Catholic priest on dark retreat, light, and the mystery between traditions: A conversation with Fr. Francis Tiso
Father Francis Tiso is a Catholic priest who has spent more than three decades studying and practicing within Tibetan Buddhism. Not as an observer of it, and not as a convert to it. He describes himself instead as a participant observer of his own faith and of the faith and practice of others, and he has the permissions to prove it: a confessor who told him to go ahead, Benedictine superiors who backed him, and a 1992 audience in which John Paul II pointed a finger at his chest and told him to continue this dialogue with the Buddhists.
The research that came out of that position began with a friendship. Tiso met Brother David Steindl-Rast in 1969 and later worked as his assistant. In 1998, word reached Brother David of the death of Khenpo A Chö in eastern Tibet, whose body was reported to have dissolved over eight days beneath a covering cloth. Brother David, then in dialogue with the Jesus Seminar and looking for anything that might reopen the question of the resurrection, sent Tiso to find out what had happened.
Tiso went to Tibet in 2000. He did not publish until 2016. What took those sixteen years, he explains here, was working out how to tell the story in a way that would be honest to the Nyingma and Bonpo traditions, to New Testament scholarship, and to the methods of anthropology all at once. The answer, when it came, arrived partly through a body of literature almost nobody reads: the Syriac Christian mystics of the seventh and eighth centuries, who wrote to one another about discs of light and a crystal ringed in gold appearing as the mind grew purer. They were describing, a century before Dzogchen took its recognizable form in Tibet, something close to what Tibetan contemplatives would later describe.
We recorded this conversation two weeks after Tiso returned from Brother David's hundredth birthday in Austria, and days after he emerged from four and a half days alone in total darkness at a retreat in Germany. He talks about both, including what he saw in the dark, and why he now suspects the Syriac monks were doing their practices in darkness too.
We also get into the Shroud of Turin and why Fa. Tiso thinks carbon dating no longer settles anything; biophotons and the small bursts of light inside living cells; the difference between the light that arises in tummo practice and the light that arises in a dark retreat; where Christian and Buddhist metaphysics genuinely part company, and where a Tibetan word for something very like sin turns up in tantric texts that translators would rather render some other way.
And near the end, the thing he seems most concerned that people miss. Every tradition, he says, has its penance and its ecstatic states, and everyone wants to talk about both. Almost nobody wants to talk about the middle term. Virtue. Whether, when someone arrives at your door in tears, all of your technique has made you the kind of person who can open it.
About Fr. Francis Tiso
Fr. Francis Tiso is a priest of the Diocese of Isernia-Venafro in Italy, where he serves as chaplain to migrant communities. He holds a doctorate from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, where he specialized in Buddhist studies, and teaches Tibetan Buddhism at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. From 2004 to 2009 he served as Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Books
Rainbow Body and Resurrection: Spiritual Attainment, the Dissolution of the Body, and the Case of Khenpo A Chö (North Atlantic Books, 2016)
Liberation in One Lifetime: Biographies and Teachings of Milarepa (North Atlantic Books, 2014)
Discerning Stirrings (En Route Books) — an account of his own formation in the Catholic tradition, drawing throughout on what he has learned from others. The title comes from a short medieval English text by the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing.
Mentioned in this episode
Br. David Steindl-Rast
Khenpo A Chö and the events in eastern Tibet, 1998
The Shroud of Turin, and Secondo Pia's 1898 photographic negative
The Syriac Christian mystics, and Isaac of Nineveh
Dzogchen, and the Six Yogas of Naropa
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
Shantideva, The Bodhisattva's Way of Life
Asanga and the Yogachara school
Dale Allison Jr. on the resurrection
Philippe Cornu's review of Rainbow Body and Resurrection
Ian Baker, Tibetan Yoga
Biophoton research
Thresholds of Consciousness is hosted by Scott Menasco, a transdisciplinary scholar and licensed therapist in Petaluma, California. New conversations twice monthly.