The Tibetan Book of the Dead
The Bardo Thodol — guidance through the states between death and rebirth.
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About the book
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the Western title for the Bardo Thodol, a set of Tibetan Buddhist texts read aloud to a dying or recently deceased person. Its purpose is to guide the consciousness through the bardos — the intermediate states between death and the next rebirth — describing the visions, peaceful and wrathful deities, and lights that the traveller is said to encounter, and instructing them how to recognize these as projections of their own mind and so attain liberation.
First published in English in 1927, this edition made one of Tibet's most profound spiritual documents available to readers who had never encountered Himalayan Buddhism. It treats death not as something to be feared but as a moment of extraordinary opportunity for awakening.
About the editor
Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (1878–1965) was an American anthropologist and pioneer in the study of Tibetan Buddhism. He assembled this edition from a translation prepared by the Sikkimese teacher Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, framing the text for a Western audience. Later editions added a now-famous psychological commentary by Carl Jung, who read the bardos as a map of the unconscious mind.
Why it still matters
This book did more than almost any other to introduce Tibetan Buddhist thought to the West, influencing psychology, comparative religion, the mid-century counterculture and countless later writers on death and dying. Whether approached as scripture, as anthropology or as a meditation on mortality, it remains one of the most compelling documents humanity has produced about what may happen when we die.