The Great Liberation upon
Hearing: The Bardo of the Peaceful
and Wrathful Deities
Tibetan: Zab chos zhi khro dgongs
pa rang grol las thos grol chen moâi
skor: Chos nyid bar doâi gsal Îdebs thos
grol chen mo Paro, Bhutan, 1977.
I(Bhu)-Tib-149; 79-902879. [text 2, 36
folios]
According to The Bardo of the Peaceful
and Wrathful Deities, which is included
in Karma Lingpa's Great Liberation upon
Hearing, the final moment of the dying
process is marked by the sudden and
dramatic appearance of the radiant clear
light. As we saw in Section 2 above, the
fundamental mind of clear light is said
to exist beginninglessly and
continuously in each individual through
each lifetime and into Buddhahood
itself. For those Buddhist practitioners
who became accomplished in the esoteric
methods of yoga and meditation
previously in their lifetimes, the true
nature of the radiant clear light will
be immediately recognized and the wisdom
necessary for full liberation from the
cycle of birth and death (samsara) will
be achieved. On the other hand, those
who have not practiced during their
lives will fail to recognize the clear
light at death and will digress into the
intermediate state known as the "Bardo
of Reality" or Chö-nyi Bardo (chos nyid
bar do), wherein the deceased
experiences the visions of the one
hundred Peaceful and Wrathful Deities.
In our text it is stated that seven days
after the initial appearance of the
radiant clear light of death, the
deceased awakens in the bardo, confused
and bewildered by a stunning array of
lights and visions. These colorful
visions transform into the forty-two
Peaceful Deities, who manifest in a
circular pattern known as a mandala. A
mandala represents a perfectly contained
sacred space, a celestial realm in which
reside a great pantheon of enlightened
spiritual beings. On the fourteenth day,
this peaceful mandala dissolves into the
mandala of the fifty-eight Wrathful
Deities. These Deities manifest also in
the same circular pattern of their
peaceful counterparts, only now each
Deity appears in its terrifying form. As
blood-drinking, flesh-eating demons, the
Wrathful Deities symbolize the intensity
or "violence," if you will, of
liberation, understood here as the
compassionate "murdering" of the
neurotic and distorted thoughts and
emotions that trap human beings in the
ongoing cycle of rebirth. Some more
contemporary sources assert that the
Deities, in both their quiescent and
frightening forms, are not really gods
in the traditional sense. They are
actually symbolic manifestations of
psychological states in the inner space
of human awareness. If the deceased is
capable of properly identifying these
Deities as projections of the mind and
as manifest reflections of past karma,
he or she will merge with the
enlightened consciousness that these
images represent. Once again, however,
if the visions are not recognized due to
fear or ignorance, the deceased falls
further into the bardo realms which lead
eventually to a new existence. Clearly,
in the context of the Tibetan funeral
rituals associated with this and other
texts included in The Great Liberation
upon Hearing, it is the prime
responsibility of the religious
specialist or 'lama' (bla ma) to gain
the attention of the deceased and to
make him or her aware of the visions
encountered during the bardo
experience.
