called, in its own language, Bardo Thödol (‘Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane’),[1] is, among the sacred books of the world, unique. As an epitomized exposition of the cardinal doctrines of the Mahāyāna School of Buddhism, it is of very great importance, religiously, philosophically, and historically. As a treatise based essentially upon the Occult Sciences of the Yoga Philosophy, which were fundamental in the curriculum of the great Buddhist University of Nālanda, the Oxford of ancient India, it is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable works the West has ever received from the East. As a mystic manual for guidance through the Otherworld of many illusions and realms, whose frontiers are death and birth, it resembles The Egyptian Book of the Dead sufficiently to suggest some ultimate cultural relationship between the two; although we only know with certainty that the germ of the teachings, as herein made accessible to English readers, has been preserved for us by a long succession of saints and seers of the God-protected Land of the Snowy Ranges, Tibet.
II. The Symbolism
The Bardo Thödol is unique in that it purports to treat rationally of the whole cycle of sangsāric (i.e. phenomenal) existence intervening between death and birth;—the ancient doctrine of karma, or consequences (taught by Emerson as compensation), and of rebirth being accepted as the most essential laws of nature affecting human life. Often, however, its teaching appears to be quite the antithesis of rational, because much of it is recorded in an occult cipher. Dr. L. A. Waddell has declared, after careful research, that ‘the lāmas
- ↑ Mr. Talbot Mundy, in his interesting Tibetan romance Om, in making reference to this title, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, has taken it to be a very free translation of Bardo Thödol. It should not, however, so be taken; it has been adopted because it seems to be the most appropriate short title for conveying to the English reader the true character of the book as a whole.
all sincere researchers into comparative religion devoid of any religious bias ought always to be to accumulate such scientific data as will some day enable future generations of mankind to discover Truth itself—that Universal Truth in which all religions and all sects of all religions may ultimately recognize the Essence of Religion and the Catholicity of Faith.
