ABSTRACT
The yogin concentrates in a special way on various body orifices that are deemed to be correlated with the beings of various realms, while the person who dies with his stream of consciousness passing through one orifice or another, goes to the appropriate realm of the intermediate state. The orifices themselves are made salient in ancient Indian literature. Specialists in Buddhism would probably wish the present writer to comment on the relation with the preceding of the well-known characteristics attributed to the Buddha—and consistently represented icono-graphically—of the usnisa at the crown of the head and the urna-kosa in the middle of the forehead. It is a well-known feature of Buddhist canonical literature that one of the chief early disciples of the Buddha, Maudgalyayana was credited with special magical powers with which he often visited various other realms of the world than ours, such as the hells and heavens.
