The Tibetan Book of the Dead
translated by Gyurme Dorje, edited by Graham Coleman with Thupten Jinpa 496pp, Penguin Classics, £25
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a kind of Baedeker for the afterlife, and like the best guidebooks its reassuring refrain is "Don't panic!" After death, it says, you will be assailed by thunderous sounds and bewildering apparitions as first the peaceful deities rise before you, then the wrathful ones, who drink blood and eat the entrails of bloated corpses. If you are very unlucky, Yama (representing the forces of impermanence and the laws of cause and effect) will chop off your head, lick out your brains and drink your blood, then eat you. The trick is not to be afraid and to remember that you don't have a body any more, so he can't hurt you. These deities are enormous, blotting out the sky, and some have the heads of tigers, vultures, crocodiles, scorpions or bats, but they are also all in our minds. This idea fascinated Jung, who revered The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a great psychological work.
According to Highest Yoga Tantra (from which The Tibetan Book of the Dead derives), only during the process of dying can we achieve liberation from the cycle of existence. Advanced yogis can make trial runs by inducing a deathlike state, but after death the rest of us must try to remember what we've read in The Tibetan Book of the Dead and put it into practice. Even the totally unprepared needn't despair, however, provided a qualified guru is on hand to read out the relevant bits to our corpse. Ideally, he should have a soothing, melodious voice, to calm us down.
The stakes are high: either we become enlightened and attain buddhahood or we are reborn to experience all over again the sufferings of birth, old age, sickness and death, stranded in "the swamp of cyclic existence". If we fail, we should at least try to be reborn in an area where Buddhism is practised, so we can have another go. But it gets worse. If we choose the wrong womb entrance we might be reincarnated as an animal, an anguished spirit or a hell-being. Even the Dalai Lama isn't confident of success. "Sometimes I do wonder," he admits in his introduction, "whether or not I will really be able to fully utilise my own preparatory practices when the actual moment of death comes!"
When WY Evans-Wentz's English translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead first appeared in 1927 it became an instant classic. Later it was a firm favourite of the postwar counterculture. Timothy Leary recast it as The Psychedelic Experience, a manual for psychedelic voyagers - the idea being to "shortcut" many years of spiritual training and discipline by dropping some acid - and William Burroughs claimed to be in telepathic contact with Tibetan adepts, subtitling his novel The Wild Boys "A Book of the Dead". Allen Ginsberg read The Tibetan Book of the Dead while off his head on yajé in New York, while in Brion Gysin's novel The Last Museum the Beat Hotel in Paris becomes the Bardo Hotel, each room representing another stage in the after-death state. Gysin's beatnik friends, Ginsberg and Burroughs included, are depicted chanting in the street, their "heads shaven like Tibetan monks" and wearing orange robes: "Kerouac looks kinda cute, and so do some of the anonymous acolytes and hangers-on who are earnestly passing around a community copy of the Bardo Thödol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, handwritten on dried banana leaves."
In fact, Evans-Wentz's book has been so influential it is surprising to learn that he translated only three chapters of the original work which, it turns out, is not even called The Tibetan Book of the Dead - that was his idea. Its real title is The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States, and this is the first complete English translation. It's a magnificent achievement.
The extra material includes an examination of the nature of mind ("One's own mind is insubstantial, like an empty sky") and some beautiful verse meditations usually sung by monks performing their early morning duties. There are aspirational prayers to be read at the moment of death, as well as a translation of the sacred mantras that can be attached to a corpse in order to bring "Liberation by Wearing". An unexpected bonus is a light-hearted allegorical masque about travelling through the after-death state.
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. The result is a very clear-cut, practical rendering of this classic of Nyingma literature (the Nyingmapa being followers of the oldest school of Tibetan Buddhism stretching back to the eighth century). The familiar, evocative vocabulary has been rationalised - "bardo" becomes "the intermediate state", "samsara" is "cyclic existence", "wisdom" is "pristine cognition", "the Knower" becomes "the consciousness [of the deceased]" and "good and bad karma" are now "positive and negative past actions" - but there are more gains than losses. "O, Child of Buddha Nature" is preferable to Evans-Wentz's "O nobly born"; "skull-cup" is much gorier than "red shell"; and the "Three Precious Jewels" (meaning the Buddha, the sacred teachings and the monastic community) is less open to misinterpretation than Evans-Wentz's "Precious Trinity".
Thupten Jinpa, the Dalai Lama's senior translator, has advised on the text, as has Zenkar Rinpoche, a revered lineage-holder of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (its correct interpretation transmitted through an unbroken line of masters). There are useful introductions to each chapter, extensive notes and a glossary, and really everything one could possibly want to prepare for what Timothy Leary called "the ultimate trip". As Burroughs once said to Ginsberg: "Tibetan Buddhism is extremely interesting. Dig it if you have not done so."
· Ian Pindar's Joyce is published by Haus. To order The Tibetan Book of the Dead for £23 with free UK p&p go to Guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.