Let it come that the blissful Samadhi of the Clear Light may dawn [upon mel.
[6] When assuming supernormal rebirth in the Szdpa Bardo, Let it come that the perverting revelations of Mara occur not therein; When I arrive wheresoever I wish to, Let it come that I experience not the illusory fright and awe from evil arma.
When the roarings of savage beasts are uttered,
Let it come that they be changed into the sacred sounds of
the Six Syllables ; ?
When pursued by snow, rain, wind, and darkness,
Let it come that I see with the celestial eyes of bright
Wisdom.
[8]
Let it come that all sentient beings of the same harmonious order in the Bardo,
Without jealousy [towards one another],° obtain birth on the higher planes ;
? That is, into the sounds of the mantra Om-md-ni-pay-mé-Hing! and of other mantras of the Mahayana and Mantraydna Doctrines ; (cf. stanza 9 below; also pp. 1491, 134”).
* These are: Om-md-ni-pay-mé-Hing! (Cf. p. 1491.)
° This may also refer to the jealousy arising when one is taking rebirth either as a male or a female. (See p. 179.)
Prayer for Protection 207
When [destined to] suffering from intense miseries of hunger and thirst,
Let it come that I experience not the pangs of hunger and thirst, heat and cold.!
When I behold the future parents in union,
Let it come that I behold them as the [Divine] Pair, the
Conquerors, the Peaceful and the Wrathful Father and
Mother;
Obtaining the power of being born anywhere, for the good of others,
Let it come that I obtain the perfect body, adorned with the signs and the graces,?
[10]
Obtaining for myself the body of a male [which is] the
better,
Let it come that I liberate all who see or hear me;
Allowing not the evil Zarma to follow me,
Let it come that whatever merits [be mine] follow me and be
multiplied.
[11] Wherever I be born, there and then, Let it come that I meet the Conquerors, the Peaceful and the Wrathful Deities ; Being able to walk and to talk as soon as [I am] born,’ Let it come that I obtain the non-forgetting intellect and remember my past life* [or lives].
1 ‘Hunger and thirst’ refer to the sufferings concomitant with existence as a preta (or unhappy ghost); ‘heat and cold’, to existence in the hot and cold Hells.
2 This refers to the body of a Buddha, in which appear various supernormal signs and powers.
3 This is a reference to the Buddha, Who when born is said to have taken fifty-six steps, seven forwards and seven backwards in each of the four cardinal directions, and to have uttered a divine premonitory sentence at the end of each fourteen steps. After that supernormal performance He, like an ordinary babe, was unable to walk or to talk until normally old enough.
In the Samgiti Satta, Digha Nikaya, of the Pali Canon of Southern
208 Tibetan Book of the Dead: Appendix
[12] In all the various lores, great, small, and intermediate, Let it come that I be able to obtain mastery merely upon hearing, reflecting, and seeing ; In whatever place I be born, let it be auspicious ; Let it come that all sentient beings be endowed with happiness.
[33] Ye Conqucrors, Peaceful and Wrathful, in likeness to your bodies, [Number of your] followers, duration of your life-period, limit of your realms, And [in likeness to the] goodness of your divine name, Let it come that I, and others, equal your very selves in all these.
By the divine grace of the innumerable All-Good Peaceful and Wrathful [Ones],
And by the gift-waves of the wholly pure Reality,
[And] by the gift-waves of the one-pointed devotion of the mystic devotees,
Let it come that whatsoever be wished for be fulfilled here and now.
‘The Path of Good Wishes Affording Protection from Fears in the Bardo’ is finished.
Buddhism, there is the following explanation from the Buddha Himself as to the non-forgetting (and the forgetting) of past incarnations:
‘There are four conditions of entrance of the embryo into the womb:
‘Brethren, in this world, one cometh into existence in the mother’s womb without knowing, remaineth in it without knowing, and cometh out from the mother’s womb without knowing; this is the first.
‘Brethren, one cometh into existence in the mother’s womb knowingly, remaineth in it without knowing, and cometh out from it without knowing ; this is the second.
‘Brethren, one cometh into existence in the mother’s womb knowingly, remaineth in it knowingly, and cometh out from it without knowing ; this is the third,
‘Brethren, in this world, one cometh into existence in the mother’s womb knowingly, remaineth in it knowingly, and cometh out from it knowingly ; this is the fourth,’
(Cf. the method, taught by the Buddha, of remembering past lives, pp. 40-1.)
ibe CONCLUDING SEVEN VERSES 209
[Vs THE COLOPHON]
[The Manuscript concludes with the following seven verses by the dama or scribe who compiled it, but he—faithful to the old /amaic teaching that the human personality should be self-abased and the Scriptures alone exalted before the gaze of sentient creatures—has not recorded his name :]
Through the perfectly pure intention of mine
In the making of this, through the root of the merits thereof,
[May] those protectorless sentient beings, Mothers,
[Be] placed in the State of the Buddha:!
Let the radiant glory of auspiciousness come to illuminate the world ;?
Let this Book be auspicious ; #
Let virtue and goodness be perfected in every way.
[Here endeth the Manuscript of the Bardo Thodol.|
1 In dedicating the whole of the spiritual merit, derived from the task of tran- scribing our copy of the Bardo Thédol, to mothers, irrespective of race or religion, to the end that they may be helped to attain Buddhahood, the scribe testifies to the position of respect and honour which the democracy of Buddhism has always assigned to woman,
2 Lit. ‘ Jambudvipa’, the proper Sanskrit name given to the realm of human beings,
3 The text of this verse is Mangalam: dGeho (pron. Gewo), the Sanskrit and the Tibetan term (each meaning ‘Let it [i.e. this Book] be auspicious’), in apposition, suggesting that the scribe possessed at least a limited knowledge of Sanskrit.
‘Fill up, Punna, the orb of holy life,
E’en as on fifteenth day the full-orb’d moon.
Fill full the perfect knowledge of the Path,
And scatter all the gloom of ignorance.’—
Punna, a Bhikkhuni.
Psalms of the Early Buddhists, 1. iii
(Mrs. Rhys Davids’ Translation),
Oe Dien 1) A
These Addenda consist of seven sections, complementary to our Introduction and Commentary, concerning (1) Yoga, (2) Tantricism, (3) Mantras, or Words of Power, (4) the Gurz and Skiskya (or Chela) and Initiations, (5) Reality, (6) Northern and Southern Buddhism and Christianity, and (7) the Medieval Christian Judgement.
Yoga
The word Yoga (frequently appearing in our annotations to the Bardo Thodol text), derived from the Sanskrit root yw, meaning ‘to join’, closely allied with the English verb Zo yoke, implies a joining or yoking of the lower human nature to the higher or divine nature in such manner as to allow the higher to direct the lower;! and this condition—essential to the successful application of the Bardo doctrines—is to be brought about by control of the mental process. So long as the field of the mind is occupied by such thought-forms and thought- processes as arise from the false concept, universally dominat- ing mankind, that phenomena and phenomenal appearances are real, a state of mental obscuration called ignorance, which prevents true knowledge, exists. It is only when all obscuring and erroneous concepts are totally inhibited and the field of the mind is swept clean of them that the primor- dial or unmodified condition of mind, which is ever devoid of these thought-formations and thought-processes arising from ignorance, is realizable ; and, in its realization, there dawns Illu- mination, symbolized in the Bardo Thodol as the Primal Clear Light of the Dharma-K aya.
A mirror covered with a thick deposit of dust, or a crystal vase filled with muddied water, symbolize the mind of the normal human being darkened with the nescience arising from
1 Some scholars question this generally accepted explanation and think that the term yoga probably means ‘practice’ as opposed to theory in religion. If so, it would then imply yogic practice such as will produce indomitable control over the mental processes and lead to realization of Reality. In this sense,
yoga may be regarded asa system of applied psychology far more highly developed than any known to Western Science,
212 Tibetan Book of the Dead: Addenda
heresies and false knowledge. Yoga is a scientific method of removing the dust from the mirror and the earthy particles from the water. It is only when the mind is thus made clear and limpid that it can reflect the Light of Reality and man can come to know himself. J/aya, or Illusion, is the Veil of Isis hiding from man the Unsullied and Unsulliable Reality ; the piercing of this Veil and the secing of that which it hides is accomplished through methods as definite and certain in psychical results as those employed in a European or American chemical laboratory are in physical results. As gold can be separated from impurities by methods of chemistry, so can Truth be divorced from Error by methods of Yaga.
Like the root teachings of Buddhism, the root teachings of the Bardo Thodol are incapable of being practically applied without Right Knowledge; Right Knowledge to be at all effective in a devotee’s life should not depend merely upon belief or theory, but upon realization; and realization of Right Knowledge is impossible without such mind control as Yaga implics. That this is so, the canonical scriptures of all schools of Buddhism confirm.!
It is not our purpose to discuss here the intricacies of the various aspects and schools of Yoga; for, though technical terms and some of the purely philosophical or theoretical parts of the Hindu, Buddhist, and other systems of the science of mind-control often differ widely, we are convinced, after much research carried on while living among yogis of various schools, that the goal for all yogis is, in the last analysis of esotcricism, idcntical, namely, emancipation from the thraldom of sangsaric, or phenomenal, existence, the Hindus calling it Mukti and the Buddhists Mirvana?
Intellectual understanding of much of the Bardo Thédol is,
1 Yoga practice was introduced into Mahdyaua Buddhism by Asanga, a monk of Gandhara (Peshawar, India). He is said to have been inspired directly by the Bodhisat Maitreya, the coming Buddha, and so produced the Scriptures of the Yoga-carya (i. e. ‘Contemplative ’) School called The Five Books of Maitreya (cf. Waddell, The Buddhism of Tibet, p. 128).
* The editor possesses a number of very important translations, by the late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, of Tibetan treatises on Yoga, one of them having originated in ancient India. If there should be encouragement to publish them,
the editor hopes then to put’on record in more detail the results of his own researches in Yoga,
Yoga 213
therefore, obviously dependent upon at least some elementary explanation of Yoga, such as we have herein given. The Clear Light, so often referred to in our text—to take but one of the outstanding yogic doctrines—is best interpreted from the standpoint of the devotee of Yoga, though for all mankind alike it dawns at the all-determining moment of death. As such, the Clear Light symbolizes the visual condition in which one finds oneself at the moment of death and afterwards in the Intermediate State. If the vision be unclouded by karmic propensities, which are the source of all phenomena and appari- tional appearances in the Bardo, the deceased sees Reality as the Primordial Clear Light, and, if he so wills, can renounce the Sazgsaéra and pass into Mirvaua, beyond the Circle of Death and Rebirth.
Such clarity of spiritual insight is, of course, extremely rare, being the fruit of innumerable lifetimes of right living ; nevertheless, the aim of the Bardo Thédol teachings is to attempt to place every one, when dying or deceased, in the Path leading to its realization. Unless, through the practice of mental-concentration, complete control over the thinking process be achieved, so as to arrive at Right Knowledge ere death, in virtue of having experienced Illumination (i.e. recog- nition of the Clear Light in an ecstatic condition while still in the human body), the /amas maintain that comprehension of the nature of the Clear Light is quite impossible for the unilluminated.
Il. TANTRICISM ?
The Bardo Thidol being itself a work more or less Tantric,? and consequently largely based upon the Yoga Philosophy, some general acquaintance with Tantricism, as with Yoga, is