The Book the West Half-Invented

Much of what the general reader "knows" about this text is a Western overlay. The title The Tibetan Book of the Dead was coined by the American editor W. Y. Evans-Wentz, whose 1927 edition, based on a translation by the Sikkimese teacher Kazi Dawa-Samdup, framed the work through Theosophy and comparative religion; C. G. Jung later added a psychological commentary, and in the 1960s Timothy Leary and others recast it as a guide to psychedelic experience. Each of these readings tells us more about its own moment than about the Tibetan ritual, in which the Bardo Thodol is one text among many in an elaborate funerary practice, not a stand-alone "book of the dead" on the Egyptian analogy that its Western title imports. Scholars such as Bryan Cuevas and Donald Lopez have reconstructed both its actual history within Tibetan tradition and the story of its Western reinvention.