On folio 64, the Eight Kerima and the Eight Htamenma of the Thirteenth Day; and the Four Female Door-keepers of the Fourteenth Day;
On folio 67, the maṇḍala of the animal-headed deities of the Fourteenth Day.
Each deity is depicted in conformity with the description given in the text as to colour, position, posture, mudrā, and symbols.
All of the illustrations in the manuscript thus belong to the Chönyid Bardo of the First Book. In our translation, copious annotations contain the textual name of each deity and the Sanskrit equivalent when, as in most cases, there is one.
No attempt has been made to collate our manuscript with other manuscripts of the same text, none having been available. Such manuscripts are, no doubt, numerous in Tibet, and the production of a standard or uniform text would require years of careful labour—a task remaining for scholars of the future. The only comparison of texts attempted was with Dr. Van Manen’s Block-Print, which is probably not more than about twenty to thirty years old. The translator said that, so far as he was aware, Block-Prints of the Bardo Thödol have appeared—at least in Sikkim and Darjeeling—rather recently, although probably known in Tibet itself much longer, block-type printing having been carried on for unknown centuries in China, and thence brought to Tibet, long before printing was done in Europe.[1]
- ↑ These Block-Prints are usually composed of separate treatises belonging to the Bardo Thödol cycle. One of such Block-Prints—which was purchased in Gyantse, Tibet, during the year 1919, by Major W. L. Campbell, then the British Political Representative in Tibet, Bhutan, and Sikkim, and presented to the editor—contains seventeen treatises, whose Tibetan titles have been rendered, in slightly abbreviated form, by the translator, as follows:
1. ‘The Clear Directions on The Divine Bardo, called “The Great Liberation by Hearing”, from “The Profound Doctrine of the Divine Peaceful and [Wrathful] Self-Liberation”’;
2. ‘The Exposition of the Wrathful [or Active] Aspect of the Bardo’;
3. ‘The Good Wishes [or Prayers] Invoking the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas for Assistance’;
4. ‘The Root Verses of the Bardo’;
5. ‘The Prayer to Rescue [One] from the Narrow Places of the Bardo’;
