The Bardo

The Bardo is the intermediate state between death and the next rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism, the word means, literally, an "in-between", and the tradition's detailed mapping of it produced one of the most famous of all religious texts, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead (properly the Bardo Thodol, "Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State").

In the Tibetan (Vajrayana) account, the deceased passes through a sequence of bardo states over up to forty-nine days: first the dawning of the pure "clear light" of reality at the moment of death, then a visionary phase in which the consciousness encounters a succession of peaceful and wrathful deities, radiant Buddhas and terrifying forms alike. The decisive teaching is that all these appearances, blissful and horrifying, are projections of one's own mind, not external beings; the one who recognizes them as such is liberated on the spot, while the one who reacts to them with attachment or terror is driven onward, toward another rebirth. This is why the text is read aloud to the dying and the dead: to remind the consciousness, at each stage, of what it is seeing, and so to offer repeated chances at liberation. The Bardo thus reframes death as an opportunity rather than merely an ending, a final, high-stakes occasion for the awakening that meditation prepares one to seize, and it embodies the tradition's deep teaching that the realms we experience, in life and after it, are made by mind.

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.