A Treasure Text for the Space Between Lives

The most detailed Tibetan account of the intermediate state between death and rebirth reaches readers today through a text with an unusual history of its own. Tibetan tradition holds that its root teaching was composed by the eighth century tantric master Padmasambhava and then concealed, to be rediscovered only when the time was right by a qualified treasure revealer, a terton. That rediscovery came in the fourteenth century, when Karma Lingpa, a Nyingma treasure revealer working in Tibet, brought forth the cycle of teachings that includes what is now called the Bardo Thodol, literally liberation through hearing in the intermediate state. The text describes death not as a single instant but as a passage through several distinct phases, each with its own characteristic experiences, and it is composed to be read aloud at the bedside of the dying and beside the recently dead, on the understanding that recognizing the true nature of what appears at any stage of the passage can bring liberation before rebirth occurs. The teaching belongs to the Tibetan lineages specifically; the developed literature describing staged intermediate experience in this much narrative detail is not carried in the same form by the Theravada tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, which addresses death and rebirth through a different body of teaching.