Tibetan Book of the Dead (eBook)

'Awakening Upon Dying' by Chgyal Namkhai Norbu, a commentary on the Tibetan Book of The Dead The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate States, well known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, is part of a large body of literature titled in Tibetan the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities: The Profound Teaching on Natural Liberation through Recognition of the Primordial State. Its authorship is attributed to Padmasaṃ,bhava, an important Indian master of the eighth century. While in Tibet, Padmasaṃ,bhava concealed the texts of this teaching at Mount Gampodar near the Yangtze River, where they remained as a terma or hidden treasure until the fourteenth century, when Karma Lingpa, a Tibetan youth of fifteen, brought them to light. The Hidden Treasures The hidden-treasure or terma tradition is a widespread phenomenon in Tibet, both in the Buddhist and in the pre-Buddhist Bnpo tradition. Hidden treasures are doctrines, texts, and sacred objects concealed by spiritual teachers in order to preserve them during future periods of plundering, devastation, religious corruption, and so on that these masters foresaw lay ahead. Subsequently, sometimes hundreds of years later at a propitious time, the terma would be discovered by a spiritually gifted individual known as a finder of hidden treasures or tertn, following indications revealed to that person in dreams, visions, or in normal waking life. Two main kinds of hidden treasure exist: those hidden in the earth and those hidden in the mind. Earth treasures can be texts of spiritual teaching or sacred objects such as small statues, ritual instruments, relics, stones, or precious metals, and so on. Earth treasures are usually concealed underground or in rocks, caves, temple pillars, and similar places. Mind treasures, on the other hand, are spiritual teachings and instructions that emerge as natural visions from the essence of the treasure finder's mind. These teachings are then committed to writing by the tertn himself or by a scribe, then practiced by the discoverer, and at the prescribed time, taught to others. My academic experience in the West alerted me to the considerable mistrust with which termas are regarded by scholars. Although I recognize that forgeries certainly exist among the hidden treasures, the incidents I witnessed and the stories I heard as a youth in Tibet of the discoveries of authentic earth and mind termas inspired me with trust in these phenomena. I recount below a few examples of these remarkable findings to familiarize the reader with the hidden-treasure tradition of which so little is known in the West. In the summer of 1952 I stayed some time with my uncle, Khyentse Chkyi Wangchug, a highly advanced spiritual practitioner, at his retreat place in Lhalung in eastern Tibet. In that period he was imparting a Dzogchen teaching to some twenty of his disciples. One day he called me to his room and recounted a dream in which he had received indications about a hidden treasure. Some weeks later, he told me that he had had another such dream, this time clearer, in which he received precise instructions for the discovery of a terma related to Vajrapṇ,i. In the dream, he saw a cave, at the cave's entrance a shadow cast by the sun striking the rocks was clearly visible in the shape of the Tibetan character ཨ, (Ah). From his dream, my uncle recognized the location of the cave to be an area near a mountain that we both knew. I did my best to convince him to search for that place and to make the discovery in public, as specified in the instructions he had received, although he...