The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing In The Bardo (Shambhala Classics)

by Padmasambhava

His skull cup holds wealth, both spiritual and material, for practitioners of the teaching.

Liberation, in this case, means that whoever comes into contact with this teaching—even in the form of doubt, or with an open mind—receives a sudden glimpse of enlightenment through the power of the transmission contained in these treasures.

I received this transmission at the age of eight, and was trained in this teaching by my tutors, who also guided me in dealing with dying people. Consequently I visited dying or dead people about four times a week from that time onwards. Such continual contact with the process of death, particularly watching one’s close friends and relatives, is considered extremely important for students of this tradition, so that the notion of impermanence becomes a living experience rather than a philosophical view.

the yidam is the expression of one’s own basic nature, visualized as a divine form in order to relate with it and express its full potentiality.

Buddhism looks for the basic cause of sin and suffering, and discovers this to be the belief in a self or ego as the center of existence.

Since we experience the whole of life from this falsely centralized viewpoint, we cannot know the world as it really is. This is what is meant by saying that the world is unreal. The remedy is to see through the illusion, to attain the insight of emptiness—the absence of what is false. Inseparable from emptiness is the luminosity—the presence of what is real, the basic ground in which the play of life takes place.

The fundamental teaching of this book is the recognition of one’s projections and the dissolution of the sense of self in the light of reality. As soon as this is done, these five psychological components of the confused or unenlightened state of mind become instead factors of enlightenment. They are transmuted into their transcendent or purified forms, which are presented during the first five days in the bardo of dharmatā.