The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol)

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.

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.