The "Tibetan Book of the Dead" is a 1927 title

A note before going on. This article is about a religious text on death, not about how to live through grief, and it does not replace anyone who accompanies. If you are going through someone's death, or thoughts of harming yourself, talk to someone you trust or to a professional; findahelpline.com takes you to a helpline in your country.

The previous article read a night told from the other side. This one changes continent and question: what is said to someone who has just died. It is the Bardo Thödol, known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I read, in English, the 1927 edition that made it known (the version of the lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz), and I did not read the Tibetan text. What I did not read, I say at the end.

A 1927 title

In Tibetan it is called bar do thos grol: "liberation (grol) through hearing (thos) in the intermediate state (bar do)". Bar is "between", and the bardo is the interval between death and the next birth. According to the English Wikipedia, "Tibetan Book of the Dead" is a title popularised by Evans-Wentz's edition, modelled on the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and bears no relation to the Tibetan title. The edition is from 1927, by Oxford University Press.¹

The title page of that book says: The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering, with a foreword by Sir John Woodroffe. And, before the text, a quotation from a medieval book, the Horologium Sapientiae: "it is a science most profitable, and passing all other sciences, for to learn to die".² The title page thus puts the book next to a European tradition of "learning to die".

A text to be heard

It is not a book to read in silence. It is a script that a guide reads aloud, near the person who is dying or has just died, calling them by name: "O nobly-born…". The 1927 translation calls that action setting face to face: each passage tells the deceased what will be seen and what to do.²

According to Tibetan tradition, reported by Wikipedia, the text was composed in the 8th century by Padmasambhava, written down by his disciple Yeshe Tsogyal, and buried in the Gampo hills in central Tibet, until in the 14th century a tertön ("discoverer of hidden treasures"), Karma Lingpa, found it. It is part of a larger cycle of teachings, and there are versions of different sizes.¹

It distinguishes three intermediate states. The chikhai bardo, of the moment of death, in which the "clear light of reality" appears. The chonyid bardo, of the experiencing of reality, with visions of Buddha forms. And the sidpa bardo, of rebirth, with karmically driven visions that end in a birth. It also names three other bardos: life, meditation and dream.¹ The text itself says that those who receive this teaching and recognise it at the moment of death will obtain the body of truth "without any Intermediate State, by the Great Perpendicular Path". For the others there are more chances: "like the rungs of a ladder", says the conclusion, "there are many kinds of settings-face-to-face".²

The fourteen days

What is remembered most of the book are the fourteen days of the chonyid bardo. The first seven days are those of the peaceful deities: each day a light of wisdom appears, with its colour and its deity, and alongside it shines another, dull, belonging to one of the six worlds of rebirth: that of the gods, of hell, of humans, of the hungry spirits, of the jealous demigods, of animals. The text asks the deceased not to flee the dazzling light and not to grow fond of the dull one. The next seven days are those of the wrathful deities; in what I read there is no dull light any more, and the text only asks to recognise them.²

The sentence that holds it up

Across the fourteen days, and above all in the last seven, the same sentence returns again and again, with variations. The 1927 version puts it like this: "whatever fearful and terrifying visions thou mayst see, recognize them to be thine own thought-forms". Before entering the chonyid, the guide tells the deceased that in that sentence "lieth the vital secret of recognition", and gives some verses to repeat: "May I recognize whatever [visions] appear, as the reflections of mine own consciousness".² The wrathful deities, the text makes come out of the "brain" of the deceased, and adds: "voidness cannot injure voidness".²

That idea, that the visions do not come from outside, is what made the book seem modern. Evans-Wentz says it in the introduction, and adds something that is not in the text: that, as one is taught, so one believes, and therefore for a Buddhist of another school, a Hindu, a Muslim or a Christian "the Bardo experiences would be appropriately different": the Christian would see the Christian Heaven; the Muslim, the Muslim Paradise.² That is the editor's reading; the text does not say it.

The judgement

In the sidpa bardo there is a scene that in the 1927 book has a plate of its own. The Lord of Death weighs the deeds: the good genius, born together with the deceased, counts out the good ones with white pebbles, and the evil genius counts the bad ones with black pebbles. The deceased, terrified, "will attempt to tell lies, saying, ‘I have not committed any evil deed’". Then the Lord of Death says: "I will consult the Mirror of Karma", "wherein every good and evil act is vividly reflected". And the text warns: "lying will be of no avail". And also, immediately, that this body is "a mental body … incapable of dying".²

A note in the book reads the scene as a scene of conscience: the Judge is conscience itself in its stern aspect, and the Mirror is memory.² And in the introduction, the editor sets beside it the Egyptian scales and Plato's myth of Er, in book X of the Republic, as versions of the same judgement.² I did not read the myth of Er for this article: the editor says so, and I cite it as his.

Who translated it, and with what eyes

The 1927 book is not the Tibetan text: it is the English version of the lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, with Evans-Wentz's notes and introduction. According to the English Wikipedia, Evans-Wentz (1878–1965) was an American anthropologist who had studied Celtic folklore at Oxford and who, from a young age, belonged to the Theosophical Society.³ John Myrdhin Reynolds, whom Wikipedia cites, says that edition introduced misunderstandings: that Evans-Wentz did not know Tibetan Buddhism well, that the reading was "fundamentally neither Tibetan nor Buddhist, but Theosophical and Vedantist", with a vocabulary taken from Hinduism, and that the translation was provided mainly by two English-speaking lamas.¹ The 1927 book, on the other hand, gives the main credit to the lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, and Evans-Wentz describes the editor's own role as "little more than a compiler and editor".² I do not know how those are reconciled.

It is a criticism to keep in mind when reading the quotations in this article. The more recent translations (Fremantle and Trungpa in 1975, Thurman in 1994, Dorje, Coleman and Jinpa in 2005) I know only by name, from Wikipedia.¹

After 1927

According to Wikipedia, a third edition of the book added a psychological commentary by Carl Jung, in which Jung reads the visions as contents of the unconscious and warns of the dangers of Westerners adopting Eastern traditions wholesale.¹ In 1964, Leary, Metzner and Alpert published The Psychedelic Experience, a guide for LSD trips loosely based on the 1927 edition; and "Tomorrow Never Knows", by the Beatles (1966), was inspired by that guide.¹ The text that was read to the dead became, in the West, a mirror for other things.

What I could not read

I did not read the Tibetan text or any translation after 1927. What I read, in English, in the 1927 book: the opening of the text, the fourteen days (their beginnings and the passages on the dull lights), the judgement, the conclusion, Evans-Wentz's introduction and several of the notes; I did not read the whole book. Kazi Dawa-Samdup's version is a century old, with Theosophical vocabulary according to Reynolds: I cannot judge how far it departs from the Tibetan. What I say of Jung, Leary, the Beatles and Reynolds's criticism I take from Wikipedia; I did not read Jung, or Lopez, or Cuevas. That the book is in the public domain is because of its date: 1927, in the United States.

What we do with this

The text's guide begins by telling the deceased something that serves whoever reads this: "Thou art departing from this world, but thou art not the only one; death cometh to all".² Anima Mundis does not accompany those who die and does not pretend to: it is a place where 3, 5 or 7 strangers coincide for ten minutes, without names. The only thing it shares with the text is that sentence. What the Observatory counts is the voices that arrived and at what UTC hour, and nothing more.