, and what begin as involuntary physiological events become spiritual vocations compelled by forces beyond delogs’ control.

This Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.