How the West Learned to Call It a Book of the Dead

The text now known in English as the Tibetan Book of the Dead reached a Western readership only in the twentieth century, and the title itself is a Western invention. In 1927 the American scholar Walter Evans-Wentz published an English edition built from a translation prepared by the Sikkimese teacher Kazi Dawa Samdup, and he gave the book its English name in deliberate echo of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a text it otherwise has little in common with beyond both concerning the passage after death. The comparison caught on regardless, and Evans-Wentz's edition became the way most Western readers first encountered the bardo teachings at all, well before more direct scholarly translations followed later in the century.

The book's reception outside Tibetan Buddhism did not stay within religious studies. The psychologist Carl Jung wrote an influential psychological commentary reading its stages as a map of the unconscious mind rather than a literal account of an afterlife, and decades later the psychologist Timothy Leary drew on the same text, filtered through Evans-Wentz, to frame the stages of a psychedelic experience. Both readings moved a considerable distance from the text's own setting as a manual of instruction meant to be read to the dying within a specific tantric tradition, and Tibetan Buddhist teachers have noted the gap between the popular Western bardo and the doctrine as it is actually held and transmitted.