The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, Transition To The Otherworld, page 3
The Great Liberation upon Hearing: The
Bardo of the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities
Tibetan:
Zab chos zhi khro dgongs pa rang grol las thos grol chen moâi skor: Chos nyid
bar doâi gsal Îdebs thos grol chen mo Paro, Bhutan, 1977.
I(Bhu)-Tib-149; 79-902879. [text 2, 36 folios]
According to The Bardo of
the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities, which is included in Karma Lingpa's Great
Liberation upon Hearing, the final moment of the dying process is marked by the
sudden and dramatic appearance of the radiant clear light. As we saw in Section
2 above, the fundamental mind of clear light is said to exist beginninglessly
and continuously in each individual through each lifetime and into Buddhahood
itself. For those Buddhist practitioners who became accomplished in the esoteric
methods of yoga and meditation previously in their lifetimes, the true nature of
the radiant clear light will be immediately recognized and the wisdom necessary
for full liberation from the cycle of birth and death (samsara) will be
achieved. On the other hand, those who have not practiced during their lives
will fail to recognize the clear light at death and will digress into the
intermediate state known as the "Bardo of Reality" or Chö-nyi Bardo (chos nyid
bar do), wherein the deceased experiences the visions of the one hundred
Peaceful and Wrathful Deities. In our text it is stated that seven days after
the initial appearance of the radiant clear light of death, the deceased awakens
in the bardo, confused and bewildered by a stunning array of lights and visions.
These colorful visions transform into the forty-two Peaceful Deities, who
manifest in a circular pattern known as a mandala. A mandala represents a
perfectly contained sacred space, a celestial realm in which reside a great
pantheon of enlightened spiritual beings. On the fourteenth day, this peaceful
mandala dissolves into the mandala of the fifty-eight Wrathful Deities. These
Deities manifest also in the same circular pattern of their peaceful
counterparts, only now each Deity appears in its terrifying form. As
blood-drinking, flesh-eating demons, the Wrathful Deities symbolize the
intensity or "violence," if you will, of liberation, understood here as the
compassionate "murdering" of the neurotic and distorted thoughts and emotions
that trap human beings in the ongoing cycle of rebirth. Some more contemporary
sources assert that the Deities, in both their quiescent and frightening forms,
are not really gods in the traditional sense. They are actually symbolic
manifestations of psychological states in the inner space of human awareness. If
the deceased is capable of properly identifying these Deities as projections of
the mind and as manifest reflections of past karma, he or she will merge with
the enlightened consciousness that these images represent. Once again, however,
if the visions are not recognized due to fear or ignorance, the deceased falls
further into the bardo realms which lead eventually to a new existence. Clearly,
in the context of the Tibetan funeral rituals associated with this and other
texts included in The Great Liberation upon Hearing, it is the prime
responsibility of the religious specialist or 'lama' (bla ma) to gain the
attention of the deceased and to make him or her aware of the visions
encountered during the bardo experience.