Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/99

Rh as the Bardo Thödol, when viewed exoterically, or literally, presents.

The Bardo rebirth symbols themselves ought now to be considered from the standpoint of the esoteric interpretation; and to elucidate them innumerable parallels could be chosen from widely separated sources, but because of its recognized authority no parallel seems more appropriate than that contained in the tenth book of Plato’s Republic, describing certain of the Greek Heroes in the Sidpa Bardo choosing their bodies for the next incarnations:

The Bardo legend as recorded in the Republic concerns Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth, who, as Plato tells us, ‘was slain in battle, and ten days afterwards, when the bodies of the dead were taken up already in a state of corruption, his body was found unaffected by decay, and carried home to be buried. And on the twelfth day, as he was lying on the funeral pile, he returned to life and told them what he had seen in the other world. He said that when his soul left the body he went on a journey with a great company, and they came to a mysterious place at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and over against them were two other openings in the heaven above. In the intermediate space there were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgement on them and had bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand; and in like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand; these also bore the symbols of their deeds, but fastened to their backs.’

Having thus described the otherworld Judgement—which closely resembles the Judgement described in our text—Plato goes on to describe the souls of the Greek Heroes in their Sidpa Bardo preparing for reincarnation: ‘Most curious, he said, was the spectacle—sad and laughable and strange; for the choice of the souls was in most cases based on their own experience of a previous life. There he saw the soul which had once been Orpheus choosing the life of a swan out of enmity to the race of women, hating to be born of a woman