Transcription
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In the late 1920s, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung encountered a Buddhist text that radically shaped his own theories of the mind: the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In his commentary on the text, he called it "the quintessence of Buddhist psychological criticism," calling its philosophy "sublime and unparalleled."
The Tibetan Book of the Dead went on to become one of the most widely recognized Buddhist texts in Europe and the United States. It inspired movies, novelists, and musicians like John Lennon of The Beatles. Lennon drew inspiration from the Tibetan Book of the Dead when he wrote the song "Tomorrow Never Knows," also drawing inspiration from a psychedelic experience he had while on LSD.
But what is this text? What does it say? And why did it become such a big deal to people like Jung?
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the Western name for the Bardo Thodol, meaning "the great liberation by hearing in the intermediate states." That's a complicated title, but it tells us a lot about the text, so let's unpack it.
The text is a funerary rite. It's intended to be read aloud to someone who's dying or recently dead. It's traditionally read by a lama, which, if you remember from our previous episode on Tibetan Buddhism, are religious teachers, the Tibetan equivalent to the Sanskrit word guru.
The opening lines are a direct address to the dead: "O alas, alas, fortunate child of Buddha nature, do not be oppressed by the forces of ignorance and delusion, but rise up now with resolve and courage." By reciting the text, the lama prepares the dead to enter the bardo.
Bardo refers to an intermediate state after death but before rebirth. This is the "intermediate states" part in the official title. But to understand what bardo states are, you can compare it to a type of purgatory. It's a bewildering state of transformation and suspended reality. Technically, it's a state that happens entirely in the mind, not an actual physical place. The deceased, sometimes called the "bardo being," will be born there as a mental body in the shape of the body of their next incarnation.
The word "bardo" itself can also help us understand the concept. Bardo breaks down into the word "bar," denoting movement or flowing, and "do," which means a stepping stone or island. Thus, a bardo is a "mind island of stillness" as you move from death to the next state of being.
The goal during the bardo state is to liberate the being from samsara, or the cycle of death and rebirth, hence the first part of the title: "The Great Liberation." The consciousness of the deceased is, in some sense, still present in the corpse and can hear the text being read as the lama guides them through the bewildering experiences of the bardos.
I say bewildering because the bardo being's own karma conjures all sorts of visions. Some of them are absolutely terrifying, and the lama reading the text helps the bardo being recognize what they're seeing during this intermediate state.
So, let's go through three of the bardos that one passes through after death, as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Though I'll note that there are a total of six bardos mentioned in the text, we'll focus on the last three.
The first of these bardos, known as the "Bardo of the Moment of Death," begins as a person is physically dying. At the moment of death, the bardo being enters into an experience of inner radiance, sometimes known as luminous mind, and can briefly experience a kind of ultimate truth of reality. If the bardo being recognizes this state as absolute reality, they become enlightened and are liberated from rebirth.
If they do not recognize it, which is more often the case, they enter the second bardo, called the "Bardo of Reality." It involves experiences and visions that can disorient the bardo being if they don't have the lama's help. The text stresses the importance of moving on, stating that "it's not possible to remain here in this life, even if they were to try." Not that the bardo being is reminded of these things.
The lama then warns them of what's to come: "O child of Buddha nature, when your mind and body separate, the pure luminous apparitions of reality itself will arise, subtle and clear, radiant and dazzling, naturally bright and awesome. Do not fear them, do not be terrified, do not be awed. Whatever sounds, lights, or rays may arise, they cannot harm you, for you are beyond death now."
Now, bright lights may not seem all that terrifying, but the bardo being will soon be confronted by the peaceful and wrathful deities. What you're looking at is an 18th-century Tibetan painting of these deities. The text instructs the bardo being to visualize the assembled peaceful and wrathful deities as a mandala of deities within one's body. Mandala being a visual representation of a Buddha palace, specific pure lands, deities, or even the entire cosmos. They're often used as visual aids during meditation.
The peaceful deities manifest before the bardo being first. For many, this procession of deities will strike fear; for others, awe and fascination. The text attempts to steer the bardo being away from these emotional highs and lows because, to be liberated, they must recognize that these images are not separate from themselves. Instead, the deities are manifestations of their own mind.
"The entire mandala of peaceful deities will array itself in a rainbow of color. They will dazzle the bardo being with many bright lights, while the text directs the bardo being to achieve unity with them and not be distracted by the dull path back to rebirth. 'At that moment, do not withhold your compassion, but draw us back from the path which is the gateway to the deluded animal realms.'"
But if the bardo being has not identified with the peaceful deities and become Buddhas, they will then be approached by the assembly of wrathful, blood-drinking deities. And these wrathful beings are as terrifying as they sound. They have many heads, they have sharp fangs, they will laugh at the bardo being and make strange sounds, and they're depicted as being surrounded by flames with weapons in their hands.
Although they're wrathful and appear as terrifying, blood-drinking demons, they are manifestations of pure nature, and the text explains that they shouldn't be feared. If the bardo being recognizes either the peaceful or wrathful deities as manifestations of their own mind, the text says, "you will dissolve inseparably within the lights and Buddha bodies, and Buddhahood will be attained."
So, this is a second chance to achieve enlightenment and escape the cycle of rebirth. But many people will find this difficult, to say the least. If the bardo being becomes afraid, they will not attain Buddhahood, and the deities will morph together. The peaceful deities will become Mahakala, known as the protector of the Dharma, and the wrathful deities will become Yama Dharmaraja, the Lord of Buddhist Hells.
"Yama will be as vast as the sky, brandishing in his hand the wooden slate documenting past actions. His mouth echoing with the cries of 'strike and kill!' He is drinking brains, severing heads, and ripping out internal organs." The bardo being will then faint from fear and wake up later, having failed to achieve liberation from samsara.
From there, they enter the third bardo of "rebirth or existence." In this stage, the bardo being's karma determines which realm they're born into: the realm of the gods, the jealous gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, or hells. The bardo being will be presented with womb entrances, which they'll feel attracted to. Upon entering one entrance, conception occurs, and they are reborn. The transmigration process is complete, and the bardo being enters into a different bardo of birth.
As we unpack this complex text, we should remember its ritual context. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is meant to be read aloud. It's an oral, performative text. And moreover, as one scholar says, it's meant to be read to the dead. Corpses are the intended audience. As you read the text, you'll notice so much of it is addressed specifically to "O child of Buddha nature," and many of the stanzas are encouragements or instructions on how to navigate the wild visions of the bardo states. The text reads very differently when you remind yourself of this oral nature of the text, especially the more terrifying parts of Yama drinking brains.
So, where did the Tibetan Book of the Dead come from? Well, first of all, we should be clear that the name is a bit of a misnomer. Although it's called a book, it's actually a section of just three chapters from a larger text, a text called "Peaceful and Wrathful Deities: A Natural Liberation Through Recognition of Enlightened Intention."
The text is originally attributed to the 8th-century tantric master Padma Sambhava, who is one of the most revered figures in Tibetan Buddhism. As the tradition goes, he prophesied that his teachings would one day become corrupted, so to protect them, he began hiding texts around the Tibetan landscape to be revealed when the time was right, sometimes hiding the texts in a cave, lake, or on top of a mountain, but other times hiding the texts in the heart and mind of a future disciple that would one day be revealed spontaneously centuries later.
These hidden teachings of Padma Sambhava are called terma, translated as "treasure." The Tibetan Book of the Dead is one part of one such terma text. The people who discover these treasures are called tertöns, or "treasure discoverers." Tertöns are thought to be reincarnations of Padma Sambhava's disciples. After giving a lecture, Padma Sambhava would choose one of his disciples and assign the task of revealing that teaching in a future life.
According to tradition, this is how the Tibetan Book of the Dead was discovered. In the 14th century, a 15-year-old boy named Karma Lingpa, the son of a tantric master, is said to have found several texts buried in a cave, including the entire collection of "Peaceful and Wrathful Deities," which, as I said, includes the section that we now call the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
It's worth mentioning, though, that this is the traditional narrative of the terma. Many scholars don't accept the story as historical. Instead, the terma are considered to be works of the tertön who discovered it, and attributing the authorship to Padma Sambhava is more of a traditional sign of respect or claim to authority.
Although the Tibetan Book of the Dead is the most famous Tibetan Buddhist writing in the West, it's not actually that central in Tibetan Buddhist practice itself. Many Tibetan Buddhists are often surprised to hear that this small section of one of their many funerary texts became so popular. In fact, some scholars have even argued that it's become more of an American spiritual classic than a Tibetan one.
Why is that? Let's turn to this guy, Walter Evans-Wentz, the American who first published the text in the West. Evans-Wentz was a theosophist. Theosophy is a spiritual movement that arose in the late 19th century that drew from several strands of esoteric thought, including Hinduism and Buddhism.
In 1919, while on a spiritual journey in India, Evans-Wentz bought a bunch of Tibetan funerary texts from a British officer who had recently returned from Tibet, which at the time had been invaded by the British Empire. Evans-Wentz had a bit of a habit of collecting old texts in languages he didn't know well enough to translate. So, wanting to know what these texts said, he traveled to Northeast India to meet Kazi Dawa Samdup, an English language teacher who had helped Westerners translate religious texts in the past.
After the texts were translated, Evans-Wentz then published them under the title "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" because of similarities he saw between it and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. He even believed they both derived from a single source of ancient wisdom. Evans-Wentz would later describe his relationship with Samdup as one of a guru and disciple. In the preface of the first edition, published in 1927 by Oxford University Press, he says, "In this book I am seeking, so far as possible, to suppress my own views and to act simply as the mouthpiece of a Tibetan sage of whom I was a recognized disciple."
So, by publishing these texts, Evans-Wentz positioned himself in a lineage of guru to disciple. However, the scholar Don Lopez says there's nothing indicating that they had this sort of relationship. As far as we can tell from the letters they exchanged, their interaction was a brief two months of formal professionalism.
Nevertheless, thanks to Evans-Wentz, the Tibetan Book of the Dead went on to fascinate Western audiences, partly due to the orientalist tendency to romanticize Tibet as a land of mysticism, and partly because of the perennial fear of death and the desire to understand what comes after it. It was immensely popular, especially among Americans interested in spiritualism, esotericism, and altered states of mind, especially throughout the 1930s and '40s and all the way into the 1960s.
As we saw at the start of this video, Carl Jung famously wrote introductions to several of the book's editions. And in 1964, the notorious psychedelic researcher Timothy Leary, along with a few others, published "The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead," which essentially was a how-to guide for psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead also had a major impact on Western culture. The movies "Jacob's Ladder" and "Enter the Void" both draw heavily from its ideas and symbolism.
Now, the idea that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is more American than Tibetan can sound off-base or even insulting. After all, "Tibet" is in the name, the text was composed in the Tibetan language, it's performed by Tibetan Buddhist lamas. But thanks to Evans-Wentz and those that came after him, the Tibetan Book of the Dead was reshaped and repackaged to appeal to an American audience. It's a curious byproduct of religious globalization, in which sacred ideas of one culture become something entirely new when they interact with a different culture.
As Don Lopez says, "Ironically, the Tibetan Book of the Dead is not really a book, and it's not really about death. It's about rebirth: the rebirth of souls and the resurrection of terma texts. Evans-Wentz's classic is not so much Tibetan as it is American, a product of American spiritualism." Evans-Wentz extracted a few chapters from a much larger cycle of texts and rebranded it with a new, American-friendly title and added all sorts of commentary to the original text. It wasn't until recent years that we finally got more complete scholarly translations in English. The translation I've been using is from 2005 and translates more than double the content of Evans' original version. Moreover, his version is removed from the concerns of Tibetan Buddhism. As Lopez says, "the text is concerned with Buddhist rebirth, while for American audiences, it's been received more as a psychological or even psychedelic classic."
In many ways, the history of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is also a lesson in religious authority and the transmission of sacred texts. Many religions have some method of connecting their holy books to an important figure who legitimizes the text, like how Christians ascribe books like the Gospel of John to specific apostles of Jesus, or how the Sikh sacred text, the Guru Granth Sahib, is the eternal Guru for Sikhs, standing in the lineage of the religion's ten human gurus. We see a similar phenomenon in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as well, which roots the authority of terma texts in the lineage of Padma Sambhava's disciples who continually reintroduce terma by reincarnating generation after generation.
For the theosophists, grounding their ideas in more ancient religions like Buddhism and Hinduism is their claim to authority, too. Like how Evans-Wentz claimed to be a disciple of a lama, he positioned himself in the same lineage of authority as Karma Lingpa himself, the revealer of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, linking his chain of authority to a much more ancient chain.
Thanks to Wondrium for sponsoring this video. Wondrium is an online learning platform featuring educational documentaries, lecture series, tutorials, and more. In today's video, we explored the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which exploded in popularity in Europe and the United States, especially among people interested in psychology and altered states of consciousness. If these sorts of topics fascinate you too, then I'd really check out Wondrium's series "Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science," which tackles similar questions like, "What counts as reality?" and "What is human consciousness in the first place?" It's taught by Dr. Stephen Gimbel, who's a philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Some episodes focus on physics, like the episode "Quantum Consciousness," which sets out to answer the question, "Can physics explain human consciousness?" Other episodes are more biological, like an episode on evolutionary psychology, "How the Human Brain Evolved." Overall, it's a sweeping series that will help you understand some very free, abstract, metaphysical ideas. If you'd like to watch the series, Wondrium is offering the Religion for Breakfast audience a free trial. Head on over to Wondrium.com/forbreakfast or click the link in the comments below to get started. Thanks, everyone.