The Bardo Thödol

Buried Text, Borrowed Title

First attested
14th centuryThe Bar do thos grol is first placed in the fourteenth century, as part of the treasure cycle Karma Lingpa is held to have revealed at Gampodar Mountain in south-eastern Tibet. Cuevas (2003) reconstructs the transmission from Karma Lingpa's father and son, who redacted the collections, to Gyarawa by the late fifteenth century, whose institutional ties in eastern Tibet made the texts liturgical property of a number of monasteries. The English text known worldwide dates from 1927.
Claimed
8th centuryasserted by The Nyingma treasure (gter ma) tradition, which holds that Padmasambhava composed the text during his eighth-century visit to Tibet, dictated it to his consort and scribe, and concealed it to await a revealer.

The claim runs about 600 years ahead of the evidence.

"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.

Spoken to the dying and the dead: what you are about to see is your own mind, not powers coming to judge you.

The Tibetan is Bar do thos grol — Liberation in the Intermediate State Through Hearing — recited aloud beside a dying or newly dead person, not read privately by the living. It is a terma: a treasure said to have been composed by Padmasambhava in the eighth century, concealed, and unearthed by Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth at Gampodar Mountain. Bryan Cuevas traces its redaction by Karma Lingpa's father and son and its growth in later hands. It belongs to a much larger cycle of peaceful and wrathful deities and is no summary of Tibetan Buddhism. Walter Evans-Wentz named it The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927, on the Egyptian analogy, and published only several of its chapters. Kazi Dawa-Samdup did the translating; Evans-Wentz, who read no Tibetan and never entered Tibet, supplied the frame.

Light

A practical instruction for the hardest hour. The dead person is addressed directly, told what they are about to see, and urged to recognise the peaceful and wrathful visions as projections of their own mind rather than powers coming to judge them.

Shadow

Donald Lopez calls it not really Tibetan, not really a book, not really about death but about rebirth — of souls and texts — a product of American Spiritualism. In 1964 Leary, Metzner and Alpert made the rite for the dead an LSD manual for the living.

Sources and verification6 sources · 5 links

Scholarship

  • Donald S. Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, 1998, the chapter on The Tibetan Book of the DeadEvans-Wentz did not read Tibetan; the standard corrective for treating the English book as a record of ancient Tibetan wisdom rather than as a document of its own reception.
  • Bryan J. Cuevas, The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, 2003, Oxford University PressThe fourteenth-century treasure revealer Karma Lingpa is held to have discovered two textual collections at Gampodar Mountain in south-eastern Tibet, of which the Bar do thos grol forms part; the collections were redacted by his father and son as first transmitters and had passed to Gyarawa by the late fifteenth century, whose institutional ties made them principal liturgical texts at important eastern Tibetan monasteries. The collection was compiled and enlarged by successive hands rather than arriving whole.
  • Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography, 2011, Introduction, pp. 1-11 (Princeton, Lives of Great Religious Books)Bar do thos grol means literally 'Liberation in the Intermediate State through Hearing'; Evans-Wentz, an American Theosophist travelling in the Himalayas, chanced upon the text in 1919 and asked Kazi Dawa-Samdup, then English teacher at the Maharaja's Boarding School for boys in Gangtok, Sikkim, to translate it; the Oxford editions have sold over 500,000 copies in English; Evans-Wentz never entered Tibet; the work is not the most important text of Tibetan Buddhism, nor one all Tibetans have read or necessarily heard of; Lopez's verdict that it is 'not really Tibetan', 'not really a book' and 'not really about death' but about rebirth, and 'a product of American Spiritualism' (p. 11); and that in the version of the book we have today — the first edition's apparatus plus Evans-Wentz's further prefaces of 1949 and 1960 and Jung's and Govinda's additions of 1957 — the prefaces, introductions, forewords, commentaries, notes and addenda 'comprise some two thirds of the entire book', surrounding a translation of several chapters of a much larger Tibetan work (pp. 4-6).

Where this claim originates

  • W. Y. Evans-Wentz (comp. and ed.), Kazi Dawa-Samdup (trans.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead; or, The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering, 1927, Oxford University Press; 2nd ed. 1949; 3rd ed. 1957, adding C. G. Jung's Psychological CommentaryThe English title and the Theosophical-Vedantist framing are Evans-Wentz's own, and the volume is cited for what he claimed rather than as evidence the claims are sound. The title page credits the translation to Kazi Dawa-Samdup and the compiling and editing to Evans-Wentz; the foreword, 'Science of Death', is by Sir John Woodroffe.
  • Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, 1964, University Books, New YorkThat in 1964 the three authors adapted Evans-Wentz's text into an instructional manual for an LSD session, presenting the Tibetan work as concerned with the living rather than the dead. Cited for what they claimed, not as an account of the Tibetan text.

Further reading

  • Gyurme Dorje (trans.), Graham Coleman with Thupten Jinpa (eds), introductory commentary by the Dalai Lama, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: First Complete Translation, 2005, Penguin ClassicsThe scholarly English translation of the wider cycle, against which the extent of Evans-Wentz's selection can be measured.

Linked entries

  • Set againstThe Nag Hammadi LibraryA modern connection

    Two buried libraries with opposite evidential standing: the Nag Hammadi codices were physically dug up in 1945 and can be dated, while the terma model has the text concealed by Padmasambhava and revealed to Karma Lingpa, a claim the tradition makes and the manuscripts cannot corroborate.

  • Set againstThe Epic of GilgameshA modern connection

    Both are read as books about dying, but the Bardo Thödol supplies a procedure for it and Gilgamesh reports that there is none — Uta-napishti tells him no one sees the face of death. The pairing is a modern reader's, not a historical link.

  • Often confused withThe Egyptian Book of the DeadA modern connection

    W. Y. Evans-Wentz titled the Bar do thos grol 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead' in 1927 by analogy with the Egyptian, and the pairing has been read ever since as evidence of a shared ancient science of dying that neither text claims.

  • Set againstThe Yoga Sūtras of PatañjaliAttested

    Two technical manuals of states of consciousness with opposite occasions: Patañjali trains attention in life towards kaivalya, while the Bardo Thödol is read aloud to the dying and the dead.

  • Set againstThe Pyramid TextsA modern connection

    W. Y. Evans-Wentz borrowed Egypt's title in 1927 to call it The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the Egyptian title was itself modern — Lepsius coined Todtenbuch in 1842 — so two unrelated corpora now share a name neither tradition used.

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