Bardo

The six between-states

Bar do is a Tibetan compound — bar, between; do, island, interval — for the gap between any two settled conditions of mind. The standard Tibetan enumeration distinguishes six. Skye gnas bar do, the bardo of birth or of the present life, is the entire span between conception and the onset of the dying process — most of what an ordinary person would call being alive. Rmi lam bar do, the bardo of dream, is the nightly interval between falling asleep and waking, in which the rmi lam (dream yoga) curriculum of the Six Yogas of Naropa§ trains lucidity. Bsam gtan bar do, the bardo of meditative absorption, is the dhyāna state stabilised on the cushion. The remaining three — 'chi kha'i bar do (the dying), chos nyid bar do (the dharmatā, the luminous gap immediately after death), and srid pa'i bar do (the becoming, the disorientation in which the next rebirth§ is selected) — are the post-death bardos that the Bar do thos grol, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, maps in detail. The doctrinal claim the six-bardo enumeration encodes is that the recognition the contemplative path is engineered to provoke is recognition of the same nature of mind across all six — and that the practitioner who has stabilised the recognition in the bardos of meditation, dream and ordinary life will recognise it again in the bardos of dying and after-death, where the dissolution of the ordinary perceptual scaffolding makes the recognition either available or, if untrained, terrifying.

The Bar do thos grol and its Western reception

The text the West has come to call the Tibetan Book of the Dead is the Bar do thos grol chen mo — the Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo — a fourteenth-century gter ma (revealed text) attributed to the eighth-century Vajrayāna§ master Padmasambhava and uncovered by the Tibetan tertön Karma Lingpa in the 1300s. The text is structured as an oral-recitation manual: read aloud to a person at the moment of dying and over the forty-nine days the post-death bardo cycle is held to last, it is meant to remind the consciousness as it transits the chos nyid and srid pa bardos of what it is in fact perceiving — that the wrathful and peaceful deities the dharmatā bardo presents are the projections of one's own mind, that the lights of the six realms in the srid pa bardo are the karmic destinations to be neither pursued nor fled. The Western reception begins in 1927 with Walter Evans-Wentz's English translation, made through the Tibetan-English collaboration of Kazi Dawa Samdup. Carl Jung wrote a long psychological introduction to the second edition (1957), reading the bardo deities as projections of the unconscious in the analytic sense; the Beat-era Timothy Leary–Ralph Metzner–Richard Alpert Psychedelic Experience (1964) used the Bar do thos grol as a manual for the LSD trip. Chögyam Trungpa§ and Francesca Fremantle's 1975 translation — produced shortly after Trungpa had begun teaching in the United States — was the first to render the text from inside the Karma Kagyu§ curriculum that had transmitted it for six centuries, and is the rendering most contemporary American practitioners have first encountered.

The contemplative reading: dying-while-living

The reading the modern Western Vajrayāna§ inheritance has most foregrounded is the structural identity between the dying bardo and the ordinary moments of disintegration — what Pema Chödrön§ names groundlessness§. The bardo of dying, on this reading, is not a special event reserved for the deathbed; it is the recurring texture of any moment in which the scaffolding of identity gives way through illness, loss, public failure or sustained attention. The Tibetan tradition has always treated small dyings — falling asleep, the gap between thoughts, the dissolution of a strong emotion — as bardo training-events: the practice of recognising the nature of mind in those gaps is the practice that will recognise it in the deathbed gap. Pema Chödrön's *When Things Fall Apart*↗ is, in this register, a sustained reading of the dying bardo as everyday life; her course on awakening compassion↗ and her teaching on uncertainty as the practice↗ work the bardo-recognition through tonglen and lojong in precisely this idiom. Her conversation on becoming more alive↗ treats the small bardos of midlife as the operative material the practice is for. The reframe the Tibetan tradition has carried into Western contemplative literature is that the bardo is not what awaits us; it is what we are mostly already in.

Where to encounter the bardo curriculum in the index

The English-language index does not yet hold a row recorded under any of the standard editions of the Bar do thos grol itself — neither Evans-Wentz, nor Trungpa-Fremantle, nor Robert Thurman's later rendering. The bardo curriculum is in the index through the Kagyu§ literature its line transmits. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's *Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism*↗ is the canonical English-language Karma Kagyu text and the line through which the bardo contemplative reading entered modern American practice; the spiritual materialism the book diagnoses is the construction-of-self-image that the dying bardo, on the tradition's reading, is engineered to dismantle from the inside. Pema Chödrön's *When Things Fall Apart*↗, her course on awakening compassion↗, her teaching on uncertainty as the practice↗ and her conversation on becoming more alive↗ all work the bardo curriculum in the dying-while-living register the contemporary Karma Kagyu has stabilised. Tenzin Palmo's *Cave in the Snow*↗ records the form of life — twelve years of solitary Drukpa Kagyu retreat above 13,000 feet — in which the bardo-recognition curriculum is held to be most directly trainable, and is the closest first-person record in the index of what the bsam gtan bar do (the bardo of meditative absorption) actually looks like sustained over years rather than weeks.

What it isn't

The bardo is not exclusively the after-death state, though the Western popular usage has often collapsed it to that. The six-bardo enumeration is the load-bearing structure of the doctrine, and reducing it to the Bar do thos grol's post-death section drops the operative claim — that the recognition trained in the dream, meditation and life bardos is the same recognition that becomes available in the dying and after-death bardos, and that the post-death bardo is for the untrained the most terrifying because the perceptual scaffolding the trained practitioner has already worked with collapses without warning. It is also not a metaphysical claim about what literally happens at death in the way the early Western reception sometimes read it; the Tibetan tradition is open about the soteriological function of the cosmology — the deities and lights are pointed-out as projections of one's own mind in the Vajrayāna§'s own self-description — and the test of the curriculum is not the literal accuracy of the post-death map but the trainability of the recognition the map is engineered to surface. And it is not a Buddhist novelty: the bardo enumeration has parallels in the Egyptian Book of the Dead's afterlife maps, in the post-mortem cosmologies of the Greek mystery religions, and in the Christian§ apophatic§ tradition's accounts of the via negativa as a kind of dying-into-God. The Tibetan articulation is the most operationally detailed; the recognition it points at is older and wider than its name.