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

If one goeth there, taking birth as a preta, one will suffer various pangs of hurger and thirst. Recollect the revulsion ; and do not go there by any means. Exert great energy [not to enter therein].

If to be born in Hell, songs [like wailings], due to evil karma, will be heard. [One will be] compelled to enter therein unresistingly. Lands of gloom, black houses and white ~ houses, and black holes in the earth, and black roads along which one hath to go, will appear. If one goeth there, one will enter into Hell; and, suffering unbearable pains of heat and cold, one will be very long in getting out of it.2 Go not there into the midst of that. It hath been said, ‘Exert thine energy to the utmost’: this is needed now.

[THE PROTECTION AGAINST THE TORMENTING FURIES]

O nobly-born, although one liketh it not, nevertheless, being pursued from behind by karmic tormenting furies,° one feeleth compelled involuntarily to go on; [and with] tormenting furies in the front, and life-cutters as a vanguard leading one, and darkness and farmic tornadoes, and noises and snow and rain

Unformed’—a concept altogether foreign to popular, or exoteric, Christianity and found only in esoteric Christianity, i.e. Gnosticism, which, very unwisely, the councils of exoteric Christianity have officially repudiated as being ‘heretical’.

1 Or, as in the text on p. 194 (wherein the clue to the esotericism underlying the references to birth ‘amongst beasts’ is given), amongst human beings ‘ resembling the brute order’.

2 Lit., ‘there will be no time [soon] when one can get out of it’. Buddhism (and Hinduism, too,) does not postulate eternal condemnation to a state of hell, and is, in this respect, more logical than Christian theology which has in the past postulated it.

8 Text: gshed-ma (pron. shed-ma) : ‘ tormentors’ or ‘life-takers’, used here to mean ‘tormenting furies’, (Cf. p. 167%.)

3069 Bbp. 186 and terrifying hail-storms and whirlwinds of icy blasts occurring, there will arise the thought of fleeing from them.

Thereupon, by going to seek refuge because of fear, [one beholdeth] the aforesaid visions of great mansions, rockcaverns, earth-caverns, jungles, and lotus blossoms which close [on entering them]; and one escapeth by hiding inside [one of such places] and fearing to come out therefrom, and thinking, ‘To go out is not good now’. And fearing to depart therefrom, one will feel greatly attracted to one’s place of refuge [which is the womb]. Fearful lest, by going out, the awe and terror of the Bardo will mect one, and afraid to encounter them, if one hide oneself within [the place or womb chosen], one will thereby assume a very undesirable body and suffer various sufferings.

That [condition] is an indication that evil spirits and rakshasas [or demons] are interfering with one.’ For this time there is a profound teaching. Listen; and heed it:

That [condition] is an indication that evil spirits and rakshasas [or demons] are interfering with one.’ For this time there is a profound teaching. Listen; and heed it:

At that time—when the tormenting furies will be in pursuit of thee, and when awe and terror will be occurring—instantaneously [visualize] either the Supreme Heruka, or Hayagriva, or Vajra-Pani,? or [any other] tutelary deity if thou hast such, perfect of form, huge of body, of massive limbs, wrathful and terrifying in appearance, capable of reducing to dust all mischievous spirits. Visualize it instantaneously. The gift-waves and the power of its grace will separate thee from the tormenting furies and thou wilt obtain the power to select the womb-door. This is the vital art of the very profound teaching ; therefore bear it thoroughly well in mind.

O nobly-born, the dhyani and other deities are born of the power of Samadhi [or meditation]. Pvretas [or unhappy spirits or shades] and malignant spirits of certain orders are those who by changing their feeling [or mental attitude] while in the Intermediate State assumed that very shape which they thereafter retained, and became gret¢as, evil spirits, and vrakshasas, possessed of the power of shape-shifting. All

1 That is to say, interfering in such a way as to prevent birth or a good birth. * Each of these three deities, who dawn in the Chényid Bardo (sec pp. 1164, 120‘, 137'), is held to be particularly potent as an exorcizer of evil spirits.

PART IT] BARDO-BOUND SPIRITS 187

bretas, who exist in space, who traverse the sky, and the eighty thousand species of mischievous sprites, have become so by changing their feelings [while] in the mental-body [on the Bardo-plane}.!

PART IT] BARDO-BOUND SPIRITS 187

bretas, who exist in space, who traverse the sky, and the eighty thousand species of mischievous sprites, have become so by changing their feelings [while] in the mental-body [on the Bardo-plane}.!

1 Owing to having arrived at the false concept that the Intermediate State is a desirable or fixed state of existence, all dwellers therein,—sprites, prefas, demons, and deceased human entities,—becoming thereby habituated to the Bardo, their normal evolution is retarded. According to the most enlightened of the /amas, whenever a spirit is called up, as in such spirit-evocations as are nowadays common throughout the West, that spirit, through contact with this world and the prevailing traditional animistic beliefs concerning the hereafter, being strengthened in the illusion that the Bardo is a state wherein real spiritual progress is possible, makes no attempt to quit it. The spirit called up ordinarily describes the Bardo (which is pre-eminently the realm of illusion), in which it is a dweller, more or less after what it had believed whilst in the fleshly body concerning the hereafter; for just as a dreamer in the human world lives over again in the dream-state the experience of the waking state, so the inhabitant of the Bardo experiences hallucinations in kavmic accord with the content of his consciousness created by the human world. His symbolic visions, as the Bardo Thédol repeatedly emphasizes, are but the psychic reflexes of thought-forms carried over from earth-life as mental deposits or seeds of karma. (See pp. 31-5.) This is said to explain why none but very exceptional spirits when evoked have any rational philosophy to offer concerning the world in which they exist; they are regarded as being merely the playthings of karma, lacking in mental coherence and stability of personality—more often than not, as being senseless ghosts, or psychic ‘shells’ which have been cast off by the consciousness-principle, and which, when coming into rapport with a human ‘medium’, are galvanized into automaton-like life.