Key Insights on Tibetan Book of the Dead: History and Approach to Death

THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

Daniele Corradetti - August 28, 2012

1. INTRODUCTION

In the course of previous meetings, we have had overviews of the vision of death in various cultures. We have, for example, seen the relationship with death of the Egyptians, as well as of the ancient Greeks. We have seen glimpses of the Egyptian underworld, of the magical acts that priests performed to safeguard souls from disintegration in the afterlife and protect them in the judgment of the afterlife. We then saw glimpses of what are the Greek and Persian Mysteries, speaking of splitting and techniques of apparent death.

We have seen glimpses because much of these traditions on how to behave in the afterlife were oral traditions, kept secret in the West and to which only initiates of high degrees were admitted. Even in the case of writings like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it is difficult to understand and know the details of use and the order - if there was one - with which these formulas were to be used.

Conversely, now with the Tibetan Book of the Dead - and then with the Christian Book of the Dead - we enter completely into another domain: in these writings every passage of the soul after death is codified, day by day, step by step, described minutely. For this reason, my idea for this meeting was to follow the journey of a dying person's soul, step by step, to see what the soul's journey in the afterlife was according to these traditions.

This fact seems very strange to us: how can Tibetans describe minutely and in detail what is found after death? This discourse seems strange to us because we start from the preconception or absolute axiom typical of our civilization that "one cannot" know what is after death. It is a kind of imprinting that our parents and society give us when we are small, it is part of those absolute convictions that are given to us when we do not yet have a critical structure: man cannot fly, nobody knows what the meaning of life is, what is after death cannot be known, etc...

Why can't we know what is after death? Because no one has died and then come back to tell us about it. Apart from the fact that this is not true: without bothering Christ or Dante, this statement takes for granted that reincarnation does not exist, but even if we do not consider the reincarnation of people declared clinically, legally dead and then returned to life, there are quite a few. But apart from all this, the flaw of this statement is taking for granted that the only way to communicate with the dead is through the physical body of the deceased, which is objectively quite difficult given the decomposition of bodies. But the fact that one can only communicate with the physical body is a hypothesis that has been disproven by numerous testimonies.

These are a series of a priori axioms typical of our civilization and our culture, but Tibetans instead had other objectives and other mental structures so for them there were no obstacles to the study of life after death any more than there are now obstacles for our scientists in studying the structure of matter.

2. HISTORY

To understand this mentality, however, one must first understand the fundamental history of Tibet. It must be known that the history of Tibet has been known since the time of Alexander the Great (325 BC) and that at that time Tibet was a territory dominated by military dynasties, an animist religious system and a clergy made up of shamans. Until more or less the 7th century there was a process of wars to progressively create political and religious unity until at the beginning of the 7th century an emperor Songzen Gambo reunified all of Tibet up to its natural borders.

Since neighboring peoples had no interest in expansion into Tibet and vice versa Tibet had no interest in expansion into neighboring peoples, the emperor decided to convert his people's culture into something more peaceful and spiritual. Songzen Gambo examined the religious cultures of all Asia, even the most distant ones, and then focused on Buddhism. Thus began a long work of cultural modification, collecting Buddhist texts and artifacts from every location. It is said that he married nine Buddhist Princesses from as many surrounding countries, asking each to bring with her texts and artifacts.

Gambo initiated this cultural modification that led Tibet to become one of the most important spiritual regions of Asia. This is well understood if one thinks that an entire people for hundreds and hundreds of years devoted themselves only to developing and deepening the most profound aspects of human consciousness. While for example our society, oriented towards external activity and productivity, seeks to inhibit and divert attention from themes of the spirit, Tibetan society was entirely oriented towards developing those themes by collecting experts, developing techniques, tracking down mediums, experimenting with states of consciousness different from the ordinary, etc...

While for example today these themes are inhibited and are only spoken of at the margins of dominant research which is almost entirely polarized in obtaining achievements and realizations of a technological character, at that time the main impulse was directed towards the investigation of metaphysical themes and the afterlife. Communication with family spirits, with protective spirits who could help in healing, etc., was encouraged from childhood, encouraging these phenomena and thus developing latent faculties in individuals.

One of the products of this work is precisely the Tibetan Book of the Dead which tradition holds to be written by Padma Sambhava, the quintessential Tibetan Guru who lived approximately in the 8th century. Tradition holds that during this period Padma Sambhava...