The Tibetan Book of the Dead
| Bardo Thodol | |||||||||
| Tibetan name | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tibetan | བར་དོ་ཐོས་གྲོལ | ||||||||
|
|||||||||
The Bardo Thodol (Tibetan: བར་དོ་ཐོས་གྲོལ, Wylie: bar do thos grol), Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, is a text from a larger corpus of teachings, the Profound Dharma of Self-Liberation through the Intention of the Peaceful and Wrathful Ones, revealed by Karma Lingpa (1326–1386). It is the best-known work of Nyingma literature, and is known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The Tibetan text describes, and is intended to guide one through, the experiences that the consciousness has after death, in the bardo, the interval between death and the next rebirth. The text also includes chapters on the signs of death and rituals to undertake when death is closing in or has taken place.
“Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States”.
“Natural Liberation through Understanding in the Between”.”
“The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo”.
Whilst ‘bardo’ may refer specifically to the intermediate state between death and rebirth, Tibetan literature refers to six bardos; living, dreaming, meditative stabilisation, dying, reality itself, and becoming. Dr. B. Alan Wallace, in his translation of the bardo literature, notes; “When the Tibetan term bardo (literally, the “inbetween”) refers specifically to the phase following death and prior to rebirth, one can usefully translate the term as “intermediate state.” But in the context of the six bardos, which include all of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, the term “intermediate state” no longer makes sense as a translation for the word bardo. In this context, the significance of the term bardo is in indicating that all phases of living, meditating, dreaming, and so on without exception are transitional. All these phases of life and death occur between other states. All of them are in process. To reflect this aspect of the term, the term bardo has been translated as transitional process in these contexts.”
BARDO (noun) = "interlude", "intermediate state". Translation of the Sanskrit "antarabhava". This term refers to any situation in between one major situation and the one following it. E.g., the "interlude" between death in one life and birth in another. Note that it does not only refer to the interlude between one life and the next. It is much more general than that; it means a particular situation which is the interlude between one situation before and one after. Many "interludes" are spoken of in Buddhist literature, especially in the rnying ma pa Nyingmapa tantras where four are commonly taught and six are also mentioned. The term is regularly translated as "intermediate state". That is not mistaken but is fairly clunky. The Sanskrit original term means antara "in between two things" and bhava "something that has come about, a type of existence".
Robert Thurman translates bardo as “The Between”. He says the term "is used in at least three senses: its basic colloquial sense of the whole period between death and rebirth; its technical sense in the set of the six betweens, the life, dream, meditation, death-point, reality, and existence betweens; and in the sense of “phase of a between,” where the experience of a particular period in one of the six betweens is itself called a between.”
Dorje, Coleman, and Jinpa also gloss BARDO as “Intermediate State". They note; "The original usage of the term within the literature of classical Buddhist abhidharma suggests that it referred exclusively to the period between the time of death and the time of rebirth. According to the Nyingma and Kagyu schools, however, the term ‘intermediate state’ refers to key phases of life and death identified as: the intermediate state of living (rang-bzhin bar-do), the intermediate state of meditative concentration (bsam-gtan bar-do), the intermediate state of dreams (rmi-lam bar-do), the intermediate state of the time of death (’chi-kha’i bar-do), the intermediate state of reality (chos-nyid bar-do) and the intermediate state of rebirth (srid-pa’i bar-do). During each of these phases, the consciousness of a sentient being has particular experiential qualities, and corresponding to these qualities of experience there are specific meditative techniques conducive to realisation of the ultimate nature of mind and phenomena”.
...
Wikipedia