The Bardo and the Tibetan Book of the Dead

Tibetan Buddhism shares the wider Buddhist picture of rebirth among six realms, from the gods to the hells, driven by karma and ignorance. What it develops in unusual detail is the passage between one life and the next. The Tibetan word bardo simply means “in-between”. Indian Buddhist schools had debated whether such a state exists: the Sarvastivada and others described an intermediate being seeking a new birth, while the Theravada denied it. Tibetan tradition accepted it and made it a central theme of practice.

Tibetan teachers speak of six bardos. Three belong to life: the bardo of this life between birth and death, the bardo of dreams and the bardo of meditation. Three belong to death: the bardo of dying, the bardo of reality, and the bardo of becoming, which ends in rebirth. In this view every moment is a kind of transition, and death is the most powerful of them.

The layers shown here are schematic. The bardo is not a place above or below the earth but a state of mind, so the diagram arranges its possible outcomes from the highest, liberation in the clear light, to the lowest, rebirth in the lower realms.

The Bardo Thödol, “Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State”, is part of a larger cycle of teachings on the peaceful and wrathful deities. Tibetan tradition holds that the 8th-century master Padmasambhava hid these teachings as treasures, terma, and that the treasure-revealer Karma Lingpa brought them to light in the 14th century. Historians cannot confirm this account, but agree that the cycle took shape in the Nyingma tradition and spread widely in the following centuries.

The text is meant to be read aloud by a lama or a friend beside the dying person, and after death near the body. It first describes the dissolution of the elements: the body grows heavy, fluids dry up, warmth fades and breath stops, as earth, water, fire and air dissolve one into another. Then, tradition teaches, the clear light dawns, the luminous nature of the mind itself. A person who has trained in meditation and recognises it is liberated at that moment. Tibetan Buddhists speak of accomplished practitioners who remain in this state, called tukdam, for days after death.

For those who do not recognise it, the bardo of reality opens. The mind’s own nature appears as brilliant colours, roaring sounds and a procession of deities, forty-two peaceful and then fifty-eight wrathful, over successive days. The reader repeatedly tells the dead person that these terrifying and beautiful forms are projections of their own mind, and that recognising them brings liberation or rebirth in a pure land.

If recognition still fails, the dead enter the bardo of becoming. They have a mental body that can pass through walls and travel anywhere at a thought, and they may see their grieving family without being able to reach them. The text describes a judgement before Yama, the lord of death, who looks into a mirror that reflects every deed, and an assessment of good and evil, sometimes pictured as white and black pebbles. Tradition presents this not as a sentence imposed from outside but as the working of the dead person’s own karma.

Soft lights of the six realms then begin to shine, and the dead are urged to turn away from the dull lights that lead to the lower realms. Finally they see couples in union, their possible future parents. The reader gives instructions for closing the door of an unfavourable womb or, if rebirth cannot be avoided, choosing a good human birth where the path can be practised again. The whole passage is said to last up to forty-nine days, and families hold prayers and offerings every seventh day.

These teachings shape what Tibetan families do when someone dies. Lamas are called to recite prayers and, where possible, to perform phowa, a meditation said to transfer the consciousness of the dying directly to a pure land. The body is often left undisturbed for a time so that the consciousness can leave peacefully. Butter lamps are lit, offerings are made to monasteries in the dead person’s name, and the reading of the bardo texts may continue through the forty-nine days. The body itself is then given back to the elements, by cremation or, in parts of Tibet, by sky burial, in which it is offered to vultures as a final act of generosity.

Tibetan literature also tells of the delog, people who are said to have died, travelled through the bardo and the realms of the dead, and returned to life to describe what they saw. Their accounts, often written down and recited, served as moral lessons and kept the images of the bardo vivid among ordinary people.

In Tibet the Bardo Thödol was one of several funeral texts. It became world-famous through the English translation made by the Sikkimese teacher Kazi Dawa Samdup and published in 1927 by the American scholar W. Y. Evans-Wentz, who titled it The Tibetan Book of the Dead by analogy with the Egyptian Book of the Dead, an unrelated work. Evans-Wentz added introductions shaped by his own Theosophical interests, and later editions included a psychological commentary by Carl Jung.

In 1964 Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert adapted the text as a manual for psychedelic experience, and in the following decades it was read in hospices, quoted in films and music, and newly translated by Tibetan teachers and Western scholars. Historians such as Bryan Cuevas and Donald Lopez have traced how a regional ritual text became a global classic, often read in ways its authors could not have imagined.

For Tibetan Buddhists the bardo teachings remain above all practical. They encourage people to prepare for death through meditation, to help the dying with calm and prayer, and to see every transition in life as a chance to recognise the nature of the mind.