1 This Introduction is—for the most part—based upon and suggested by explanatory notes which the late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, the translator of the Bardo Thédol, dictated to the editor while the translation was taking shape, in Gangtok, Sikkim. The Lama was of opinion that his English rendering of the Bardo Thédol ought not to be published without his exegetical comments on the more abstruse and figurative parts of the text. This, he thought, would not only help to justify his translation, but, moreover, would accord with the wishes of his late guvu (see p. 80) with respect to all translations into a European tongue of works expository of the esoteric lore of the Great Perfectionist School into which that guru had initiated him. To this end, the translator’s exegesis, based upon that of the translator’s guru, was transmitted to the editor and recorded by the editor herein,
The editor’s task is to correlate and systematize and sometimes to expand the notes thus dictated, by incorporating such congenial matter, from widely separated sources, as in his judgement tends to make the exegesis more intelligible to the Occidental, for whom this part of the book is chiefly intended.
The translator felt, too, that, without such safeguarding as this Introduction is intended to afford, the Bardo Thédol translation would be peculiarly liable to misinterpretation and consequent misuse, more especially by those who are inclined to be, for one reason or another, inimical to Buddhistic doctrines, or to the doctrines of his particular Sect of Northern Buddhism. He also realized how such an Introduction as is here presented might itself be subject to adverse criticism, perhaps on the ground that it appears to be the outcome of a philoso- phical eclecticism. However this may be, the editor can do no more than state here, as he has stated in other words in the Preface, that his aim, both herein and in the closely related annotations to the text itself, has been to present the psychology and the teachings peculiar to and related to the Bardo Thédol as he has been taught them by qualified initiated exponents of them, who alone have the unquestioned right to explain them.
If it should be said by critics that the editor has expounded the Bardo Thédol doctrines from the standpoint of the Northern Buddhist who believes in them rather than from the standpoint of the Christian who perhaps would disbelieve at least some of them, the editor has no apology to offer; for he holds that there is no sound reason adducible why he should expound them in any other manner. Anthropology is concerned with things as they are ; and the hope of
2 Introduction
called, in its own language, Bardo Thédol (‘Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane’),! is, among the sacred books of the world, unique. As an epitomized exposition of the cardinal doctrines of the Mahayana School of Buddhism, it is of very great importance, religiously, philosophically, and historically. As a treatise based essentially upon the Occult Sciences of the Yoga Philosophy, which were fundamental in the curriculum of the great Buddhist University of Nalanda, the Oxford of ancient India, it is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable works the West has ever received from the East. As a mystic manual for guidance through the Otherworld of many illusions and realms, whose frontiers are death and birth, it resembles The Egyptian Book of the Dead sufficiently to suggest some ultimate cultural relationship between the two; although we only know with certainty that the germ of the teachings, as herein made accessible to English readers, has been preserved for us by a long succession of saints and seers of the God-protected Land of the Snowy Ranges, Tibet.
Il. THE SYMBOLISM
The Bardo Théodol is unique in that it purports to treat rationally of the whole cycle of sangsaric (i.e. phenomenal) existence intervening between death and birth ;—the ancient doctrine of karma, or consequences (taught by Emerson as compensation), and of rebirth being accepted as the most essential laws of nature affecting human life. Often, however, its teaching appears to be quite the antithesis of rational, because much of it is recorded in an occult cipher. Dr. L. A. Waddell has declared, after careful research, that ‘the Jamas
all sincere researchers into comparative religion devoid of any religious bias ought always to be to accumulate such scientific data as will some day enable future generations of mankind to discover Truth itself—that Universal Truth in which all religions and all sects of all religions may ultimately recognize the Essence of Religion and the Catholicity of Faith.
1 Mr. Talbot Mundy, in his interesting Tibetan romance Om, in making reference to this title, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, has taken it to be a very free translation of Bardo Thédol. It should not, however, so be taken; it has been adopted because it seems to be the most appropriate short title for convey- ing to the English reader the true character of the book as a whole.
The Symbolism 3
have the keys to unlock the meaning of much of Buddha’s doctrine which has been almost inaccessible to Europeans.’ !
Some of the more learned Jamas, including the late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, have believed that since very early times there has been a secret international symbol-code in common use among the initiates, which affords a key to the meaning of such occult doctrines as are still jealously guarded by religious fraternities in India, as in Tibet, and in China, Mongolia, and Japan.
In like manner, Occidental occultists have contended that the hieroglyphical writings of ancient Egypt and of Mexico seem to have been, in some degree, a popularized or exoteric outgrowth of a secret language. They argue, too, that a symbol-code was sometimes used by Plato and other Greek philosophers, in relation to Pythagorean and Orphic lore; that throughout the Celtic world the Druids conveyed all their esoteric teachings symbolically ; that the use of parables, as in the sermons of Jesus and of the Buddha, and of other Great Teachers, illustrates the same tendency; and _ that through works like Aesop's Fables, and the miracle and mystery plays of medieval Europe, many of the old Oriental symbols have been introduced into the modern literatures of the West.”
1L. 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 com- parison, 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 canoniza- tion 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). Further- more, 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, concern- ing death and existence after death, such as underlie both the Tibetan Bardo
4 Introduction
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 Free- masonry 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 sym- bols 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.
‘Esoteric Buddhism’ 3
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 7era- vada; 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 accord- ing 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 un- written teachings of the Buddha which have never been taught to those who were not of the Sazgha, then there is, un- doubtedly, an extra-canonical, or esoteric, Buddhism, An esoteric Buddhism thus conceived is not, however, to be
6 Introduction
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 un-
recorded body of orally transmitted Buddhistic teachings
complementary to canonical Buddhism.?
Ill. THE ESOTERIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FORTY-NINE DAYS OF THE BARDO