Enlightenment After Death / Buddhism

There is a strange story about the teachers of Buddha which is told in the book, In the Buddha’s Words. This is the episode about how the Buddha studied under two teachers and when Buddha wanted to share his enlightenment process with those brahmins, he was told by supernatural beings that they were dead. The names of those teachers were Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta.

There are two enigmatic things about the story:

• Buddha did not give details about their processes which he mastered under their instruction
• Buddha did not share with them his discovery of a unique process of enlightenment because they were deceased by the time, he was qualified to teach it.

When the monks (led by Ananda) were told about the teaching Buddha got from those two teachers, details were not given but there hints about the processes where Buddha said that from Alara Kalama, he mastered the base of nothingness. From Uddaka Ramaputta, he mastered the base of neither perception nor non-perception.

Both systems were insufficient however because they were not such that gave the ascetic a state where there was no renewed existence.

In other words, whatever that base of nothingness is, it has renewed existence and the same goes for the base of neither perception nor non-perception.

Buddha wanted to reach a level where there would be no renewed existence. We can understand that by our current experience, where we see that an embryo is delivered from a mother in a new form but then it ages. Once it ages, it continues until its death. Then again, the person has to have a renewed state in the form of being reincarnated as a new embryo. And this process goes on to infinity unless that system of re-formation is broken somehow.

Supposedly Buddha found a way to break the cycle of renewal which is known otherwise as the cycle of birth and death or samsara.

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Now the strange thing is that the Buddha did not have a desire to teach the process of liberation he discovered but he was induced to do so by the Brahma deity. Once Buddha made the decision, he wanted to teach it to his former teachers, especially since he scanned the world and found that only a few people may be qualified enough to use the process. However, as it came to his mind to teach those former teachers of his, some deities, supernatural beings, told him that those teachers were dead.

This is strange because at the time Buddha was using the divine eye which is a psychic vision which can range over the worlds. And still there is no mention of Buddha reaching either of the two former teachers. There is no mention of where they were located in which astral or super-aster dimension or even if they merged out of this existence into some other formless or non-person state.

The question is: Why did the Buddha not locate those two teachers and give them the process of enlightenment which he discovered and which supposedly allowed for having no need for a renewed existence?

Is it that those persons could not be assisted once they departed from their physical bodies?

My interest in this is based on recent experiences where I teach breath infusion and meditation to some deceased persons. Some of these did not do the practice while using the last physical form. But some did. I do not see that the death of the physical body deprives anyone of doing yoga practice. I do know however that if one is transferred to some astral or super-astral place where one is isolated, there may be little possibility of one having any notion of practice, or one may assume a higher practice in that other place, making it unnecessary for one to learn from a person who uses a physical body.