Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/116

66 Hindu and in turn Buddhist cosmography would be—even if it were possible for us—quite beyond the scope of an introduction. Suffice it to say that the possession of a key to such explanation is claimed by expert professors of the Occult Sciences in India and in Tibet—compared to which, in the realm of mind and matter, our Western Science is, so they maintain, but at the Threshold of the Temple of Understanding.

Ere passing on to the final Sections of this Introduction, touching the Manuscript itself, we may now summarize the chief teachings upon which the whole of the Bardo Thödol is based, as follows:

1. That all possible conditions, or states, or realms of sangsāric existence, heavens, hells, and worlds, are entirely dependent upon phenomena, or, in other words, are nought but phenomena;

2. That all phenomena are transitory, are illusionary, are unreal, and non-existent save in the sangsāric mind perceiving them;

3. That in reality there are no such beings anywhere as gods, or demons, or spirits, or sentient creatures—all alike being phenomena dependent upon a cause;

4. That this cause is a yearning or thirsting after sensation, after the unstable sangsāric existence;

5. That so long as this cause is not overcome by Enlightenment death follows birth and birth death, unceasingly—even as the wise Socrates believed;

6. That the after-death existence is but a continuation, under changed conditions, of the phenomena-born existence of the human world—both states alike being karmic;

7. That the nature of the existence intervening between death and rebirth in this or any other world is determined by antecedent actions;

8. That, psychologically speaking, it is a prolonged dream-like state, in what may be called the fourth dimension of space, filled with hallucinatory visions directly resultant from