The work commonly called “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” has been an enduring classic among Westerners since its original translation into English by Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup and W.Y. Evans-Wentz in 1927. But its popularity in the West has bemused scholars and Tibetan religious adepts. According to Gyurme Dorje, a British scholar who has done a brand new translation of this work, the original Tibetan volume, actually called “The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States,” is only one section of a much longer compendium of Tibetan Buddhist teachings, part of a cycle of texts revealed in the 14th century by the Tibetan Buddhist adept Karma Lingpa. Like other such revealed material from the Tibetan “Treasure” tradition, these texts are said to have been merely discovered by Karma Lingpa but written in the 8th century by the great Tantric adept Padmasambhava, who was a key figure in introducing Buddhism to Tibet and whom Tibetans hail as a second Buddha.

Mr. Dorje’s lucid and elegant translation (Viking, 592 pages, $29.95) breaks fresh ground by offering the entire cycle of these teachings in English for the first time, making available a comprehensive guide to Buddhist teachings about living and dying.

It’s not clear why “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” has been so popular among Westerners. It may be the result of a fascination and anxiety about death and an eagerness to find more ways to think about it, even if those ways of thinking come from a tradition that most Americans know little about. Or perhaps it is because the descriptions in the “Book of the Dead” of the “intermediate states” (bardo in Tibetan) between death and life are so dramatic and vivid, both reassuring in their specificity and nearly hallucinatory in their detail.

“The Tibetan Book of the Dead” describes the experiences individuals have at the moment of death and afterward.The text leads the dying on a journey through the collapsing systems of their own bodies and on to the “intermediate states,” where fierce and peaceful deities make horrific, dramatic, or gentle appearances. Ultimately, these visions are revealed as illusions, creations of the mind itself. The goal is to allow the dying individual to experience death as an opportunity for spiritual transformation. By understanding what is happening and cultivating an attitude of altruistic compassion, people may be able to help themselves and others by achieving Buddhahood. At the very least, this understanding can protect the dying from panic and disorientation and help avoid a painful rebirth in a suffering state. In the language of the tradition, the text reassures travelers through the intermediate state by helping them recognize where they have actually been all along.

But from the point of view of many Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, “The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States” can only be fully understood and made use of within the larger framework of teachings from which it comes. Death is most meaningful in the context of how one lives one’s life. It is in this context that this comprehensive new translation of the entire cycle of texts is especially valuable.

An earlier translation of the text by the American Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman (Bantam, 1994), which also appeared under the title “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” explicitly addressed this issue of context, and presented the beautiful poetry of the “Liberation” against the backdrop of a detailed explanation of key Buddhist concepts involved in meditations and prayers. Mr. Thurman’s translation gave readers encountering the text of the “Liberation” for the first time the tools they would need in order to make sense of it, particularly if they wished to help a dying person. “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” by the Tibetan teacher Sogyal Rinpoche (HarperCollins, 1992) approached the needs of Westerners in a related way, offering not so much a translation as an extensive set of meditations and advice in the tradition of “The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”

In his new translation, Mr. Dorje works with a distinguished group of Western and Tibetan editors and commentators, including the current Dalai Lama, who wrote an extensive introduction, Graham Coleman, the president of the Orient Foundation, and Thupten Jinpa, the Dalai Lama’s main English translator and a respected scholar in his own right. Readers may be familiar with Mr. Dorje’s extensive work in another genre – the travel guide. His is the enthusiastic voice behind the Footprint guides to Bhutan and Tibet. This makes him curiously well-suited to translate “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” which in a sense is also a travel book.

The Dalai Lama’s introduction situates the work in the larger Buddhist context and in the specific setting of the Dzogchen, or Great Perfection, lineage of Tibetan Buddhist ideas and practices of the Nyingma tradition, the oldest of the four main branches of Tibetan Buddhism, dating to the 8th century. The translation and commentary include interpretations by some of the most famous Tibetan religious teachers of the 20th century, such as the great yogi and scholar, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, himself a teacher of many western students toward the end of his life and one of the main lineage holders of “The Book of the Dead” cycle of teachings, and the brilliant contemporary lineage-holder and scholar Alak Zenkar Rinpoche. Since Tibetan Buddhism is traditionally communicated not only by means of texts, but especially through the connections between teacher and student, this material from the lineage holders is particularly important, and is another reason to welcome the publication of this volume.

The work itself is, like many of the great religious books of the world, approachable on many levels. It offers thrills to the thrill seeker (Buddhas! demons with big teeth! hallucinations!), and even the skeptical may enjoy the rivetingly precise and detailed descriptions of the colors, sights, sounds, and other experiences supposedly occurring in the state separating birth and death (or in this Buddhist context, death and rebirth).Students of mental phenomena (most notoriously Carl Jung, but many others as well) have seen in these post-death visions insights into the projections of the mind and its fears and desires. Interestingly, this is not entirely different from how the Tibetan Buddhist tradition itself understands these visions – as a drama projected by the unresolved fears and desires of the mind,which are most naked and all-consuming in the time after death.

In response to these potentially fearful displays, the Buddhist tradition suggests helpful methods for preparing oneself for death. In particular, compassionate, loving mental states and actions toward others can make a person fearless. According to the “Book of the Dead,” individuals build their own reality all the time, and they experience this very directly in the after-death state.

At the same time, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition urges, individuals should also cultivate wisdom – insight into their own minds and how they work. People are encouraged to examine their fears, hopes, angers, etc., to see the causes of these emotions and ultimately, their transient, unstable quality. The more insight one has, the more free one is, in both life and death, to see the dramas played out by the mind as the mere constructs that they are. The development of wisdom makes a person free, transcending death.

In the electrifying words of the text itself,”O, Child of Buddha Nature, (call the name of the individual) listen! Pure inner radiance, reality itself, is now arising before you. Recognise it!”What better advice could the traveler find indeed? Gyurme Dorje and the editors of this volume have done a great service with this new translation, which makes this classic work more genuinely accessible than ever before.