The bardo, the intermediate state between death and rebirth

The most detailed Tibetan account of the intermediate state between death and rebirth reaches readers today through a text with an unusual history of its own. Tibetan tradition holds that its root teaching was composed by the eighth century tantric master Padmasambhava and then concealed, to be rediscovered only when the time was right by a qualified treasure revealer, a terton. That rediscovery came in the fourteenth century, when Karma Lingpa, a Nyingma treasure revealer working in Tibet, brought forth the cycle of teachings that includes what is now called the Bardo Thodol, literally liberation through hearing in the intermediate state. The text describes death not as a single instant but as a passage through several distinct phases, each with its own characteristic experiences, and it is composed to be read aloud at the bedside of the dying and beside the recently dead, on the understanding that recognizing the true nature of what appears at any stage of the passage can bring liberation before rebirth occurs. The teaching belongs to the Tibetan lineages specifically; the developed literature describing staged intermediate experience in this much narrative detail is not carried in the same form by the Theravada tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, which addresses death and rebirth through a different body of teaching.

The text now known in English as the Tibetan Book of the Dead reached a Western readership only in the twentieth century, and the title itself is a Western invention. In 1927 the American scholar Walter Evans-Wentz published an English edition built from a translation prepared by the Sikkimese teacher Kazi Dawa Samdup, and he gave the book its English name in deliberate echo of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a text it otherwise has little in common with beyond both concerning the passage after death. The comparison caught on regardless, and Evans-Wentz's edition became the way most Western readers first encountered the bardo teachings at all, well before more direct scholarly translations followed later in the century.

The book's reception outside Tibetan Buddhism did not stay within religious studies. The psychologist Carl Jung wrote an influential psychological commentary reading its stages as a map of the unconscious mind rather than a literal account of an afterlife, and decades later the psychologist Timothy Leary drew on the same text, filtered through Evans-Wentz, to frame the stages of a psychedelic experience. Both readings moved a considerable distance from the text's own setting as a manual of instruction meant to be read to the dying within a specific tantric tradition, and Tibetan Buddhist teachers have noted the gap between the popular Western bardo and the doctrine as it is actually held and transmitted.