Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/85

Rh The Bible of the Christians, like the Koran of the Moslems, never seems to consider that the spiritual experiences in the form of hallucinatory visions by prophet or devotee, reported therein, may, in the last analysis, not be real. But the Bardo Thödol is so sweeping in its assertions that it leaves its reader with the clear-cut impression that every vision, without any exception whatsoever, in which spiritual beings, gods or demons, or paradises or places of torment and purgation play a part, in a Bardo or any Bardo-like dream or ecstasy, is purely illusionary, being based upon sangsāric phenomena.

The whole aim of the Bardo Thödol teaching, as otherwise stated elsewhere, is to cause the Dreamer to awaken into Reality, freed from all the obscurations of karmic or sangsāric illusions, in a supramundane or Nirvāṇic state, beyond all phenomenal paradises, heavens, hells, purgatories, or worlds of embodiment. In this way, then, it is purely Buddhistic and unlike any non-Buddhist book in the world, secular or religious.

The Judgement Scene as described in our text and that described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead seem so much alike in essentials as to suggest that common origin, at present unknown, to which we have already made reference. In the Tibetan version, Dharma-Rāja (Tib. Shinje-chho-gyal) King of the Dead (commonly known to Theravādists as Yama-Rāja), the Buddhist and Hindu Pluto, as a Judge of the Dead, corresponds to Osiris in the Egyptian version. In both versions alike there is the symbolical weighing: before Dharma-Rāja there are placed on one side of the balance black pebbles and on the other side white pebbles, symbolizing evil and good deeds; and similarly, before Osiris, the heart and the feather (or else in place of the feather an image of the Goddess of Truth which it symbolizes) are weighed one against the other, the heart representing the conduct or conscience of the deceased and the feather righteousness or truth.

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the deceased, addressing his heart, says: ‘Raise not thyself in evidence against me.