Bardo Thodol
A sacred text of Tibetan Buddhism, popularly known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a title coined by its first English translator, Walter Evans-Wentz, in 1927, though the original name, Bardo Thödol, literally means 'liberation through hearing in the intermediate state'. Traditionally attributed to the Indian tantric master Padmasambhava, a founding figure of Buddhism in Tibet in the 8th century, and said to have been hidden as a textual 'treasure' (terma) to be rediscovered centuries later by the treasure-revealer Karma Lingpa in the 14th century, the text belongs to a broader corpus of funerary literature associated with the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Its central function is to serve as a guide recited aloud to the dying or recently deceased person — or, in more contemplative readings, studied as spiritual preparation by the still-living practitioner — describing in detail the various intermediate states (bardos) that consciousness passes through between death and the next rebirth: the bardo of the moment of death, in which a clear, primordial light appears; the bardo of reality (chönyi bardo), populated by visions of peaceful and wrathful deities that are, according to the doctrine, projections of one's own mind; and the bardo of becoming (sidpa bardo), in which consciousness, driven by its karmic impulses, moves toward a new birth. The underlying soteriological message is that recognising these visions as manifestations of one's own consciousness, without fear or attachment, can free the being from the cycle of rebirth (samsara); should this recognition fail, the text likewise offers practical guidance for securing a more favourable rebirth. Since its translation into Western languages, the Bardo Thödol has exerted notable influence beyond Buddhist circles, from Jungian psychology to the countercultural literature of the 1960s.