Long before Western medicine coined the term "near-death experience", Tibet had two answers of its own to the question of what happens in dying: a text and a class of witnesses. The text is the Bardo Thödol, known in the West as the "Tibetan Book of the Dead" – a travel guide for the dying. The witnesses are the delok: people who seemingly died, travelled through the afterlife worlds and came back with messages. Together they form a striking counterpart to modern near-death research – with remarkable parallels and honest differences.
The Bardo Thödol: a travel guide for the dying
Bardo Thödol literally means "Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State". It belongs to the Tibetan genre of terma – hidden "treasure texts" attributed to the great master Padmasambhava (8th century) and said to have been rediscovered centuries later by the treasure-revealer Karma Lingpa (14th century). Contrary to what the Western title suggests, it is not a book about death to be read at leisure but a spoken accompaniment: it is read aloud to the dying and the recently deceased to guide them step by step through the transitions.
The three bardos
"Bardo" means intermediate state. The Book of the Dead describes above all three of them after death:
- The bardo of the moment of death. At the instant of dying the clear light of reality dawns. Whoever recognises it as their own true nature is liberated – the highest goal the text calls out to the dying.
- The bardo of reality. If the light is not recognised, peaceful and then wrathful deities appear in overwhelming visions. The text insists tirelessly: they are projections of one's own mind, not external powers – whoever sees through this is not afraid.
- The bardo of becoming. Whoever does not recognise even here is gradually drawn toward a new rebirth. To the last, the Book of the Dead tries to steer this pull favourably.
The delok: Tibet's "returners"
While the Bardo Thödol prescribes what should happen in dying, the delok report what they have experienced. Delok (Tibetan das-log) means roughly "returned from death". Traditionally they are people – often women – who in severe illness seemingly die, lie "dead" for hours or even days, and then awaken again. During that time, by their account, they travelled through the afterlife realms: they saw the hell worlds and the suffering of the dead, sometimes also paradises and Buddha realms.
What is remarkable is their social role: the delok return as messengers. They carry news from the dead to their relatives, urge an ethical, devout life, and become respected religious figures in their community. The experience transforms them – just as the Western near-death experience transforms those who undergo it.
Two cases
Lingza Chökyi (16th century) is perhaps the most famous delok. In her life story she tells how at first she did not grasp that she had died: she found herself outside her body and saw a pig's corpse lying on her bed, dressed in her own clothes. Frantically she tried to speak with her family – in vain, no one heard her, while they were already preparing the death rituals for her.
Dawa Drolma (early 20th century) later became one of the significant lama figures of her time. At sixteen she fell ill, "died" and returned to her body after five days. She recorded her journey in the book Delog: Journey to Realms Beyond Death – one of the few first-hand delok accounts available in the West. Her son, Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, carried the tradition westward.
The mirror of karma: the encounter with Yama
At the centre of many delok accounts stands the encounter with Yama, the Lord of Death. Before him the life that was lived is called up – not arbitrarily, but at a mirror of karma in which one's own deeds become visible. Good and bad actions are, as it were, weighed. Anyone familiar with our series will immediately recognise the life review of Western near-death experiences – the morally structured retrospect in which one experiences the effect of one's own conduct. Only here it is clothed in the imagery of Buddhist cosmology.
The parallels to the near-death experience
The religious scholar Carl Becker and others pointed out early how strongly delok accounts and modern near-death experiences resemble one another. The overlap is striking:
- Leaving the body and the view of one's own corpse – a classic out-of-body experience.
- The futile effort to make oneself noticed by the living.
- A companion or deity who guides through the realms.
- A kind of judgement or reckoning – the mirror of karma as a life review.
- A boundary at which the return is "ordered".
- The profound transformation afterwards: lost fear of death, ethical reorientation, a spiritual mission.
It is precisely this cross-cultural recurrence of the same basic structure that occupies researchers like Kenneth Ring and Bruce Greyson: a stable core beneath a changing cultural surface.
The honest differences
Tempting as the parallel is, one must not smooth over the differences. Delok journeys last days rather than minutes and are far more detailed: whole topographies of hell, named encounters, concrete commissions. Buddhist cosmology (Yama, the six realms) is far more present in the experience than in Western reports. And above all: the delok are a literary and religious genre. The Tibetologist Bryan Cuevas showed in Travels in the Netherworld (2008) that the transmitted delok biographies are shaped to edify and instruct – they aim to encourage a virtuous life, not to deliver a clinical record.
So the delok call for the same caution as any historical source of this kind: they are not clinically documented cases with files and timestamps, but transmitted, elaborated narratives. One may read them as culturally coloured relatives of the near-death experience – not as its proof. The checkable strand lies elsewhere, with veridical perception.
How the West discovered the book
The Bardo Thödol entered Western awareness in 1927 through the edition of the anthropologist Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, who gave it its catchy, in fact misleading title in echo of the ancient Egyptian "Book of the Dead". C. G. Jung wrote a psychological commentary on it, reading the bardo deities as archetypes of the unconscious. Later the translation by Chögyam Trungpa and Francesca Fremantle (1975) and above all Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1992) made the material accessible to a wide audience – and in doing so brought the delok back to the fore as living witnesses of the bardo teaching.
Context
This article is the sister piece to our article on the Nechung State Oracle: both show how rich Tibet's engagement with the borderlands of consciousness is. Anyone wishing to pursue the parallels to Western research will find them in the life review, in deathbed visions and in the question of the relation between brain and consciousness.
Sources:
• Bryan J. Cuevas, Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet, Oxford University Press, 2008 – the scholarly account of the delok genre.
• Delog Dawa Drolma, Delog: Journey to Realms Beyond Death, Padma Publishing, 1995.
• W. Y. Evans-Wentz (ed.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Oxford University Press, 1927 (with C. G. Jung's psychological commentary in later editions).
• Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, 1992 – contains delok accounts (including Lingza Chökyi).
• Near-Death.com: Lingza Chokyi / Tibetan Buddhism and the NDE(link).
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