The Bardo Thodol, “Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State”, is a Tibetan Buddhist text read aloud to a person who is dying or has just died. Tibetan tradition attributes it to Padmasambhava, the 8th-century teacher who brought Buddhism to Tibet, and holds that it was hidden and then rediscovered in the 14th century by Karma Lingpa. Its English title, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”, was given by its first Western editor, W. Y. Evans-Wentz, in 1927, echoing the Egyptian book.
Illustration: the text is a meditation guide for the moment of death
A bardo is an in-between state. The text describes the forty-nine days between death and rebirth in three stages: the moment of death, when the Clear Light of reality dawns; a stage of visions of peaceful and wrathful deities; and the stage of seeking rebirth. At each stage the reader speaks directly to the dead person, urging them to recognise what they are seeing.
“Recognizing the voidness of thine own intellect to be Buddhahood, and looking upon it as being thine own consciousness, is to keep thyself in the [state of the] divine mind of the Buddha.”Bardo Thodol (tr. Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, ed. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, 1927)
The terrifying deities, the text insists, are not outside forces:
“It is quite sufficient for thee to know that these apparitions are thine own thought-forms. Recognize this to be the Bardo.”Bardo Thodol (tr. Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, ed. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, 1927)
Though read to the dead, the Bardo Thodol is really a training for the living: if you can recognise in meditation that experiences arise in the mind, you will recognise it at death too. Its influence in the West has been unusual: the psychologist Carl Jung wrote a commentary on it in 1935, and in 1964 Timothy Leary and his colleagues loosely adapted it as a guide to psychedelic experience, a use most Tibetan teachers would not recognise.
Tradition: Tibetan (Vajrayana) Buddhism, Nyingma school
Use: read aloud to the dying and the dead over 49 days
Related: The Heart and Diamond Sutras, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Memento Mori, Grief and Loss
Tibetan tradition says the Bardo Thodol was taught by Padmasambhava, who brought Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century, and hidden as a “treasure” (terma) to be found when the time was right. It was revealed in the 14th century by Karma Lingpa, as part of a larger cycle of texts on the peaceful and wrathful deities.
W. Y. Evans-Wentz’s 1927 edition gave the text its English title; Carl Jung wrote a psychological commentary for its 1935 German edition; and in 1964 Timothy Leary turned it into a guide for psychedelic experience. The first complete English translation, by Gyurme Dorje, appeared only in 2005.
Bardo Thodol on Wikipedia · Evans-Wentz 1927 edition (Internet Archive) · Bardo · The Buddha
