The Tibetan Book of the Dead for Reading Aloud (full recording) Posted 10 Feb 2021
This little book is a most wonderful and readable summary of the famous Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead for Reading Aloud was written by Jean-Claude van Itallie, who says in his Introduction, “A playwright and a practising Tibetan Buddhist for thirty years, I wrote it because I felt a need to make The Tibetan Book of the Dead as readily available as a book of poems. I wanted a version that could be easily read to oneself or to a friend at a time of need.”
As Jean-Claude van Itallie says, “The Tibetan Book of the dead contains practical navigational instructions of urgent use on the journey that starts with the dying and continues in the days following death. A guidebook to the ‘in-between place’, it instructs how to avoid the suffering caused by the confusion of constantly discursive thoughts”.
I have made an audio recording of the Tibetan Book of the Dead for Reading Aloud.
The recording runs for about 35 minutes and is in three parts:
- the moment of death,
- the peaceful visions at the start of the journey through the intermediate state, and finally
- the angry and frightening visions leading to the search for another body and rebirth.
