Suppose a person is about to die. This critical stage may be compared to the flickering of a lamp just before it is extinguished.
To this dying man is presented by
a Kamma, a Kamma Nimitta, or Gati Nimitta.
By Kamma is here meant some good or bad action committed during his lifetime, or immediately before his dying moment. Kamma Nimitta, or symbol, means a mental reproduction of any sight, sound, smell, taste, touch or idea which dominated at the time of the commission of some salient activity, good or bad, - such as a vision of knives or dying animals, in the case of a butcher, patients, in the case of a kind physician: an object of worship, in the case of a devotee and so forth.
By Gati Nimitta, or "symbol of destiny" is a meant some sign of the place where he is to take rebirth. Such a symbol frequently presents itself to dying persons and stamps its gladness or gloom upon their features. When these indications of the future birth occur, and if they are bad, they might at times be remedied. This is done by influencing the thoughts of the dying man. Such premonitory visions of destiny may be fire, forests, mountainous regions, a mother's womb, etc.
Death according to Buddhism is the
cessation of the psycho-physical life of any one individual existence. It takes place by the passing away of vitality (ayu), i.e. psychic and physical life (jivitindriya), heat (usma) and consciousness (vinnana).
Death is not the complete annihilation of a being, for though the particular life-span ended, the
force which hitherto actuated it is not destroyed.
Just as an electric light is the outward visible manifestations of invisible electric energy, even so we are the outward manifestations of invisible Kammic energy. The bulb may break, and the light may be extinguished, but the current remains and the light may be reproduced in another bulb. In the same way, the Kammic force remains undisturbed by the disintegration of the physical body, and the passing away of the present consciousness leads to the arising of a fresh one in another birth. But nothing unchangeable or permanent "passes" from the present to the future.
Just as the wheel rests on the ground only at one point even so, strictly speaking, we live only from one thought-moment. We are always in the present, and that present is ever slipping into the irrevocable past. Each momentary consciousness of this ever-changing life-process, on passing away, transmits its whole energy, all the indelibly recorded impressions, to its successor. Every fresh energy consciousness therefore consists of the potentialities of its predecessors and something more. At, death, the consciousness perishes, as truly is does every moment, only to give birth to another in a rebirth. This renewed consciousness inherits all the past experiences. As all impressions are indelibly recorded in the ever-changing palimpsest-like mind and as all potentialities are transmitted from life to life, irrespective of temporary physical disintegrations, reminiscence of past births or past incidents becomes a possibility. If memory depends solely on brain cells, it becomes an impossibility.
The continuity of the flux, at death, is unbroken in point of time, and there is no breach in the stream of consciousness. The only different between the passing of one thought to another in lifetime and of the dying thought-moment to the rebirth consciousness, is that in the latter case a marked perceptible physical death is patent to all.