Introduction to the Tibetan Book of the Dead: Historical Context and Death Approach
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 the ancient Greeks. We have seen hints about the Egyptian underworld, about 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 hints of what the Greek and Persian Mysteries were, speaking of doubling and techniques of apparent death. We have seen hints because a large part of these traditions on how to behave in the afterlife were oral traditions, kept secret in the West and to which only initiates to 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 usage 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 was the soul's journey in the afterlife 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 there 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:
- no one can know what the meaning of life is,
- no one can know what there is after death
Why can't we know what there is after death? Because no one has died and then come back to tell us about it, or if they have come back to tell us about it (given that there are various cases of individuals considered clinically and legally dead who then returned to life) it means they were not "really" dead. These are a series of fundamental axioms that are part of our culture and obviously make this type of investigation difficult.
Conversely, no one had told the Tibetans that they "could not" know life after death, and for them there were no obstacles to the study of life after death any more than there are now obstacles for our scientists in the study of the structure of matter. Indeed, for them it was even easier because the structure of matter, how do you as a 14th-century Tibetan study it? It's difficult to find experiments to do. Conversely, from the point of view of death, practically every week you have someone close to you who dies.
History
To understand this mentality, however, we must first understand the fundamental history of Tibet. We must know 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 conversely 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, 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 we think that an entire people for hundreds and hundreds of years dedicated themselves only to developing and deepening the most profound aspects of human consciousness. While, for example, our society, oriented toward external activity and productivity, seeks to inhibit and divert attention from themes of the spirit, Tibetan society was entirely oriented toward developing those themes by gathering experts, developing techniques, tracing mediums, experimenting with states of consciousness different from the ordinary, etc. While today, for example, these themes are inhibited...