Devachan

Devachan (sometimes "dewachen") is a phonetic spelling of the Tibetan term བདེ་བ་ཅན་, (bde ba can or bde ba chen), first published by German scholar Emil Schlagintweit in his book Buddhism in Tibet (1863). The term can be translated as "blissful realm" or "pure land", and corresponds to the Mahayanic sukhāvatī or the Hindu devaloka or svarga.

In the Theosophical view, devachan is a stage in the post-mortem processes where the person enjoys the result of the good actions done in the life just finished, before coming back to a new incarnation. H. P. Blavatsky defines it as follows:

The “dwelling of the gods”. A state intermediate between two earth-lives, into which the EGO (Atmâ-Buddhi-Manas or the Trinity made One) enters, after its separation from Kâma Rupa, and the disintegration of the lower principles on earth.

General description

The devachan

Since devachan is described as a kind of temporary paradise, a place (or state) of bliss and of supreme felicity. it is sometimes confused with the religious concept of Heaven. However, due to the important differences that exist between the two concepts, Mahatma K. H. rejected such a comparison:

Nor has the latter [Devachan] —even omitting all “anthropomorphic ideas of God”— any resemblance to the paradise or heaven of any religion, and it is H.P.B.’s literary fancy that suggested to her the wonderful comparison.

Devachan is not a state for a few chosen ones:

Hence all those who have not slipped down into the mire of unredeemable sin and bestiality — go to the Deva Chan.

However, the depth of the state of devachan and the duration of it will be different according to the spirituality of the person.

Devachan is not necessarily a "spiritual" state. It still belongs to the sphere of the "personal Ego":

Of course it is a state, one, so to say, of intense selfishness, during which an Ego reaps the reward of his unselfishness on earth. He is completely engrossed in the bliss of all his personal earthly affections, preferences and thoughts, and gathers in the fruit of his meritorious actions. No pain, no grief nor even the shadow of a sorrow comes to darken the bright horizon of his unalloyed happiness: for, it is a state of perpetual "Maya"

Devachanic ego

After going through kāmaloka the Lower ego|personal ego undergoes a period of gestation where it is purified from anything that is not fit to be expressed in devachan:

“Who goes to Devachan?” The personal Ego of course, but beatified, purified, holy. Every Ego — the combination of the sixth and seventh principles — which, after the period of unconscious gestation is reborn into the Devachan, is of necessity as innocent and pure as a new-born babe.

Usually, two and a half Principles enter in Devachan, although in some cases only the two highest do it:

The seventh and the sixth [principles], that is to say the immortal spirit and its vehicle, the immortal or spiritual soul, enter therein alone (an exceptional case) or, which nearly always takes place, the soul carries in the case of very good people (and even the indifferent and sometimes the very wicked), the essence, so to speak, of the fifth principle which has been withdrawn from the personal EGO (the material soul). It is the latter only, in the case of the irredeemably wicked and when the spiritual and impersonal soul has nothing to withdraw from its individuality (terrestrial personality). Because the latter had nothing to offer but the purely material and sensual—that becomes annihilated.

Activity in Devachan

Immense growths, for example, of knowledge itself are possible in Devachan, for the spiritual entity which has begun the “pursuit” of such knowledge during life. Nothing can happen to a spirit in Devachan, the keynote of which has not been struck during life; the conditions of a subjective existence are such that the importation of quite external impulses and alien thoughts is impossible. But the seed of thought once sown, the current of thoughts once set going (the metaphor may freely be varied to suit any taste), and then its developments in Devachan may be infinite, for the sixth sense there and the sixth principle are our instructors; and in such society there can be no isolation, as physical humanity understands the term.

Duration of Devachan

. . . lasts so long as the merits of the old Ego entitle the being to reap the fruit of its reward in its new regenerated Egoship. It occurs after the gestation period is over, and the new spiritual Ego is reborn—like the fabled Phœnix from its ashes—from the old one. The locality, which the former inhabits, is called by the northern Buddhist Occultists “Deva-chan,” the word answering, perhaps, to Paradise or the Kingdom of Heaven of the Christian elect.

Bardo Thodol

Comparing the teachings on Devachan with that of the "bardos" found in the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol), David Reigle wrote:

What is known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead teaches six bardos, three of which pertain to a person while living, and three pertain to a person after death. These latter three are the ones normally spoken of. Of these, the third is the srid-pa'i bar-do, in which the person is reborn in a mental body (yid lus) in this new state of existence. This is called more fully, "the mental body of apparitional experience in the intermediate state," in the 2006 translation by Gyurme Dorje, p. 274. . . . The Mahatma letter's explanation of the three bardos matches the explanation given in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. What the Mahatma letter adds is that this third bardo where the person is reborn is devachan. The Tibetan Book of the Dead does not speak of devachan, which comes from the Sukhavati-vyuha Sutra.

Further reading

• Devachan at Theosopedia