“Alcune considerazioni sulle origini del Libro tibetano dei morti”

Although among the old Tibetan documents from Dun huang there are several texts dealing with death and the afterlife, the antarābhava or bar do doctrine arose in Tibet as specific tantric innovation which developed in the eleventh century, during a period in which Tibetans produced a great amount of new esoteric tantric literature, related in a way or the other, to the last phase of Buddhism in India. In the tantra treatises such as the Guhyasamājatantra, and the Kālacakratantra which acquired great importance in the Tibetan Gsar ma traditions, as well as in the Guhyagarbhatantra, that is one of the most authoritative source of the Rnying ma pa tradition, and in the Ati yoga section of the Rnying ma rgyud bcu bdun collection, we can detect the background theories informing the fascinating and multifarious Tibetan later literature on death.