The Tibetan Book of the Dead · Reading 95 of 170
The After-Death World
The Bardo Body: Its Birth and Its Supernormal Faculties
Reading 1 of 6
Worship having been offered to the Trinity, and the prayer invoking the aid of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas having been recited, then, calling the deceased by name, three or seven times, speak thus:
O nobly-born, listen thou well, and bear at heart that birth in the Hell-world, in the Deva-world, and in this Bardo-body is of the kind called supernormal birth.
Indeed, when thou wert experiencing the radiances of the Peaceful and the Wrathful, in the Chönyid Bardo, being unable to recognize, thou didst faint away, through fear, about three and one-half days [after thy decease]; and, then, when thou wert recovered from the swoon, thy Knower must have risen up in its primordial condition and a radiant body, resembling the former body, must have sprung forth — as the Tantra says,
'Having a body [seemingly] fleshly [resembling] the former and that to be produced,
Endowed with all sense-faculties and power of unimpeded motion,
Possessing karmic miraculous powers,
Visible to pure celestial eyes [of Bardo beings] of like nature.'Such, then, is the teaching.
That [radiant body] — thus referred to as [resembling] 'the former and that to be produced' (meaning that one will have a body just like the body of flesh and blood, the former human, propensity body) — will also be endowed with certain signs and beauties of perfection such as beings of high destiny possess.