Tibetan Book Of The Dead

what the percipient on the Bardo plane sees is due entirely to his own mental-content; that there are no visions of gods or of demons, of heavens or of hells, other than those born of the hallucinatory karmic thought-forms constituting his personality

The Evans-Wentz edition articulates the text's central psychological claim: Bardo visions are projections of the dying person's own karmic mental content, a reading that directly enabled Jung's psychologizing of the text.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis

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consciousness never ceases, but passes through birth, death, the intermediate state or bardo (a Tibetan term that, as a result of Evans-Wentz's book, has found its way into Webster's Third New International Dictionary), and rebirth, until the achievement of buddhahood

Lopez's afterword tracks how Evans-Wentz's edition introduced the Tibetan concept of bardo into Western consciousness and language, anchoring the text's cultural authority in its capacity to address the universal fascination with death.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis

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the Bar do thos grol, Liberation in the Intermediate State through Hearing… is part of a larger cycle of texts of the 'heart essence' (mying thig) tradition of the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism… a 'treasure' (gter ma), said to have been hidden in Tibet by the Indian tantric master Padmasambhava during the eighth century

Lopez situates the text within its precise Nyingma tantric lineage as a revealed treasure text, establishing the philological and sectarian context that Evans-Wentz's perennialist framing had largely obscured.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis

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Removing the Bar do thos grol from the moorings of language and culture, of time and place, Evans-Wentz transformed it into The Tibetan Book of the Dead and set it afloat in space, touching down at various moments in various cultures over the course of the past century

Lopez's critical assessment identifies Evans-Wentz's decontextualizing transformation as constitutive of the text's Western reception, framing the entire translation history as an act of cultural appropriation and creative misreading.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis

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Just as Evans-Wentz invoked Pythagoras, Plato, and Plotinus, Sogyal offers quotations from Montaigne, Blake, Rilke, Henry Ford, Voltaire, Origen, Shelley, Mozart, Balzac, Einstein, Rumi, Wordsworth, and the Venerable Bede

The passage traces the text's perennialist afterlife from Evans-Wentz to Sogyal Rinpoche's best-selling adaptation, demonstrating a persistent strategy of cosmopolitan eclecticism in presenting Bardo teachings as universal wisdom.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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Whilst the funeral rites — including the reading of the Bardo Thödol — are being performed, in the house of the deceased or at the place of death, other lāmas chant by relays, all day and night, the service for assisting the spirit of the deceased to reach the Western Paradise of Amitabha

Evans-Wentz's account of the actual Tibetan mortuary liturgical context describes the Bardo Thodol as a read-aloud guide for the deceased across the forty-nine-day intermediate state, grounding the text in lived ritual practice.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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once again, as with The Tibetan Book of the Dead, C. G. Jung provided a psychological commentary

The preface to The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation confirms the established pattern of Jung's collaboration with Evans-Wentz editions, indicating a sustained Jungian hermeneutic presence across the Evans-Wentz Tibetan corpus.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting

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Jung first became acquainted with this particular school in the inter-war years when Tibet was still a 'Forbidden Land' from which Westerners were strictly excluded, and its philosophical systems known only by tenuous and mostly unreliab

Clarke contextualizes Jung's encounter with Tibetan Buddhism — including the Bardo Thodol — within the historical inaccessibility of Tibet, explaining why Evans-Wentz's edition represented a rare and consequential window for Western depth psychology.

Clarke, J. J., Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, 1994supporting

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is tied to the corpse and burned or buried with it — just as a copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead was ordinarily interred with a mummy

Evans-Wentz draws a comparative parallel between the Bardo Thodol and the Egyptian Book of the Dead as mortuary texts, a cross-cultural equation that became foundational to the text's reception within comparative religion and depth psychology.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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Evans-Wentz describes himself as having served as the lāma's 'living English dictionary.' One can thus assume that much of the terminology derived from Evans-Wentz

Lopez's critical account of the Evans-Wentz/Dawa Samdup collaboration reveals the degree to which Evans-Wentz's own linguistic and conceptual choices shaped the English text, destabilizing the claimed authority of lāmic transmission.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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Apart from errors in translation, the rendering of Evans-Wentz misses the simple and direct locution of the text, interpolating instead a vague and exalted notion

Lopez's critique of Evans-Wentz's translation practice — exemplified through comparison with a more accurate rendering — argues that systematic mistranslation elevated and spiritualized the text beyond its original register.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting

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'The Tibetan Book of the Dead'. 'The Times of India Annual', Bombay, 1951

Lama Govinda's bibliography documents his own engagement with the Bardo Thodol as an independent scholarly and practitioner voice, situating the text within the broader project of his Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting

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There cannot, in any philosophic view of the doctrine of Karma be any 'hold up' of what is a continuous life-process. Such process does not consist of independent sections waiting upon one another

The Evans-Wentz edition's commentary addresses the philosophical coherence of the Bardo doctrine within the framework of karma and continuous consciousness, engaging the text's metaphysics on its own doctrinal terms.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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Bardo Thödol, see Book of the Dead: Tibetan

Neumann's index cross-references the Bardo Thodol under 'Book of the Dead: Tibetan,' confirming its integration as a recognized term within the depth-psychological literature of the Jungian school.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019aside

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the Block-Print employed contains sixteen such treatises, corresponding to the first sixteen of the cycle of seventeen enumerated in The Tibetan Book of the Dead (pp. 71–72)

Evans-Wentz cross-references the Bardo Thodol textual cycle in his Great Liberation edition, demonstrating how his successive publications formed an internally referencing Tibetan corpus for Western readers.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954aside

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These are, according to Kuṇḍalini Yoga, the median-nerve, in the hollow of the spinal column, and the right and left psychic nerves coiled around the spinal column. (See The Tibetan Book of the Dead, p. 215.)

Evans-Wentz's footnote connects Kundalini yoga physiology to the Bardo Thodol's subtle-body cosmology, illustrating his characteristic method of synthesizing Tibetan and Hindu tantric frameworks.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954aside

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