The Therapeutic Psychology of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead"

Abstract

Although we usually conceive of death as the endpoint of life, there is an important sense in which death, as an aspect of change and renewal, is ever present throughout life: each passing moment dies as it becomes past experience; a new moment is constantly born as the future becomes present. From moment to moment, beginnings and endings perpetually coincide. At a more mundane level, we also frequently meet with another form of death-a counterpart to our familiar conception: our habitual patterns of expectation and reaction to circumstances often lead to a deathlike stagnation and unanimated redundancy within our experience. This narrowing of horizons, though certainly problematic, does not preclude the permanent possibility of experiencing a liberating transformation of character and a of personality. The implicit and explicit means to achieve such a personal transformation within our present lives, as described in The Tibetan Book for the Dead,' is the subject of this essay. My aim is to recall and reemphasize some of the affinities between the text's therapeutic intentions and the goals of psychotherapy, in recognition of its practical, socially all-encompassing message. In the course of this inquiry, I will discuss how some authoritative commentators on the text, namely Carl Jung and Lama Anagarika Govinda, have drawn our attention away from the text's more pragmatic and existential value as a handbook for more insightful and liberated living. In ordinary practice, The Tibetan Book for the Dead is read aloud as part of a Tibetan Buddhist funeral ceremony: it speaks to the dead person who, as a disembodied spirit, is believed to persist within hearing distance in an after-death realm of transition, or bardo. This is a transitional realm through which a disembodied spirit passes between reincarnations.2 The text's manifest purpose is to offer the dead person repeated opportunities for enlightenment during the bardo experience, such as to avoid rebirth into a renewed condition of suffering. This transitional experience, most importantly, presents itself as a period of decision making: the dead person can choose either to become enlightened by giving up his or her unconscious tendencies that inevitably led to suffering, or the person can choose to remain bonded to those dispositions and become fated to circle once more through the patterns of his or her former existence. The text's guiding words are intended to help the dead person choose the path toward enlightenment. On the face of things, then, the text articulates the mechanisms that cause a disembodied soul to gravitate toward reincarnation, and be directed toward the avoidance of suffering through an enlightening personality transformation. Robert Wicks