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24 EASTERN HORIZON | FEATURE

A Journey Between Lives

How I found my way back to

my ancestors through The

Tibetan Book of the Dead

By Ann Tashi Slater

On a rainy morning in 1919, Walter Evans-Wentz walked
a winding mountain path into Gangtok, Sikkim, in
northeastern India. An American scholar, he was seeking
to translate the Bardo Thödol, a Tibetan Buddhist guide
for the after-death bardo journey to rebirth. Through a
letter of introduction from my Tibetan great-grandfather,
Evans-Wentz met Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup, a well-
known translator and the headmaster of a government
boarding school. They began working together and—
with Dawa-Samdup translating and Evans-Wentz
editing—completed the first English version of the Bardo

Thödol, entitled The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford
University Press, 1927).

The translation ignited an enduring fascination in
the West with the 8th-century teaching said to have
been written by Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava),
the Indian spiritual master who brought Buddhism
to Tibet. Inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead’s The author (second from right) with her family, including (from left)
her grandmother, sister, and mother | Photo courtesy the author
depiction of individual transformation, Carl Jung said
the volume was his “constant companion.” It was also
embraced by counterculture figures like Timothy Leary, my Tibetan family history, about three generations
Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass), gathered in Darjeeling (my mother’s hometown) for the
the co-authors of The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual funeral of the patriarch. I felt drawn to The Tibetan Book
Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964), a guide of the Dead because my novel related to death, my great-
to the psychedelic drug trip as a bardo journey from grandfather had helped make the English translation
death of the ego to rebirth into greater self-awareness. possible, and—thinking over the plot for my book—I
The popularity of The Tibetan Book of the Dead has was intrigued by the fact that Guru Rinpoche’s guide
continued unabated; including subsequent translations, was intended to benefit not only the dead but the living.
over a million copies have been sold.
It took me years to understand The Tibetan Book of
Almost eighty years after Evans-Wentz and Dawa- the Dead. I thought I’d just read it and see what it
Samdup met, I began to study their translation of was about, but the words felt impenetrable. How to
the Bardo Thödol for a novel I was writing based on make sense of statements like, “If the instructions