Tibetan Book Of The Dead

The Tibetan Book of the Dead — known in Tibetan as the Bar do thos grol, ‘Liberation in the Intermediate State through Hearing’ — occupies a singular position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as sacred scripture, cross-cultural psychological document, and contested scholarly artifact. The corpus registers three distinct layers of engagement. First, the textual-historical layer: the Evans-Wentz edition (1927), produced through collaboration with Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup and filtered through Theosophical and neo-Vedantic frameworks, established the text’s Western reception while inevitably distorting it; Lopez’s critical afterword and Coleman’s Penguin Classics translation mark scholarly corrections to that foundational misreading. Second, the psychological layer: Jung’s commentary — reprinted in the Evans-Wentz volume — transformed the Bardo Thodol into a map of unconscious processes, reading its sequential visions of peaceful and wrathful deities as projections of karmic thought-forms, anticipating his later theorization of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Third, the comparative-mythological layer: Campbell, Eliade, Neumann, and Govinda each situate the text within broader frameworks of death-rebirth symbolism, shamanic dismemberment, and mandala cosmology. Across these registers, a central tension persists: whether the text articulates universal psychic truths accessible to Western depth-psychology or a culturally specific tantric soteriology irreducible to such appropriation.

In the library 18 passages

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

This passage articulates the Bardo Thodol’s central psychological thesis — that post-mortem visions are projections of the dying mind’s karmic content — which became the interpretive fulcrum for Jung’s and subsequent depth-psychological readings.

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 identifies the text’s core ontological claim — the continuity of consciousness through death — as the primary source of its Western appeal, and documents the term ‘bardo’ itself entering the English lexicon through Evans-Wentz’s edition.

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

Lopez argues that Evans-Wentz’s editorial transformation decontextualized a Nyingma tantric treasure-text into a universalized contemplation on death, enabling — and fundamentally distorting — its subsequent global reception.

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

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The Tibetan text that forms the point of departure for the front matter is entitled the Bar do thos grol, Liberation in the Intermediate State through Hearing… It is part of a larger cycle of texts of the ‘heart essence’ tradition of the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism

Lopez situates the text within its proper sectarian and textual genealogy as a gter ma treasure-cycle attributed to Karma gling pa, against Evans-Wentz’s more generalized spiritual framing.

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

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He did not claim that they were scholarly works; he noted presciently that a critical study of the texts from the perspectives of philology, history, and philosophy was a task for scholars of the future

Lopez’s account of Evans-Wentz’s self-described ‘anthropological’ methodology reveals the deliberate non-scholarly posture that shaped the edition’s interpretive latitude and its subsequent vulnerabilities to critique.

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

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

This passage confirms Jung’s repeated engagement with Evans-Wentz’s Tibetan translations, positioning the Tibetan Book of the Dead as establishing a template for psychological commentary on Eastern esoteric texts.

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

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Evans-Wentz’s version reads on page 228: The impatient, ordinary person when dwelling in his fleshly body calls this very clear Wisdom ‘common intelligence’… A more accurate translation might read as follows… this clear and lucid knowing is called ‘the ordinary mind.’

Lopez demonstrates through direct textual comparison that Evans-Wentz’s editorial voice — seeking vague, exalted spiritual language — systematically departs from the precision of the Tibetan originals, undermining scholarly reliability.

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

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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

Lopez traces the tradition of cosmopolitan eclecticism — here in Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying — as a direct inheritance of Evans-Wentz’s strategy of validating Tibetan teachings through Western philosophical citation.

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 Thodol — are being performed, in the house of the deceased or at the place of death, other lamas chant by relays, all day and night, the service for assisting the spirit of the deceased

Evans-Wentz describes the living ritual context of the Bardo Thodol’s recitation — a forty-nine-day funerary practice — grounding the text in Tibetan mortuary ceremony before its abstraction into psychological discourse.

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

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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 unreliable

Clarke contextualizes Jung’s encounter with Tibetan Buddhism within the historically constrained conditions of inter-war Western access to Tibet, explaining the speculative and projective character of his psychological commentary.

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

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Tibet’s geographical inaccessibility was not the only reason for this view… many of the European fantasies about India and China, dispelled from these lands by colonialism, made their way across the mountains and became sited in an idealized Tibet

Lopez identifies the Orientalist fantasy of Tibet as a reservoir of timeless wisdom — displaced from colonized India and China — as the ideological precondition for the Tibetan Book of the Dead’s Western reception.

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

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It raises the level of authority one step higher by invoking the power of lineage, stating that the exegesis derives from the lama’s own guru, which was transmitted first

Lopez analyzes Evans-Wentz’s rhetorical strategy of attributing interpretive authority to an unverifiable chain of lamic transmission, thereby legitimizing his own editorial interpolations as received teaching.

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

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‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead’. ‘The Times of India Annual’, Bombay, 1951; 122-125

Lama Govinda’s bibliography records his own published engagement with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, confirming the text’s centrality to his broader project of synthesizing Tibetan Buddhist mysticism with Western audiences.

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

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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 explicitly draws the comparative parallel between the Bardo Thodol and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, establishing the cross-cultural mortuary literature framework that would inform Campbell’s and others’ mythological readings.

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

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It was in the eighth century A.D. that Lamaism, which we may define as Tantric Buddhism, took firm root in Tibet

Evans-Wentz provides a brief historical account of Vajrayana Buddhism’s establishment in Tibet, tracing the lineage from Padmasambhava that legitimizes the Bardo Thodol’s claimed origins.

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

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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 identifies the Bardo Thodol as one text within a larger seventeen-text cycle, providing bibliographic cross-referencing that situates it within Tibetan canonical structure.

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

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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 commentary critiques popular misunderstandings of the Bardo doctrine by insisting on the philosophical continuity of karmic process, with implications for how the intermediate state between death and rebirth is to be understood.

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

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