Ritual Empowerment Text & Illuminated Manuscript

This illuminated manuscript contains the instructions that a lama gives to practitioners, teaching them how to navigate the intermediate state between death and rebirth known as the bardo. The lama empowers the deceased to gain mastery over the visions they experience in the bardo, so that they can take the path leading to liberation rather than being led astray and remaining trapped in the cycle of death and rebirth.

The images in this illuminated manuscript depict these visions. Peaceful and wrathful (animal-headed) deities as well as other bardo experiences are depicted on one side, illustrating the ritual as described in the text.

Other pages depict the goddesses that represent the transformation of the elements into subtle energies, the eight forms of divine wisdom into which the eight objects of knowledge must be transformed, and the deities of the four gates, who represent the four immeasurable states of mind.

Each page instructs the practitioner to harness the wisdom and enlightened activity of the depicted deities when traversing the disorienting liminal state of the bardo.