The Bardo Thödol — 'Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State' — was revealed by the 14th-century Nyingma treasure-revealer (terton) Karma Lingpa (1326-1386) on Mount Gampodar in central Tibet. It belongs to a larger cycle of teachings called the 'Self-Liberated Wisdom of the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities' (Karling Zhitro). Tradition holds that the text had been concealed by Padmasambhava in the 8th century, to be revealed when the time was right. The text is intended to be recited at the bedside of the dying and continuously over the forty-nine days after death — the maximum length of the intermediate state (bardo) before the next rebirth.
The Tibetan word bardo means 'between' — the gap, the interval. The Bardo Thödol describes six bardos: the bardo of birth and life, the bardo of dream, the bardo of meditation, the bardo of dying, the bardo of dharmata (the immediate post-death state of luminosity), and the bardo of becoming (the period of seeking the next rebirth). The text concentrates on the latter three — the death process, the encounter with luminosity, and the journey toward rebirth.
At the moment of death, the text says, the consciousness experiences the 'clear light' — the unconditioned luminosity that is the ground of mind itself. If recognized, liberation occurs in that instant. If not recognized, the consciousness moves into the bardo of dharmata, where it encounters first the peaceful deities and then the wrathful deities — projections of one's own mind in symbolic form. If still not liberated, the consciousness enters the bardo of becoming and is drawn toward a new rebirth, the text describing in detail the signs that indicate each of the six realms.
The Bardo Thödol entered Western consciousness through Walter Evans-Wentz's 1927 translation, prepared with Kazi Dawa-Samdup, which framed the text in the spiritualist vocabulary of its time and gave it the misleading title 'Tibetan Book of the Dead' (modeled on the Egyptian Book of the Dead). The more accurate Francesca Fremantle/Chögyam Trungpa translation (1975) corrected many of Evans-Wentz's interpretations. The most complete English version is Gyurme Dorje's 2005 translation (Penguin Classics), edited by Graham Coleman.
The text is not a 'book of the dead' in any morbid sense. It is, as Sogyal Rinpoche put it, a guidebook for the living. By practicing now with the instructions of the bardo, one prepares for the moment of death not as terror but as the highest opportunity for awakening.
