The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (review)

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is—next to the Dalai Lama himself—likely the most widely known subject of Tibetan Buddhism in Europe and North America. Since the publication of Kazi Dawa Samdup and Walter Y. Evans-Wentz's translation of the Tibetan work Liberation upon Hearing under the English title The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927, the work has been a significant object of popular intrigue and interest. For the most part, writers on The Tibetan Book of the Dead have been concerned to highlight the work's relevance for contemporary society, without giving any great consideration to its history as both text and practice in Tibet. Bryan Cuevas's contribution to our understanding of this important body of literature began with a different set of questions: "Recognizing that western scholarship has been too apt to view The Tibetan Book of the Dead as an abstraction outside of real time and space, I set out in this book to explore the origin and transmission of this literature in Tibet within its own complex religious and social arenas" (vii).

An introductory chapter (3–24) summarizes the reception history of The Tibetan Book of the Dead in Europe and North America. In preparation for the central focus on the history of the literature, part 1, "Death and the Dead," provides useful background on Tibetan deathways, including funerary rites in imperial Tibet (chap. 2, 27–38), the long-argued Buddhist notion of an intermediate state between death and rebirth (chap. 3, 39–68), and funerary rites in medieval and early modern Tibet (chap. 4, 69–77). Part 2, "Prophecy, Concealment, Revelation," explores the biographical literature relating to the central founding figure of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Karma Lingpa (chap. 5, 81–90) as well as his most important disciples, who happen also to have been his father and his son (chap. 6, 91–100). The fourteenth-century "treasure revealer" Karma Lingpa is held to have discovered two textual collections at Gampodar Mountain in southeast Tibet, The Self-Liberated Wisdom of the PeacefulandWrathful Deities and The Great Compassionate One, The Peaceful and Wrathful Lotus, works that would eventually make up large parts of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Following Karma Lingpa's untimely and suspicious death, these two collections were quickly redacted by his father and son, who were the first transmitters of his teachings. By the late fifteenth century, these texts had come into the hands of Gyarawa, whose strong institutional ties in eastern Tibet ensured that they would become principle liturgical texts at many important monasteries. Throughout chapters 7–10 (101–76), Cuevas illustrates the extent to which institutional support was a key factor in the Book's dissemination. It was not until the seventeenth-century leader Rikdzin Nyima Drakpa (the subject of chap. 11, 179–204) redacted the corpus of rituals and teachings again and printed his version that these works came to look anything like what we generally see today. After this time, The Tibetan Book of the Dead was printed a number of times.

The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead weaves an intricate web of people, places, and texts in an effort to snare the elusive history of an influential body of literature. Yet in the midst of assembling detailed genealogical minutia, Cuevas never loses sight of his primary objective, nor does he lose sight of the broader implications of his work. For Cuevas the effort to undertake a detailed literary history of a select corpus of texts raises fundamental historiographic issues for, as he concludes, "the past is available . . . only through fragments and traces left behind in texts, and those texts were determined in large measure by their own unique function and purpose within very specific contexts" (211). Therefore, it is only through detailed historical work that "questions of the meaning and significance of The Tibetan Book of the Dead must be answered...