Book Contents

The Bardo

Supplicating the Guru
Nature and Aspects

Interval of Possibility

The First Part: Dying
The Moment of Death: Experiencing the Clear Light
The Middle Part: Being Dead
The Last Part: Approaching Rebirth

Glossary

Index

Acknowledgements

Resources

Book Excerpts

What is the Bardo?

The bardo is not just the period between lives. In fact, the Buddha taught that as long as there is a state of bewilderment, all of samsara and nirvana without exception can be included in or summarized as the bardo. As long as there is fixation on duality, and as long as you believe in the independence of existence of what you experience and the cognition that experiences it, you are in some kind of bardo or interval. As long as all of the different categories of “two’s” arise for you—pleasure and pain, good and bad, samsara and nirvana—you are in the bardo.

Wandering in the Bardo

Eventually, having realized that you are dead, you will attempt to comfort your loved ones who are grieving for you. You will say, “Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’m right here. Can’t you see me? I’m right here.” Of course, your loved ones cannot see you, so you will be saddened by your inability to comfort your grieving survivors, and you too will start to grieve and cry. You may get to the point of fainting, or almost fainting, through grief and frustration. On the other hand, when you see people who are not grieving, you will be angry about that. You will resent people who dislike you, who makes jokes about you and laugh, or are otherwise disrespectful about you, now that you are dead. You will feel that some people just do not care that you are dead; they are laughing about something else or playing and entertaining themselves, and in general they are going about their lives normally. You will think, “How can they do that when I’m in this state? I’ve just been pulled right out of my body! I’m wandering in the bardo! I’m going through all of this, but they are laughing and having a good time and I can’t communicate with them!”

As an interval being, you will actually feel enmity for those people, even though they may be persons you did not even know. You will resent those who are not grieving as much as you are distressed by those who are mourning. When you see the disposition of your possessions, especially those that were particularly valuable or precious, you will resent it. When others make use of your former belongings, you will think, “This stuff was worth a lot to me. I put a lot into it, and now this person is wasting it.” You will be very angry about that, and you will actually follow the stuff around after it is passed on. The dead person’s consciousness will often be attracted to the site of their former possessions. This is one reason why soon after someone died in Tibet it was customary to offer at least a certain amount of their treasured possessions to the Three Jewels to help the dead person cut through their attachment to their previous belongings and to prevent these things being used in a way that would upset them.

May I Train Myself in Dream

If you have no instructions to follow, and have not been taught how to prepare for the bardo, you will experience the appearances of the interval of possibility in much the same way you experience the dream state. You will have very little basis for knowing what is going on, just as you are pretty well lost when you are dreaming. Because the average or untrained person will not know for some time that they are dead, they will be at the mercy of events that appear to occur. They believe that they are real just in the same way that they do not know when they are dreaming. If you do not understand what you are undergoing, what you are seeing and hearing, you will be totally at the mercy of your bewilderment and the bewildered appearances. Therefore the aspiration says, “May I train myself in dream, which is the manner of appraisal of the path.”

Perfect Buddhahood at the Moment of Death

This kind of liberation is not purely legendary. It is not the case that we can speak of this liberation by saying, “People used to achieve this in the good old days, but nowadays it does not happen.” In fact, it happens all the time. In my lifetime—more specifically, since I left Tibet—there have been several instances of this in my own experience and countless others as well. When I was thirty-eight years old, there was a certain tutor of a Drukpa Kagyu lama called Gar Rinpoche. This tutor passed away at the refugee camp in Buxador where we were all living. In order to understand what happened to him and to his body, you need to understand that he had been very sick and feeble before he died; yet just before his death, he sat up perfectly straight, seeming completely comfortable and at ease. He dismissed the attendants who had been helping him, saying, “You all go outside and play,” then asked for his outer robe and his meditation hat. When they were brought to him, he put them on and started to do his daily practice book. He chanted the first half of it, and in that state he passed away, leaving the second half undone. Having died, he remained in a state of meditative absorption for three days.

This happened at a time when it was extremely hot in Buxador. As you know, dead bodies rot and stink very quickly in hot weather, but his did not. For the three days of his samadhi, he remained seated upright, without the slightest appearance of decay, either visible or olfactory. In fact the room was hot not only because of the time and location, but because people were offering butter lamps, as many as a hundred, in the room where his body was left. Still, the double heat from the lamps did not cause any scent of decay. As for how he looked, we know that, generally speaking, when someone dies, their complexion is no longer rosy, to say the least. But the lama’s complexion actually improved. He looked more florid, more lively, after death than he had while he was still alive.

These indications, particularly the indications of circulation, the florid complexion, and the lack of decay, are considered definite signs that someone has achieved liberation in the dharmakaya and perfect buddhahood at the moment of death. Another example of this was a retreat master I knew who passed away in the same way and remained seated with the same signs for the same period of three days. There was also a lama called Karma Norbu who had done a retreat at Palpung Monastery and was a disciple of Chatral Rinpoche. He lived in an isolated place in Nepal, in a small house where water was scarce, causing disputes between him and his neighbors. Yet when he died a multicolored light, like the light of a rainbow, started to emerge from his body and from his house, filling the surrounding area. It was also noticed that his body was getting a little bit smaller as time went on. His neighbors of course recognized this as what it was and felt somewhat regretful for their having fought with him in the past. Now they prostrated to his remains and venerated him properly.

Lama Ganga, a lama who lived for sometime in the West, passed away at Thrangu Monastery and after his death remained seated in samadhi for no less than five days. I saw that myself because I was there when he died. My point is that there are many instances up to the present day of people achieving perfect awakening through these means. In fact, it happens so commonly and people are so used to it that they do not even bother to report it every time. They simply say, “Well, that’s what happens if you practice dharma. That’s dharma’s blessing.” But you should consider what it is and not be so casual about it, but it is definite and irrefutable proof of the possibility of perfect awakening at the moment of death.

No Time to Waste

Student: Rinpoche, you referred earlier to meditating on the clear light, and I’m not sure what that is. Could you explain that? Also, I have been told often to accept impermanence. I think that in Tibetan culture there is much more comfort and practice in working with this, but in our culture we haven’t been able to talk about death, except for maybe the last ten years. Many soldiers are dying, and a lot of our friends are dying at a much earlier age because of illness. Perhaps we need to pay much more attention to this. There is a certain freedom in being comfortable with the idea that death is natural, yet I don’t think we are all in that place. Could you speak about that?

Rinpoche: To answer your second question first, it is true, as you say, that generally speaking people live in denial of death. We flee the concept and we are intensely uncomfortable with it. But being uncomfortable with it is actually the starting point of contemplation. Whether you are Tibetan, American, or anything else, if you become comfortable with the idea of death you may think, “Well, death is coming, impermanence is natural, and that’s okay.” Simply thinking that death is okay and being comfortable with it does no good whatsoever.
The purpose of the contemplation of death is not to alleviate anxiety about it but to use the approach of death as inspiration for practice. Contemplating death and impermanence causes you to realize that you have no time to waste. It is only if this causes you to practice assiduously that such contemplation has any value or has achieved its intended purpose. The instruction that you have read and heard—to contemplate death and impermanence—really means to take these things to heart so you are inspired to practice with diligence.
With regard to the contemplation of impermanence, some people seem to have the idea that thinking about death and impermanence all the time will shorten your life, or that you will attract death by thinking about it. This is nonsense. The length of your life is primarily a matter of your karma, and you do not change your karma by thinking about death. If it were true that you shortened your life by thinking about death, then you could lengthen your life endlessly by repeatedly contemplating immortality, and we’ve seen that that does not happen! Therefore you can reasonably assume that you are in no danger of dying sooner merely because you contemplate impermanence.
As for what constitutes meditation on the clear light, I’ll give you an example of it. When you are meditating upon Chenrezik, as I instructed you earlier, you recite the mantra om mani peme hung repeatedly. While reciting the mantra, from time to time rest your mind in a state free of any mental engagement, of any thought or mental activity, and that will be an encounter with the clear light.


Bringing the Bardo onto the Path

The next stanza begins with a definition of the bardo as we usually use the term. The term interval or bardo simply means “something that is in between two other things.” It can be used and explained in different ways, but generally speaking it means the type of existence that you have in between lives when you have not gone to or reached the next state of birth. Here we use the term bardo to mean just that, and what characterizes it is explained in the next line, “In that state, one has no freedom or control.”

For reasons that will become clear, a being in the bardo has no ability to control where it goes. It is driven about by the strong force of its karma, or previous actions. Your previous actions control you in the bardo, and you are driven about by this karma. This means that you are thrown about violently from one place to another without having the ability to stop. Now, if that is what the bardo is like, what can you do about it? That is explained in the next line, “Through the instructions concerning special visualizations for use at that time, may I be able to practice all the various ways of bringing the bardo to the path.”

Because in the bardo state you have no opportunity to engage in practices, you must practice in the preceding life in order to gain control over the bardo. First you aspire to recognize what the bardo experience is. Then your aspiration is to be motivated by that recognition to pursue the practices that will give you the ability to gain control, and ideally liberation, within the bardo. Whereas before we used the term bardo in the restricted sense, to refer merely to the period in between lives, it will now be used in other senses as well, with practices consisting of specific methods, types of focus, or visualizations. All of these are ways to bring various aspects or stages of the bardo experience onto the path. That is what you refer to when you say, “May I undertake the specific practices that will bring the bardo onto the path.”

The bardo basically has three phases, and the methods taught for dealing with these involve learning to see the particular type of bewildered projection that characterizes each phase. You recognize dharmata in the case of the first phase, deity and mantra in the case of the second, and the nirmanakaya or emanation body in the case of the third. These will be described in detail later on.

Interval of Possibility

It is the third interval that is usually meant when people talk about the bardo, and therefore it is the principal subject of the rest of our text. Here it is called the interval of possibility, and it is divided into three phases, simply called the first part, the middle part, and the last part, which correspond to dying, being dead, and approaching rebirth. These three are called the interval of possibility because this is the state in which the various possible rebirths can happen, as you will see.

There are three paths through which you prepare for the three phases of the interval of possibility. Through the path of the clear light, the nature of the first interval is recognized to be dharmakaya. Through the path of the illusory body, the nature of the second interval is realized to be sambhogakaya, the body of complete enjoyment. Through the path of the nirmanakaya, the final phase, the third interval, is transformed into rebirth as nirmanakaya. You initially make the aspiration summarized here, “May I traverse or complete these paths and thereby achieve liberation in these intervals.”