Buddhism · Death & the Afterlife
Person · the 240s BCE
Siddhārtha Gautama
Undoubted Man, Disputed Century
The historical founder of Buddhism who attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree and taught the Four Noble Truths.
Who they wereThe suttas give a man who found his own way and refused to leave an authority behind him: be lamps to yourselves, he tells Ānanda near the end, with the teaching as the only teacher. A tradition founded on the instruction not to depend on its founder.
The FindingThe 563–483 BCE dates printed in most handbooks are a modern reckoning off the Sinhalese chronicles rather than a Buddhist tradition or a piece of evidence — since Heinz Bechert's 1988 Göttingen symposium scholarship has clustered the death near 400 BCE, and nothing outside the texts attests the Buddha before Ashoka's Lumbinī pillar of the 240s BCE.
Book · 14th century
The Bardo Thödol
Buried Text, Borrowed Title
Spoken to the dying and the dead: what you are about to see is your own mind, not powers coming to judge you.
SignificanceIts whole instruction is one sentence repeated: what you are seeing is your own mind. The peaceful and wrathful deities are not powers arriving to judge — they are projections, and recognising them as such at the moment they appear is the liberation the text is for.
The Finding"The Tibetan Book of the Dead" is Walter Evans-Wentz's title, coined in 1927 by analogy with Egypt for a Tibetan funeral recitation whose own name means Liberation Through Hearing — and in the volume as it stands today, swollen by Jung and Govinda in 1957, Lopez counts the Western prefaces, commentary and notes at some two thirds of the whole.