The hidden 8th Century works written by an Indian mystic Padma-Sambhava, which were supposed to be all written in Sanskrit, were discovered in the fourteenth century, most notably by a local youth in Tibet called Karma Lingpa. According to a web site (http://www.summum.us/mummification/tbotd/), he was born around 1350 and his discovery took place when he was fifteen years old, therefore, it could be said that he found these hidden Sanskrit works roughly in circa 1365. It seems that he was not the only person who discovered such hidden documents and what he discovered included other works than what later became to be known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, however, at least it can be said that within the hidden works, ‘he found a collection of teachings entitled The Self-Emergence of the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities from Enlightened Awareness. These teachings contained the texts of the now famous Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Bardo’ (ibid).
Though the discovery of the hidden works enabled what had been written in Sanskrit to be known to the future generations in Tibet, it should be recognised that nothing is certain about neither the physical existence of the hidden Sanskrit works nor the reliability of the legend that holds Padma-Sambhava’s authorship of the works. Believe it or not, in a case where it presumes that there had been such hidden works, inevitably it should conclude that these works were totally lost physically in the later years after the discovery because it is said that ‘The original Sanskrit texts of the Sutra (scripture)… on Death and the Transmigration of Souls are no longer extant and are known only through their Tibetan versions’ (http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/dead/sutras.html).
For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/the-tibetan-book-of-the-dead-the-establishment-of-the-work/
No comments:
Post a Comment