The 'Great Liberation Through Hearing'

The work known in English as the Tibetan Book of the Dead is properly the Bardo Thodol, "Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State", a set of instructions to be read aloud to the dying and the dead to guide the consciousness through the bardo, the interval between death and rebirth, past the visions of peaceful and then wrathful deities (understood as projections of the mind's own nature) toward either liberation or, failing that, a favourable rebirth. It belongs to the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism and is a terma or "treasure text": tradition holds that it was concealed by the eighth-century master Padmasambhava and revealed centuries later, in the fourteenth century, by the treasure-finder Karma Lingpa. Historically, then, its composition is medieval Tibetan even though the tradition assigns its authority to the earlier Padmasambhava, a pattern characteristic of the terma literature.