The Bardo Thödol: "Liberation Through Hearing in the In-Between"

In Tibet, when someone dies, a lama may sit beside the body and read aloud. The reading continues for days, as long as forty-nine, addressed not to the mourners but to the dead person, by name: "O child of noble family, listen without distraction. Now what is called death has arrived." The text tells the consciousness where it is, what it is seeing, and how to be free. Its Tibetan name is Bardo Thödol (bar do thos grol), "Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State". Since 1927, English readers have known it as The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

A treasure text

• In Tibetan tradition the teachings were given by Padmasambhava, the Indian master who helped establish Buddhism in Tibet in the eighth century, written down by his consort Yeshe Tsogyal, and hidden as terma, "treasures", to be found when the time was right.
• In the fourteenth century the treasure-revealer (tertön) Karma Lingpa (1326–1386) is said to have recovered them from Mount Gampodar in central Tibet, as part of a larger cycle, the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities: Self-Liberation through the Wisdom Mind.
• It belongs to the Nyingma school, though it is used more widely, and is one of many funeral texts in Tibet.

The bardos

Bardo means an "in-between" state. The book guides the dead through three:

• The bardo of dying (chikhai): the elements of the body dissolve and the Clear Light of reality dawns. To recognise it is to be liberated at once.
• The bardo of reality (chönyi): the forty-two peaceful and fifty-eight wrathful deities appear over many days. The text insists they are the mind's own projections, and recognising them as such frees the dead.
• The bardo of becoming (sidpa): if no recognition comes, the mind is driven by karma toward rebirth, and the text teaches how to choose a good womb or "close the womb door".

Later teachers count six bardos in all, adding birth and life, dream, and meditation.

The English book

The Sikkimese lama Kazi Dawa Samdup translated it; the American W. Y. Evans-Wentz edited it and gave it its title in 1927, by analogy with the equally misnamed Egyptian "Book of the Dead" (V20). Evans-Wentz framed it with Theosophical ideas; Carl Jung wrote a commentary for a later edition; Timothy Leary and colleagues adapted it as a manual for psychedelic experience in 1964. Newer translations (Thurman 1994; Dorje, Coleman and Jinpa 2005) work from the Tibetan and its whole cycle.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Lights. In the bardo of reality each buddha appears with a brilliant coloured light and, beside it, a dull, comforting light leading to one of the six realms of rebirth. The instruction is always the same: go toward the dazzling light, not the soft one.

The mandala of deities. The hundred peaceful and wrathful deities form a mandala inside the body: the peaceful in the heart, the wrathful in the brain.

Hearing. Its power is said to lie in being heard: the dead are assumed to keep a subtle hearing, and the words themselves are the path.

Connections

Tibetan & Vajrayana Buddhism (ch53), with Buddhism (ch11) and Tantra (ch24). Compare the Papyrus of Ani (V20) and the Egyptian idea of the afterlife journey, and the Diwan Abatur (V87) for another guide to the soul's passage.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/bardo-thodol.html