Inside the Karling Zhitro sits a cluster of texts called the Bardo Thodol, Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State. They are instructions read aloud to the dying and the dead, guiding the consciousness through the bardos, the intervals between death and rebirth, where the peaceful and wrathful deities appear and where recognition of their true nature can free the wanderer. In Tibet these texts were one strand of a much larger ritual cycle, used by lamas within a full liturgical and contemplative apparatus, and many Tibetan funerary traditions used other cycles entirely.
The West met them through a historical accident. In 1919 an Oxford connected theosophist, Walter Evans-Wentz, acquired a manuscript of the texts in Darjeeling and published a translation in 1927 under a title borrowed from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which the Tibetan corpus does not carry and does not resemble. The book became a twentieth century phenomenon, read by Jung, adapted by Timothy Leary as a psychedelic manual, and reissued in ever new translations, a career Donald Lopez has traced in detail. The atlas keeps the two things distinct: a fourteenth century Nyingma treasure cycle with its own ritual life, and a Western classic built from one part of it. Karma Lingpa stands at the head of both stories, the revealer whose treasure traveled further than any terton could have foreseen.