Be not mine adversary before the Divine Circle; let there be no fall of the scale against me in the presence of the great god, Lord of Amenta.’ In the Egyptian Judgement Scene it is the ape-headed (less commonly the ibis-headed) Thoth, god of wisdom, who supervises the weighing; in the Tibetan Judgement Scene it is the monkey-headed Shinje ; and in both scenes there is the jury of deities looking on, some animal- headed, some human-headed.1_ In the Egyptian version there is a monstrous creature waiting to devour the deceased should the deceased be condemned, whilst in the Tibetan version devils wait to conduct the evil-doer to the hell-world of purgation; and the record-board which Thoth is sometimes depicted as holding corresponds to the Mirror of Karma held by Dharma-Raja or, as in some versions, by one of the divine jury. Furthermore, in both Books of the Dead, the deceased when first addressing the Judge pleads that he has done no evil. Before Osiris, this plea seems to be accepted in all the texts now known; before Dharma-Raja it is subject to the test of the Mirror of Karma, and this seems to be distinctly an Indian and Buddhist addition to the hypothetical pre- historic version, whence arose the Egyptian and the Tibetan versions, the Egyptian being the less affected.
Plato, too, in recording the other-world adventures of Er, in the tenth book of the Repudlic, describes a similar Judgement, in which there are judges and karmic record-boards (affixed to the souls judged) and paths—one for the good, leading to Heaven, one for the evil, leading to Hell—and demons waiting to take the condemned souls to the place of punishment, quite as in the Bardo Thédol (see p. 49).”
} Such animal-headed deities as appear in the Bardo Thédol are, for the most part, derived from the pre-Buddhistic religion of Tibet called Bin, and, therefore, probably of very great antiquity, Like their Egyptian parallels, they seem to be more or less totemistic ; and, through their impersonation by masked priests, as in the Ancient Egyptian Mysteries and surviving Tibetan mystery plays, may be—as our text also suggests—symbolic of definite attributes, passions, and propensities of sangsdric, or embodied, beings—human, sub-human, and superhuman. (See p. r4o!.)
* The student is here referred to Section VII of our Addenda (pp. 238-41), concerning the Christianized version of the Judgement contained in the curious medieval treatise entitled The Lamentation of the Dying Creature.
The After-Death Judgement 37
The purgatorial lore now Christianized and associated with St. Patrick in the originally pagan St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Ireland, the whole cycle of Otherworld and Rebirth legends of the Celtic peoples connected with their Fairy-Faith, and similar Proserpine lore recorded in the Sacred Books of man- kind the world over, as well as the Semitic doctrines of heaven and hell and judgement, and of resurrection as the Christianized corruption of a pre-Christian and Jewish re- birth doctrine, as also the passage in Plato, all testify to beliefs universal among mankind, probably far older than the oldest of ancient records from Babylon or from Egypt.!
The painting of the Tibetan Judgement Scene as reproduced herein (see opposite p. 166) was made, in strict accord with monastic tradition, in Gangtok, Sikkim, during the year 1919, by Lharipa-Pempa-Tendup-La, a Tibetan artist then sojourn- ing there. An early prototype of it was, until quite recently, preserved as one of the old frescoes contained within the pictorial Wheel of Life of the Tashiding temple-picture in Sikkim, which Dr. L. A. Waddell has described as follows: ‘The judgement is in every case meted out by the impartial Shinge-chho-gyal or “ Religious King of the Dead” [Dharma- Raa|,a form of Yama, the Hindu god of the dead, who holds a mirror in which the naked soul is reflected, while his servant Shiye weighs out in scales the good as opposed to the bad deeds; the former being represented by white pebbles, and the latter by black.’2 And Dr. Waddell has traced back
1 Jn my Fatry-Faith in Celtic Countries (Oxford, 1911), Chapter X, I have suggested how very probable it is that the purgatorial lore which centred about the cavern for mystic pagan initiations formerly existing on an island in Loch Derg, Ireland, at what is now the famous place of Catholic pilgrimage called St. Patrick’s Purgatory, gave rise to the doctrine of Purgatory in the Roman Church, The original purgatorial cavern was demolished, by order of the English Government in Ireland, to destroy, as was said, pagan superstition.
Furthermore, the subterranean places of worship and initiation, dedicated to the Sun-God Mithras, still preserved as ancient remains throughout the Southern European countries, bear such close resemblance to the original Irish Purgatory— as to other underground places of initiation in Celtic countries like New Grange in Ireland and Gavrinis in Brittany—as to indicate a common prehistoric origin, essentially religious and connected with a cult of the Bardo-world and its inhabitants.
2 Cf. The Gazetteer of Sikhim, ed. by H. H. Risley, p, 269.
38 Introduction
the origin of the picture to a similar Wheel of Life, commonly, though incorrectly, known as ‘the Zodiac’ in the verandah of the Ajanta Cave No. XVII, India. (See p. 56.) This, then, establishes the antiquity of the Judgement Scene, of which our text contains one version.
Throughout the canonical and apocryphal literature of Northern Buddhism other versions are numerous. In the Pali canon of Southern Buddhism there are parallel versions, for example in the Devadita Vagga of the Anguttara Nikaya, and in the Devadita Sittam of the Mahima Nikaya. The latter version may be summarized as follows: The Exalted One, the Buddha, while sojourning at the Jetavana Monastery, addresses the monks assembled therein concerning the after-death state of existence. Like a man of clear vision, sitting between two houses, each with six doors, He beholds all who come and go; the one house symbolizing the Bardo or state of disembodied existence, the other the embodied state of existence, and the twelve doors the six entrances and the six exits of the six /okas. Then, after explaining the manner in which karma governs all states of existence, the Buddha describes how the evil-doer is brought before the King of Death and questioned about the Five Messengers of Death.
The first messenger is symbolized by a new-born babe lying on its back; and the message is that even for it, as for all living creatures, old age and death are inevitable. The second messenger comes in the guise of an aged person, eighty, ninety, or a hundred years of age, decrepit, crooked as the curved rafter of a gabled roof, leaning on a staff, trembling as he walks, pathetically miserable, with youth entirely gone, broken-toothed, grey-haired and nearly bald, and with wrinkled brow ; and his message is that the babe but grows up and matures and decays to become a victim of Death. The third messenger, a person confined by illness, rolling in his own filth, unable to rise or to lie down without the aid of an attendant, brings the message that disease, too, is inevitable, even as death. The fourth messenger, a thief undergoing most terrible punishment, bears the message that the punish-
The After-Death Judgement 39
ment for evil-doing in this world is as nothing compared to the punishment which arma inflicts after death. The fifth messenger, to emphasize the same message of death and the corruptibility of the body, is a corpse, swollen, discoloured, and putrid.
In each instance, King Yama asks the deceased if he had seen the messenger and receives the reply, ‘No’. Then the King explains to him who the messenger was and the meaning of the messages; and the deceased, thereby remembering, is obliged to confess that, not having done good deeds, he had not acted upon the messages, but had done evil instead, for- getting the inevitability of death. Thereupon, Yama pro- nounces the judgement, that since the deceased had failed to do good he must suffer the Lavmic consequences. Accordingly, the hell-furies take the deceased and cause him to suffer five sorts of purgatorial punishments; and, though he suffers most unbearable pains, he is, as the Bardo Thodol makes clear, incapable of dying
In the Anguttara Nikaya version, wherein there are but three messengers, the aged person, the man or woman over- come with disease, and the corpse, the Buddha concludes the discourse thus :
‘If men who have been warned by heavenly messengers
have been indifferent as regards religion they suffer long,
being born in a low condition.
‘If virtuous men have been warned by heavenly messengers in this world, they do not neglect to profess the holy doctrines. Seeing the danger of attachment, which is the cause of birth and death, they have in this life extinguished the miseries of existence by arriving at a condition free from fear, happy and free from passions and sins.’}
X. THE REBIRTH DOCTRINE In examining the Rebirth Doctrine, more particularly as it presents itself in our text, two interpretations must be taken into account: the literal or exoteric interpretation,
1 Cf. translation by E. R. J. Gooneratne, Anguttara Nikadya, Eka Duka and Tika Nipata (Galle, Ceylon, 1913), pp. 160-5.
40 Introduction
which is the popular interpretation; and the symbolical or esoteric interpretation, which is held to be correct by the initiated few, who claim not scriptural authority or belief, but knowledge. With respect to Tibet, these few are chiefly learned Jamas who are said to have made successful applica- tion of methods like those which the Buddha expounded for remembering past incarnations, and for acquiring the yogic power of seeing what really takes place in the natural process of death and rebirth. To the devotee, seeking thus to know rather than merely to believe on the authority of priests or books, the Buddha has offered the following guidance:
‘If he desireth to be able to call to mind his various temporary states in days gone by, such as one birth, two births, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, or a hundred thousand births, his births in many an aeon of destruction, in many an aeon of renova- tion, in many an aeon of both destruction and renovation [so as to be able to say]: “In that place such was my name, such my family, such my caste, such my subsistence, such my experience of comfort or of pain, and such the limit of my life; and when I passed from thence I took form again in that other place, where my name was so and so, such my family, such my caste, such my subsistence, such my experience of comfort or of pain, and such my term of life; and from thence I was born here—thus I am able to call to mind my various temporary states of existence in days gone by” —in that state of self-concentration, if the mind be fixed on the acquirement of any object, that object will be attained.
‘If he desireth to see with pure and heavenly vision, sur- passing that of men, beings as they pass from one state of existence and take form in others—beings base or noble, good-looking or ill-favoured, happy or miserable, according to the £arma they inherit—in that state of self-concentration, if the mind be fixed on the acquirement of any object, that object will be attained’ (Lonaphala Vagga, Anguttara Nikaya).
Again in the Brahmana Vagga, Anguttara Nikaya, where the yogic method of recovering from the content of the sub- consciousness (which—in confirmation of the Buddha’s psycho-
Interpretation of Rebirth Doctrine 41
logy—the science of the West has now proven ‘is the abode of everything that is latent’!) is likewise described, there is this additional passage: ‘ Thus he calleth to mind the various appearances and forms of his previous births. This is the first stage of his knowledge ; his ignorance [as regards prior births] hath vanished, and his knowledge [as regards prior births] hath arisen: darkness hath departed, and light hath arrived, the result due to one who liveth in meditation, subduing his passions promptly.’?
Nowhere, to our knowledge, are there nowadays—as there are said to have been in Buddhaghosa’s time—yaogis among Southern Buddhists who have carried this practice to a suc- cessful issue. It is only among Northern Buddhists (as among Hindus) that such yoga seems to be, according to trustworthy evidence from well-informed Tibetans and Indians, a practically applied science even until now, producing modern saints, some few of whom are believed worthy to be called perfected saints, or Arhants.