What The Tibetan Book of the Dead Teaches Us About Life

If you walk to the top of Darjeeling, past the old stone post office and curio shops and little restaurants, you come to Chowrasta, the town plaza. Passing ponies standing about with their syces, elderly Tibetan men and women taking the sun on benches, you start along a circular promenade that offers breathtaking views of the snow-covered Himalayas. A steep path part of the way around leads down past rickety tea stalls and pastel wooden houses with “Free Tibet” stickers on the windows. Prayer flags flutter in the trees; hydrangeas and trumpet flowers overhang trickling waterfalls. Below in the valley, dirt tracks thread the lush tea gardens. Drum beats sound from Lebong five miles to the north, once the highest racecourse in the world and now a military cantonment. About half an hour further along the path is a low red gate painted with undulating snakes like the serpent deities said to guard secret teachings. Beyond stands Bhutia Busty monastery, a two-story maroon-and-white building with yellow window frames, golden roof finials, and white prayer flags out front.

Bhutia Busty is said to house the original manuscript of the Bardo Thodol or The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist teaching composed in the eighth century by Guru Rinpoche, the Indian saint who brought Buddhism to Tibet. A kind of pilgrim’s guidebook, the teaching is intended to help the dead navigate the “bardo” after-death journey to rebirth and has enjoyed great popularity in the West since it first appeared in English translation in 1927.

On a cool, misty day, my mother and I stopped in at Bhutia Busty during a visit to Darjeeling, her hometown. A middle-aged lama greeted us at the entrance and offered to show us around.

“Could I have a look at the Bardo Thodol manuscript?” I asked, especially interested because I’d spent years studying the 1927 translation while researching a novel. My Tibetan great-grandfather had been instrumental in making this translation possible, having introduced the editor, American anthropologist and spiritual seeker W.Y. Evans-Wentz, to the translator, Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup. A number of translations have appeared since, but the 1927 one is credited with awakening interest in the West in the dharma, or teachings of the Buddha.

Disappointingly, the lama replied, “People often inquire to me: Please, can we see The Tibetan Book of the Dead. But we never take it out.”

My mother and I toured the ground floor of the monastery, admiring intricate murals of the Buddha’s life. Following the lama up to the second floor, we came upon a golden statue of Guru Rinpoche. He wore a jeweled coronet and his eyebrows swooped down to the bridge of his nose. We gazed at the fierce countenance, wind whistling through the windows and rain beating on the roof. The monastery cat slunk along the wall and disappeared into a dark doorway. I thought about The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Guru Rinpoche’s ancient teaching dwelling somewhere deep inside the old monastery. Recalling how long it had taken me to grasp the book’s meaning, I felt it was somehow fitting that I couldn’t actually see the manuscript.

When I first read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, I struggled with the archaic language and unfamiliar concepts. The text says things like “The aggregate of thy principle of consciousness, being in its pure form—which is the Mirror-like Wisdom—will shine as a bright, radiant white light, from the heart of Vajra-Sattva, the Father-Mother . . .” and “If thou hadst recognized the radiances of the Five Orders of Wisdom to be the emanations from thine own thought-forms, ere this thou wouldst have obtained Buddhahood in the Sambhoga-Kāya . . .”

After some time, I saw that the bardo passage consists of different stages. What the deceased does in each stage determines the nature of her journey. In the first part, she’s urged to realize she is dead, to accept the impossibility of returning to her previous life. The middle stage brings encounters with frightening deities. These are, The Tibetan Book of the Dead says, produced by the deceased’s own mind; the moment she recognizes this, they vanish. And in the end stage, Judgment and Rebirth, the deceased appears before Yama, Lord of the Dead. She sees her past deeds in Yama’s mirror (her memory), and her good deeds are weighed against bad on Yama’s scale (her conscience).

Though I understood the stages on their own terms, I didn’t get their larger significance. What accounted for The Tibetan Book of the Dead’s popularity? Why did generation after generation continue to find an eighth-century funerary text relevant to their day-to-day lives?

My Tibetan grandmother’s funeral shed light on these questions.

On a winter night in Darjeeling in 2004, my grandmother died. Lamas were summoned to the house from a nearby monastery. They stayed for five days next to my grandmother’s body in the altar room, guiding her through bardo by reading from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Condolence callers and relations filed in and out, placing incense and khada white blessing scarves on top of my grandmother’s body, drinking tea, and listening to the lamas.

Sitting with my relatives and the lamas, I remembered that The Tibetan Book of the Dead is meant to be as much for the living as the dead. Bardo is generally viewed as the journey from death to rebirth, but birth to death is also a bardo. After nearly a week of hearing the prayers in the altar room, I saw that, listening to the lamas, the surviving relatives can consider how The Tibetan Book of the Dead applies to the bardo they’re traveling through—in other words, to their own lives.

When the lamas urge the deceased to recognize she is dead, we might realize we’ve been in denial about the end of something: a job, a friendship, our marriage. In the middle stage, when the lamas encourage the deceased to recognize that the wrathful deities are only projections from her own mind, we can see that our fears—which seem so tangible—possess no external reality. And listening to the lamas’ instructions in the final stage, Judgment and Rebirth, the surviving relatives may recall and reflect on their past deeds. Have we cheated on our partner, told lies, stolen from a family member? Taking responsibility for our negative actions, we can recalibrate our compass and set a more positive direction going forward.

The wisdom of The Tibetan Book of the Dead continues to unfold for me. When I fell ill in 2010 and was hospitalized for six weeks, I remembered a story my grandmother told me about her father, Ajo. One winter day in 1912, on the way back to India from Tibet, he and some of the men in his party got caught in an avalanche. “Praying with his prayer beads—Save me, Guru Rinpoche, save me!—Ajo waved one arm up through the snow,” my grandmother said. “And someone saw his hand with the beads.”

For me, this story was another demonstration of the real-life power of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The lamas in my grandmother’s altar room urged her to face reality and know that her experience in the after-death bardo depended on her thoughts and actions; in a similar way, we create our experience in the bardo of life. If my great-grandfather hadn’t faced the reality of his situation and taken action, he would have perished. As I lay near death in a Tokyo hospital, thinking about how he’d changed what appeared to be his fate encouraged me not to abandon hope.

That afternoon in Darjeeling with my mother, we bid goodbye to the lama in front of Bhutia Busty monastery. The rain had stopped but mist still shrouded the white prayer flags, the dark green trees, and, on top of a big gate over the access road, the yellow deer flanking the Wheel of the Law, symbolizing the Buddha’s first teaching in a deer park in Sarnath.

A ray of sun penetrated the mist, illuminating the gate.

“That is a good sign for all your family,” the lama said, “and for all sentient beings.” He shook my mother’s hand, then mine. “Safe journey—for always.”

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