Rainbow Body and the Body-of-Light Traditions

Some traditions describe the human body as capable of transformation into a luminous, spiritual, resurrected, or liberated form. Tibetan rainbow body accounts describe advanced realization where the physical body is reported to dissolve or radically reduce after death. Decode Reality compares this with body-of-light, resurrection, garment-of-light, and ascent-body traditions while keeping each source's doctrine separate.

Rainbow Body traditions, particularly within Dzogchen, describe a culmination of spiritual practice. Accounts report that at the death of an advanced practitioner, the physical body shrinks, dissolves, or transforms, leaving behind hair, nails, or in some accounts nothing at all. These accounts are preserved as religious biography and witness-chain tradition.

Decode Reality compares this with other luminous-body traditions: the garment of light in Gnostic texts, the resurrection body in Christian tradition, the body of light in Hermetic and theurgic practice, and ascent-body traditions in various esoteric systems. Each tradition is preserved with its own evidence class and doctrinal framework — they are not merged into a single claim about physical transformation.