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Folios 35 and 67 of a manuscript of the Bardo Thodol (Liberation through Hearing during the Intermediate State), often known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The text is intended as a guide through the after-death experiences that a person’s consciousness has in the bardo.
Borrowed from Tibetanབར་དོ(bar do), from བར(bar, “interval”) + དོ(do, “two”), in the sense of an interval between two states.
1863, Emil Schlagintweit, “Details Characteristic of the Religion of the People”, in Buddhism in Tibet: Illustrated by Literary Documents and Objects of Religious Worship. With an Account of the Buddhist Systems Preceding It in India. With a Folio Atlas of Twenty Plates and Twenty Tables of Native Print in the Text, Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus; London: Trübner & Co., →OCLC, page 109:
According to the belief of the Tibetans, that is considered an untimely death, which, in opposition to the ordinary course of nature, is accelerated by evil spirits, such as Sringan, Dechad, Jungpo, and others. As a consequence of premature decease, the "Bardo," is prolongated. This is the middle state between the death and the new re-birth, which does not follow immediately, but there exists an interval, which is shorter for the good than for the bad. The prolongation of this intermediate state is considered as a punishment caused by evil spirits who have only power over sinful men.
1996, Victoria LePage, “The Perfection of the Shortest Path”, in Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth behind the Myth of Shangri-La, 1st Quest edition, Wheaton, Ill.: The Theosophical Publishing House, →ISBN, page 95:
The soul's gradual progress to God in terms of a spiralling pathway up the side of the cosmic mountain, from one spiritual station to the next, is an image common to almost all of the world's mystical systems; but few mention the direct path from the base of the mountain straight up to the summit. Even the Bardo Thodol mentions the direct path only once, and then glancingly, confining itself solely to a description of the soul's circuitous afterlife journey through the heaven-worlds. The shortcut for heroes that bypasses the heaven-worlds or bardos and takes them straight to the divine world—in one lifetime, so it is said—is so well guarded in religious literature that the relevant Tibetan Buddhist texts are written in the "twilight language," a cipher that can be understood only with the help of revelation.
The bardo in Tibetan means an intermediate state, most specifically the one after death when your soul wanders through the heavens and hell, trying to avoid rebirth into samsara—the realm of the material—and achieve nirvana or Buddhahood. […] Like everything the bardo journey takes place both inside you and outside. Like everything it's both a metaphor and not. I was born in the fifties in a nation suspended in the bardo state between a war a decade over and the hellsmoke light of a new war pulling in the East.
2013, Sogyal Rinpoche, “The Near-Death Experience”, in Lee W. Bailey, Jenny Yates, editors, The Near-Death Experience: A Reader, Routledge, →ISBN, page 173:
Some writers have suggested the near-death experience expresses the stages of the dissolution process in the bardo of dying. It is premature, I feel, to try to link the near-death experience too precisely with the bardo descriptions, […]
2014, C. J. Cala, “Babble On”, in Four Different Faces, : C. J. Cala, →ISBN, page 151:
Possessing both omniprescence and omniscience, they now stared beyond the abyss of astral space—beyond the six bardos of Tibetan Buddhism—spreading their karmic seeds across the infinite coordinates of the cosmological Minkowski continuum.
2015, Evan Thompson, “Dying: What Happens when We Die?”, in Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 292:
"Bardo," as noted, means in-between state. So whenever we're in between two states, no matter what the scale, we're in a bardo state. These two states could be living and dying or being awake and being asleep, but they could also be the just-past moment of thought and the moment to come. Thus "bardo" includes the gap between the cessation of one moment of thought and the arising of the next moment.
2015 January, Jan Jarboe Russell, “The All-American Camp”, in The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s only Family Internment Camp during World War II, New York, N.Y.: Scribner, →ISBN, page 233:
For internees the war was experienced in exile. The Buddhists in Crystal City understood it as a bardo state—a provisional period between the lives before their confinement, and the dream of freedom after the war.
Translations
state of existence between death and subsequent reincarnation
bardo in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
“bardo”, in William Smith, editor (1854, 1857), A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, volume 1 & 2, London: Walton and Maberly
