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

xxi et seg.) and here summarize and explain.

All is either Sangsdra or Nirvana. The first is finite experience in the ‘Six Worlds’ or Loka—a word which means ‘that which is experienced’ (Lokyante). The second, or Nirvana, is, negatively speaking, release from such experience, that is from the worlds of Birth and Death and their pains. The Void cannot even be strictly called Mzrvaua, for this is a term relative to the world, and the Void is beyond all relations. Positively, and concomitantly with such release, it is the Perfect Experience which is Buddhahood, which, again, from the cognitive aspect, is Consciousness unobscured by the darkness of Unconsciousness, that is to say, Consciousness freed of all limitation. From the emotional aspect, it is pure Bliss unaffected by sorrow; and from the volitional aspect, it is freedom of action and almighty power (Amogha-Siddhz). Perfect Experience is an eternal or, more strictly speaking, a timeless state. Imperfect Experience is also eternal in the sense that the series of universes in which it is undergone is infinite. The religious, that is practical, problem is then how from the lesser experience to pass into that which is complete, called by the Upanishads ‘the Whole’ or Pirna. This is done by the removal of obscuration. At base, the two are one—the Void, uncreated, independent, uncompounded, and beyond mind and speech. If this were not so, Liberation would not be possible. Man is in fact liberated, but does not know it. When he realizes it, he is freed. The great saying of the Buddhist work the Prajza-Paramita runs thus : ‘ Form (Ripa) is the Void and the Void is Form.’! Realization of the Void is to be a Buddha, or ‘ Knower’, and not to realize it is to be an ‘ignorant being’ in the Sangsara. The two paths, then, are Knowledge and Ignorance. The first path leads to—and, as actual realization, is—Nzrvana. The second means continuance of fleshly life as man or brute, or as a denizen of the other four Zokas. Ignorance in the individual is in its cosmic aspect Maya, which in Tibetan (sGyuma) means a magical show. In its most generic form,

1 See Tantrik Texts, vol. vii, p. 33.

STATE OF LIBERATION Xxxili

the former is that which produces the pragmatic, but, in a transcendental sense, the ‘ unreal’ notion of self and otherness. This is the root cause of error (whether in knowing, feeling, or action) which becomes manifest as the ‘Six Poisons’ (which Hindus call the ‘Six Enemies’) of the Six ZLokas of Sangsara (of which the Text gives five only)—pride, jealousy, sloth (or ignorance), anger, greed, and lust. The Text constantly urges upon the dying or ‘dead’ man to recognize in the apparitions, which he is about to see or sees, the creatures of his own mdayd-governed mind, veiling from him the Clear Light of the Void. If he does so, he is liberated at any stage.

The Text constantly urges upon the dying or ‘dead’ man to recognize in the apparitions, which he is about to see or sees, the creatures of his own mdayd-governed mind, veiling from him the Clear Light of the Void. If he does so, he is liberated at any stage.

This philosophical scheme has so obvious a resemblance to the Indian Mayavada Vedanta that the Vaishnava Padma Purana dubs that system ‘a bad scripture and covert Buddhism’ (mayavadam asachchastram prachchhannam bauddham). Nevertheless, its great scholastic, ‘the incomparable Shangkaracharyya’, as Sir William Jones calls him, combated the Buddhists in their denial of a permanent Self (Atma), as also their subjectivism, at the same time holding that the notion of an individual self and that of a world of objects were pragmatic truths only, superseded by and on the attainment of a state of Liberation which has little, if anything, to distinguish it from the Buddhist Void. The difference between the two systems, though real, is less than is generally supposed. This is a matter, however, which it would be out of place to discuss further here.

However this may be, the after-death apparitions are ‘real’ enough for the deceased who does not, as and when they appear, recognize their unsubstantiality and cleave his way through them to the Void. The Clear Light is spoken of in the Bardo Thodol as such a Dazzlement as is produced by an infinitely vibrant landscape in the springtide. This joyous picture is not, of course, a statement of what It is in itself, for It is not an object, but is a translation in terms of objective vision of a great, but, in itself, indescribable joyful inner experience. My attention was drawn, in this connexion, to a passage in a paper on the Avatamsaka Sutra (ch. Xv), by Mr. Hsu, a Chinese scholar, which says, ‘The

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XXXIV FOREWORD

Bodhisattva emits the light called “Seeing the Buddha” in order to make the dying think about the Tathagata and so enable them to go to the pure realms of the latter after death’.

The dying or deceased man is adjured to recognize the Clear Light and thus liberate himself. If he does so, it is because he is himself ripe for the liberated state which is thus presented to him. If he does not (as is commonly the case), it is because the pull of worldly tendency (Sangskara) draws him away. He is then presented with the secondary Clear Light, which is the first, somewhat dimmed to him by the general Maya. If the mind does not find its restingplace here, the first or Chikhat Bardo, which may last for several days, or ‘for the time that it takes to snap a finger’ (according to the state of the deceased), comes to an end.

If the mind does not find its restingplace here, the first or Chikhat Bardo, which may last for several days, or ‘for the time that it takes to snap a finger’ (according to the state of the deceased), comes to an end.

In the next stage (Chinyid Bardo) there is a recovery of the Death-Consciousness of objects. In one sense, that is compared with a swoon, it is a rewakening. But it is not a waking-state such as existed before death. The ‘soulcomplex’ emerges from its experience of the Void into a state like that of dream. This continues until it attains a new fleshly body and thus really awakes to earth-life again. For this world-experience is life in such a body.

When I first read the account of the fifteen days following recovery from the ‘swoon’, I thought it was meant to be a scheme of gradual arising of limited consciousness, analogous to that described in the thirty-six Zattvas by the Northern Skaivagama and its Tantras, a process which is given in its ritual form in the Tantrik Bhitashuddhi rite and in Laya or Kundalint Yoga. But on closer examination I found that this was not so. After the ending of the first Bardo the scheme commences with the complete recovery, without intermediate stages, of the Death-Consciousness. The psychic life is taken up and continued from that point, that is from the stage immediately prior to the ‘swoon’! Life immediately after death is, according to this view, as Spiritists assert, similar to, and a continuation of, the life preceding it.

1 Cf. Yogavashishtha, CLx, Vv. 41.

AFTER-DEATH EXISTENCE XXKV

As in Swedenborg’s account, and in the recent play Outward Bound, the deceased does not at first know that he is ‘dead’. Swedenborg, who also speaks of an intermediate state, says that, except for those immediately translated to Heaven or Hell, the first state of man after death is like his state in the world, so that he knows no other, believing that he is still in the world notwithstanding his death.!