The Book That Got a Title in 1927

The text has no traditional name resembling The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is a portion of a terma cycle attributed to Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth century, called in Tibetan the liberation through hearing in the intermediate state, and it is one text among many funerary works rather than the canonical statement of Tibetan belief. Its Western title was supplied by Walter Evans-Wentz in 1927, on the model of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and it is the title that made the book famous.

Evans-Wentz did not read Tibetan. The translation was made by Kazi Dawa Samdup, and the commentary framing it is theosophical. Carl Jung then added a psychological commentary reading the bardos as stages of the unconscious. In 1964 Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert published an adaptation as a manual for psychedelic sessions. Each layer was read by more people than the layer beneath it.

Donald Lopez has traced this history in detail, and the conclusion is not that the text is unimportant but that its Western reputation was built by people pursuing their own projects. The Tibetan tradition of dying, with its long practical literature on the transfer of consciousness and the recognition of the stages, is larger and less exotic than the book that stands in for it.