The translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead was carried out with the support of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and with the commentarial guidance of revered contemporary Tibetan masters including HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (late Head of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism), Zenkar Rinpoche and Garje Khamtrul Rinpoche.

Graham Coleman is President of the Orient Foundation (UK), a major Tibetan cultural conservancy organisation. Writer/director of the acclaimed feature documentary Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy and editor of A Handbook of Tibetan Culture, he has been editing Tibetan Buddhist poetry and prose texts in cooperation with various distinguished translators since the mid 1970s.

Thupten Jinpa (PhD) is the senior translator to His Holiness the Dalai Lama and President of the Institute of Tibetan Classics. His works include the translation of twelve books by the Dalai Lama, including the New York Times bestseller Ethics for the New Millennium and The Universe in a Single Atom, the Dalai Lama’s perspective on the meeting of Buddhism and modern science.

Gyurme Dorje (PhD) is a leading scholar of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. His seven major publications include works on Tibetan lexicography, medicine, divination, and pilgrimage guides to Tibet and Bhutan, as well as the translations of HH Dudjom Rinpoche’s The Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism. His forthcoming titles include The Guhyagarbha Tantra: Dispelling the Darkness of the Ten Directions.

Contents

Acknowledgements

From the moment in 1988, when I first tentatively suggested to HH the Dalai Lama the idea of preparing a first complete translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Dalai Lama kindly gave his continuous support to our project throughout our fifteen years of work. At the very beginning, he made a request to HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the most revered twentieth-century masters of Tibetan Buddhism, to give an oral commentary to me on key sections of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Dalai Lama knew that three of the twelve chapters of this compendium of texts had been translated by Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup and W. Y. Evans-Wentz in 1927, but that no one had translated the entire volume. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche graciously agreed to the Dalai Lama’s request, and over a period of four weeks Khyentse Rinpoche gave an incisive and illuminating oral commentary to core elements of this cycle of teachings. Each day these commentaries were eloquently translated by Sogyal Rinpoche.

While in Kathmandu receiving the oral commentary from Khyentse Rinpoche, I was fortunate to meet Dr Gyurme Dorje, who had previously translated Longchen Rabjampa’s commentary to the Guhygarbha Tantra, the root text on which The Tibetan Book of the Dead is based. During our first meeting, Gyurme agreed to make a new annotated translation of the entire Tibetan Book of the Dead, a task he has undertaken with exceptional care and dedication. While Gyurme was working on the translation he was also employed at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London as a research fellow, translating into English the Greater Tibetan—Chinese Dictionary. During this time, Gyurme worked closely with the highly regarded scholar Zenkar Rinpoche, who is one of the foremost contemporary lineage holders of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Zenkar Rinpoche kindly advised Gyurme throughout the translation of our text and also gave an extensive oral commentary to us on the extract included here under the title ‘Uncovering the Nature of Mind’.

At various stages of the project, the Dalai Lama answered my questions about difficult points and he also dictated to me the lucid and succinct Introductory Commentary to the complete translation, an extract from which is included here under the title ‘Exploring the Notion of Continuity of Consciousness’. At the Dalai Lama’s request, Khamtrul Rinpoche, also a lineage holder of The Tibetan Book of the Dead cycle of teachings, gave a beautiful oral commentary to the extract titled here ‘Body and Mind Dissolving’.

Throughout the process of editing the complete translation, I had the good fortune of working with Geshe Thupten Jinpa, senior translator to the Dalai Lama, whom I had first met in 1977 and who has been a close friend since 1989 when he came to England to study philosophy at Cambridge. Jinpa translated the Dalai Lama’s introduction and reviewed every line and word of my draft edited translation with me twice, in the course of which he made countless important and inspiring suggestions. Everyone who knows Jinpa’s work is aware of his special talent both as a translator and writer and these have played an invaluable role in this project.

The selections included in this volume all come from our first complete translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I feel deeply privileged to have been able to craft this new translation, founded on the kindness, patience, wisdom, and skill of HH the Dalai Lama, HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Zenkar Rinpoche, and Khamtrul Rinpoche, together with my colleagues Gyurme Dorje and Thupten Jinpa.

Much of my work over the last thirty years would not have been possible without the life-long friendship of the Orient Foundation’s chairman, David Lascelles. It is difficult to thank him enough for all that he has made possible, beginning with our work together on the making of our film Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy, in the 1970s, and ever since. Two other special friends, Elinore Detiger and Elsie Walker, made it possible for the translation of the complete Tibetan Book of the Dead to be initiated, and their kindness and confidence, together with that of Michael Baldwin, will not be forgotten. My sincere appreciation goes also to Johnnie and Buff Chace, Lucinda Ziesing, Faith Bieler, Lavinia Currier, Cynthia Jurs, Catherine Cochran, Margot Wilkie, Basil Panzer, Bokara Patterson, and Lindsay Masters for their important contributions to the early stages of this work.

My heartfelt thanks goes out also to the artist Robert Beer for his exquisite line drawings which illustrate the text, to Pip Heywood and Peter Le Blond for their kindness in critically reviewing my introductions to each chapter, and to Andrew Bell for his careful and generous editing and proofreading of the manuscript.

Graham Coleman
2008, Bath, England

Editor’s Introduction

It is of course ironic, after only recently finishing fifteen years of work editing the first complete translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, that I am now writing the introduction to extracts from the complete text.

Needless to say, I dearly hope that our complete translation will always be the edition which will be referred to by those wishing to study this masterful text in its entirety, but when our editor at Penguin Books suggested that we consider creating this shorter, specifically focused volume, I was happy to do so.

The complete translation is a detailed and comprehensive compendium of texts, often composed in verse, which includes an array of practices for cultivating a deeper understanding of our own nature and psychological experience. It also presents one of the most compelling visions of the after-death state in world literature, a penetrating insight into the process of dying, and a transforming perspective on bereavement. Although few works on these subjects have the poetic elegance and inspirational potency of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the complete work does contain material specific to practitioners of this cycle of teachings, while other sections are interlaced with the folklore of ancient Tibet and are not directly relevant to our lives today.

In this volume, therefore, my aim is to present many of the most beautifully written passages of the complete translation and to draw out those of its central perspectives and insights which are the most relevant to our modern experience.

In creating our first complete translation, our intention was to present the entire work in a way that, as honestly as we could, reflected the insights and intentions of the Tibetan masters of this cycle of teachings, and also to maintain the moving, poetic beauty of the original work. In order to do this, as is described in the Acknowledgements, the complete translation was based on the oral commentarial explanation of contemporary lineage holders and was carried out with the continuous advice of contemporary masters. Ihave therefore not changed the line-byline translation of the extracts included in this volume, although I have removed the annotations which accompany the complete translation so as to enhance the directness and readability of the extracts selected. In consultation with Thupten Jinpa, I have also extracted the early sections of the Dalai Lama’s introductory commentary to the first complete translation so that this now focuses on exploring the notion of continuity of consciousness, and in the chapter titled ‘Wisdoms, Elements, and Subtle Energies’ I have blended together two practices in order to succinctly reveal the meaning of the complex symbolism related to our mental and sensory processes.

Since the first publication of extracts from The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927, our understanding of the philosophy and practices relating to this magnificent cycle of teachings has deepened profoundly and brought the contemporary relevance of its insights into ever sharper focus. We now have a much expanded knowledge of the symbolism through which the understandings related to the nature of consciousness and human experience are presented, we now understand the subtle meditative techniques used as the vehicle for exploring the nature of our mental and sensory processes, and we have a deeper knowledge of the origins of the text. In selecting the extracts for this volume, I have tried to present those sections of the complete translation which most directly address the deepening of our insight into our own psychological habits and perspectives, our understanding of the process of dying and the nature of the after-death state, and the challenges of bereavement. At the same time, in my short introductions to each chapter, I have drawn on my own personal experience to further highlight the immediate relevance of each facet of these teachings to our contemporary lives. Where relevant, I have also described the parallels between the description of the after-death state revealed in The Tibetan Book of the Dead with the accounts of near-death experiences documented in contemporary medical research.

As the Dalai Lama discusses in his introduction, which follows, meditative techniques both for developing the ability to focus attention on the processes of one’s own mind and senses and for penetrating deeper into the nature of our sensory and mental processes lie at the core of the higher meditative practices of Tibetan Buddhism. At the heart of these meditative skills are the sophisticated practices through which the masters of these meditative traditions simulate the process of the dissolution of consciousness at the moment of death and through which the accomplished meditator can develop a penetrating experiential understanding of the processes of the mind in deep sleep, dreams, and the waking state. These highly refined and polished contemplative skills have been part of the daily practice of generation after generation of great masters for more than 2,000 years. Still today, when deepening their understanding of the processes of consciousness, it is not unusual for accomplished practitioners to remain in solitary retreat for sustained periods of up to thirty years.

It is the disciplined application of these meditative practices which is the source of the insights presented in this cycle of texts. Within a literary context, we now know that the ultimate source of the insights presented in The Tibetan Book of the Dead was first described in the root text on which The Tibetan Book of the Dead is based, the Guhyagarbha Tantra. The Guhyagarbha Tantra is thought to have been originally composed in the sixth century by the Buddhist masters King Indrabhuti and Kukkuraja from Sahor in north-west India. The tantra text itself describes its source as a revelation received by the king, while in retreat, from the primordial buddha Samantabhadra. According to this lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, Samantabhadra is the meditational deity who is the embodiment of pure awareness, the natural purity of mental consciousness. In other words, the text attributes the ultimate source of these teachings to a direct, complete, and sustained experiential understanding of the ultimate nature of mind. A form of meditation, which is still commonly practised today, for beginning to develop such a sustained experiential understanding is presented in the chapter ‘Uncovering the Nature of Mind’.

The arrival in Tibet of the complete cycle of teachings now known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead is attributed in our text to the great Indian Buddhist tantric master Padmasambhava. Padmasambhava, along with the eminent Indian scholar from Nalanda University, Santaraksita, and the Tibetan king Trisong Detsen, formally established Buddhism in Tibet during the eighth century. Most Tibetans today still revere Padmasambhava as ‘a second Buddha’. In other words, he is regarded as one who, through the training of the mind in the various levels of meditative practice, has awoken to a complete knowledge of the mind’s actual nature. The mystical story of the first teaching of our text in the court of King Trisong Detsen is described in the histories written by later holders of this lineage of teaching:

The histories then describe how, after completing the teaching, Padmasambhava requested that it be written down, in a secret script, and buried in the form of a ‘treasure text’ at the sacred Mount Gampodar in Dakpo, southern Tibet, predicting that the text would be discovered at a time suitable for its wider dissemination. Six centuries later, the histories recount, the text was unearthed by the Tibetan master from Dakpo, Karma Lingpa, who some say was a reincarnation of the eighth-century translator Chokrolui Gyelsten. Karma Lingpa’s own life history is surprisingly obscure. It is thought, though, that he may have discovered the hidden texts while still in his mid-teens and then passed away at a young age, but, before his untimely death, he did successfully pass the entire corpus of teachings to his son (and possibly to his father too). Initially, following Padmasambhava’s directions, the teaching was still then not widely disseminated. It was not until the fifteenth century, when the teachings were received by the third-generation lineage holder Gyarawa Namka Chokyi Gyatso, that its public teaching began and its fame slowly spread throughout the Tibetan Buddhist regions of Asia.¹

As I have mentioned, awareness of our text in the West began in 1927, when Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup and W. Y. Evans-Wentz’s pioneering first translation of three chapters of the complete work first appeared. It was Evans-Wentz who coined the title The Tibetan Book of the Dead for his edition, a title which has been retained in all subsequent translations and related studies. Immediately upon its first publication, the text’s detailed description of the after-death state and its sophisticated psychological insights caused a considerable stir amongst influential intellectual and literary circles of Europe and North America. In his psychological commentary, published with Evans-Wentz’s edition, the eminent Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, wrote:

In the 1960s, with the arrival of American counterculture, the experimentation with hallucinogens, and the often playful enthusiasm for exploring the boundaries of human experience, came Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, an interpretation of Evans-Wentz’s translation from a psychedelic perspective. Evans-Wentz’s edition then re-arose as something of a counterculture classic, spurred on by the interests of such literary icons of the time as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.

Sadly though, beginning in the late 1950s, the tragedy of the military invasion of Tibet by China’s Red Army forced many of Tibet’s greatest twentieth-century masters to seek sanctuary in India and other countries. Paradoxically, even though China’s military takeover and the consequent cultural revolution profoundly disrupted Tibet’s living Buddhist heritage, for the first time Western Buddhist scholars were now able to study directly with Tibet’s great masters. Resettled in India and Nepal, many of the great teachers who, before the Chinese occupation, had completed their studies and had often concluded long periods of solitary retreat, worked enthusiastically with their foreign students on the preparation of new translations. Gradually the accumulated knowledge of more than 2,000 years of disciplined investigation into the nature of human experience began to be authentically translated. A vast treasury of new insights across many of the major facets of human enquiry began to be uncovered and the astonishing sophistication, scope, and depth of Tibetan Buddhist culture gradually became more widely known.

Today, this translation work is continuing in universities and study centres around the world. There is still much to do! Even in relation to our text, the compendium of twelve chapters which comprises The Tibetan Book of the Dead is in fact part of a greater cycle of teachings which extends to more than sixty-five individual texts. Some scholars estimate that even now, after forty years of continuous translation activity, less than four per cent of Tibet’s literary heritage has become available in English. Yet, more and more, we are beginning to see a growing convergence of perspectives between the underlying understandings drawn from the meditative investigation into the nature of mind and the emerging scientific understandings related to the nature of perception, consciousness, and human psychology. Similarly, contemporary medical research into the nature of near-death experiences is mirroring the insights drawn from a long history of meditative investigation into the subtler levels of consciousness.

At the heart of the Buddhist investigation into the nature of our experience are the collected insights of individuals who, from ancient times until today, have followed the meditative techniques taught by their masters and who have arrived at a depth of understanding which concurs with that of their peers and with that of the past generations of teachers. Although it is very hard to accomplish this depth of understanding without intense dedication and without a teacher, we can all reflect on the experiences of the great masters as set down in texts such as ours and, as the great Buddhist teachers of the past have always encouraged us to do, check whether or not our experience concurs with their experience.

I hope in some small way that the extracts presented here will provide an inspiration for such a journey of discovery and dearly wish also that, as the Dalai Lama says in the conclusion to his introductory commentary to our first complete translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: ‘I hope that the profound insights contained in this work will be a source of inspiration and support to many interested people around the world’.

Graham Coleman
2007, Sarnath, India

Introductory Commentary

by His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama Exploring the Notion of Continuity of Consciousness

The question of whether or not there exists a continuity of consciousness after death has been animportant aspect of philosophical reflection and debate from ancient Indian times to the present. When considering these matters from a Buddhist point of view, however, we have to bear in mind that the understanding of the nature of continuity of consciousness and the understanding of the nature of the ‘I’ or ‘self’ are closely interlinked. Therefore, let us first look at what it is that can be said to constitute a person.

According to Buddhist classical literature, a person can be seen as possessing five interrelated aggregates, technically known as the five psycho-physical aggregates.² These are the aggregate of consciousness, the aggregate of form (which includes our physical body and senses), the aggregate of feeling, the aggregate of discrimination, and the aggregate of motivational tendencies. That is to say, there is our body, the physical world and our five senses, and there are the various processes of mental activity, our motivational tendencies, our labelling of and discrimination between objects, our feelings, and the underlying awareness or consciousness.

Among the ancient schools of thought, which accepted the notion of continuity of consciousness, there were several non Buddhist philosophical schools which regarded the entity, the ‘I’ or ‘self’, which migrated from existence to existence as being unitary and permanent. They also suggested that this ‘self’ was autonomous in its relationship to the psycho-physical components that constitute a person. In other words they believed or posited that there is an essence or ‘soul’ of the person, which exists independently from the body and the mind of the person.

However, Buddhist philosophy does not accept the existence of such an independent, autonomous entity. In the Buddhist view, the self or the person is understood in terms of a dynamic, interdependent relationship of both mental and physical attributes, that is to say the psycho-physical components which constitute a person. In other words our sense of self can, upon examination, be seen as a complex flow of mental and physical events, clustered in clearly identifiable patterns, including our physical features, instincts, emotions, and attitudes, etc., continuing through time. Further, according to Prasangika-Madhyamaka philosophy, which has become the prevailing philosophical view of Tibetan Buddhism today, this sense of self is simply a mental construct, a mere label given to this cluster of dependently arising mental and physical events in dependence on their continuity.

Now, when we look at this interdependence of mental and physical constituents from the perspective of Highest Yoga Tantra,³