The Tibetan Book of the Dead — ed. W. Y. Evans-Wentz

A. Waddell, The Buddhism of Tibet or Lamatsm (London, 1895), p. 17.

2 There is some sound evidence for supposing that one source of the moral philosophy underlying certain of the Aesop’s Fables (and, also, by way of comparison, of the Indian Panchatantra and Hitopadesha) may yet be shown to have been such primitive Oriental folk-tales about animals and animal symbols as scholars now think helped to shape the /a@taka Tales concerning the various births of the Buddha (cf. The Jataka, ed. by E. B. Cowell, Cambridge, 1895- 1907). Similarly, the Christian mystery plays contain symbolism so much akin to that found in mystery plays still flourishing under ecclesiastical patronage throughout Tibet and the neighbouring territories of Northern Buddhism as to point to another stream of Orientalism having come into Europe (cf. Three Tibetan Mysteries, ed. by H. 1. Woolf, London, n.d.). The apparent Romanist canonization of the Buddha, under the medieval character of St. Jehoshaphat, is an additional instance of how things Eastern seem to have become things Western (cf. Baraldm and Yéewdséf, ed. by E. A. W. Budge, Cambridge, 1923). Furthermore, the once very popular medieval work De Arte Moriendi (cf. The Book of the Craft of Dying, ed. by F. M. M. Comper, London, 1917), of which there are many versions and variants in Latin, English, French, and other European languages, seems to suggest a still further infiltration of Oriental ideas, concerning death and existence after death, such as underlie both the Tibetan Bardo

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Be this as it may, it is certain that none of the great systems of ancient thought, nor even vernacular literatures, have always found the ordinary work-a-day language of the world adequate to express transcendental doctrines or even to bring out the full significance of moral maxims.

The lamb, the dragon (or serpent), the dove above the altar, the triangle enclosing the all-seeing eye (common to Freemasonry as well), the sacred fish-symbol, the ever-burning fire, or the image of the risen sun upon the receptacle for the consecrated wafer in the Roman Mass, the architectural symbols and the orientation of church and cathedral, the cross itself, and even the colours and designs of the robes of priest and bishop and pope, are a few of the silent witnesses of the survival in the modern Christian churches of the symbolism of paganism. But the key to the interpretation of the inner significance of almost all such Christianized symbols was unconsciously thrown away: uninitiated ecclesiastics, gathered together in heresy-seeking councils, having regarded that primitive Christianity, so deeply involved in symbolism, called Gnosticism, as ‘ Oriental imagery gone mad’, repudiated it as being ‘heretical’, whereas from its own point of view it was merely esoteric.

Similarly, Northern Buddhism, to which symbolism is so vital, has been condemned by Buddhists of the Southern School for claiming to be the custodian of an esoteric doctrine, for the most part orally transmitted by recognized initiates, generation by generation, direct from the Buddha—as well as for teaching (as, for example, in the Saddharma-Pandarika) recorded doctrines not in agreement with doctrines contained

Thédol and the Egyptian Book of the Dead ; and, in order to show this, a few of the most striking passages, found in the De Arte Moriend: cycle, which parallel textually certain parts of the Bardo Thédol, have been added in foot-notes to the Bardo Thédol translation from Mr. Comper’s excellent edition in The Book of the Craft of Dying.

Buddhist and Christian Gospels (Philadelphia, 1908), a pioneer study of the remarkable parallelism which exists between the texts of the Wew Testament and the texts of the Buddhist Canon, by Mr. A, J. Edmunds, suggests, likewise, that one of the most promising fields of research, as yet almost virgin, lies in a study of just such correspondences between Eastern and Western thought and literature as is suggested in this note.

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in the 77-Pitaka (Skt. Tri-Pitaka), the Pali Canon. And yet, though the Southern Buddhist commonly assumes that there cannot be any buta literal interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings, the Pali Scriptures contain many parables and metaphorical expressions, some of which the /a@mas regard as symbolical and confirmatory of their own esoteric tradition, and to which they thus claim to hold—perhaps not without good reason—the initiate’s key.

The /amas grant that the 77-Pitaka (‘Three Pitakas, or Baskets’ [of the Law]) are, as the Southern Buddhist holds, the recorded Word (or Doctrine) of the Ancients, the 7eravada; but they claim that the Pztakas do not contain all the Word, that the Pztakas lack much of the Buddha’s yogic teachings, and that it is chiefly these teachings which, in many instances, have been handed down esoterically to the present day. ‘Esoteric Buddhism’, as it has come to be called— rightly or wrongly—seems to depend in large measure upon ‘ear-whispered ’ doctrines of this character, conveyed according to long-established and inviolable rule, from guru to shishya, by word of mouth alone.

‘Esoteric Buddhism’, as it has come to be called— rightly or wrongly—seems to depend in large measure upon ‘ear-whispered ’ doctrines of this character, conveyed according to long-established and inviolable rule, from guru to shishya, by word of mouth alone.

The Pali Canon records that the Buddha held no doctrine secretly ‘in a closed fist’ (cf. Maha Parinibbana Sittanta, Digha Nikaya Il), that is to say, withheld no essential doctrine from the members of the Sazgha (Priesthood), just as no guru nowadays withholds a doctrine necessary for the spiritual enlightenment of his initiated or accepted disciples. This, however, is far from implying that all such teachings were intended to be set down in writing for the uninitiated and worldly multitude, or that they ever were so recorded in any of the Canons. The Buddha Himself wrote down nothing of His teachings, and His disciples who after His death compiled the Buddhist Scriptures may not have recorded therein all that their Master taught them. If they did not, and there are, therefore, as the /amas contend, certain unwritten teachings of the Buddha which have never been taught to those who were not of the Sazgha, then there is, undoubtedly, an extra-canonical, or esoteric, Buddhism, An esoteric Buddhism thus conceived is not, however, to bep. 6 regarded as in any wise in disagreement with canonical, or exoteric, Buddhism, but as being related to it as higher mathematics are to lower mathematics, or as being the apex of the pyramid of the whole of Buddhism.

In short, the evidence adducible gives much substantial support to the claim of the Jamas, to whom we refer, that there is—as the Bardo Thodol appears to suggest—an unrecorded body of orally transmitted Buddhistic teachings complementary to canonical Buddhism.?

Ill. THE ESOTERIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FORTY-NINE DAYS
OF THE BARDO

Turning now to our text itself, we find that structurally it is founded upon the symbolical number Forty-nine, the square of the sacred number Seven ; for, according to occult teachings common to Northern Buddhism and to that Higher Hinduism which the Hindu-born Bodhisattva Who became the Buddha Gautama, the Reformer of the Lower Hinduism and the Codifier of the Secret Lore, never repudiated, there are seven worlds or seven degrees of Maya? within the Sangsara,’ constituted as seven globes of a planetary chain. On each globe there are seven rounds of evolution, making the forty-nine (seven times seven) stations of active existence. As in the