Which tibetan book of the dead

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Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Illuminated books became very popular in nineteenth-century Mongolia, and unlike many Buddhist texts that were reproduced using block prints, most of these books were handwritten, as is true of this text.

This manuscript of the Tibetan Book of the Dead features a vertical Uyghur-based Mongolian script that was instituted by order of Chinggis Genghis Khan reigned — in the early thirteenth century. Chapter 10 reveals how to transfer our consciousness at the exact moment of death. This involves blocking up in our imagination the rectum the entrance to hell , the genitals entrance to the realm of the anguished spirits and other orifices, so that our consciousness escapes through the crown fontanelle, which we should visualise opening up.

If it leaks blood, it is a sure sign the deceased has attained buddhahood. It is said that if these ancient rituals are followed, even the unrefined and uncultured "however unseemly and inelegant their conduct" can attain enlightenment. In fact, they have a head start on those devout monks and learned philosophers who pooh-pooh such practices. Combining Tibetan folklore with traditional medicine, another chapter tells us how to recognise the signs of our impending death. These include loss of appetite and disturbed sleep, but also "if one's urine falls in two forks" and "if one urinates, defecates and sneezes simultaneously".

Another sure sign is dreaming of riding a tiger or a corpse, or of eating faeces, or of "being disembowelled by a fierce black woman". Untimely or sudden death may be averted, it tells us, by following the "Natural Liberation of Fear through the Ritual Deception of Death", which involves making dough effigies, kneaded with our own urine, and hurling them into a river.

Gyurme Dorje's translation avoids the archaic thees and thous of the Evans-Wentz version and emphasises instead the quasi-scientific quality of the text - a point made in the Dalai Lama's introduction, where he draws parallels between Buddhist ideas and the discoveries of modern physics. Bardo is generally viewed as the journey from death to rebirth, but birth to death is also a bardo.

In the middle stage, when the lamas encourage the deceased to recognize that the wrathful deities are only projections from her own mind, we can see that our fears—which seem so tangible—possess no external reality.

Have we cheated on our partner, told lies, stolen from a family member? Taking responsibility for our negative actions, we can recalibrate our compass and set a more positive direction going forward. The wisdom of The Tibetan Book of the Dead continues to unfold for me. When I fell ill in and was hospitalized for six weeks, I remembered a story my grandmother told me about her father, Ajo. One winter day in , on the way back to India from Tibet, he and some of the men in his party got caught in an avalanche.

For me, this story was another demonstration of the real-life power of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.