Breathing in the Bardo
Last week, I read Anne de Marcken’s award winning novel, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over.
In it, the main character wanders around the world in a liminal space
between life and death. It’s a hauntingly beautiful zombie novel of
sorts, as it follows our heroine, who tries unsuccessfully to sate her
hunger. She wanders across the earth, not alive, and not yet dead,
trying to remember her name. She is tormented by the fleeting memories
of her old life, and waiting for the moment to come when she can fully
move on into death.
The story gripped me with both hands and refused to let go. I couldn’t help but liken the main character’s journey to the bardo.
Bardo is a Tibetan word, often referring to the period between death
and rebirth, or more generally the transition space between two states
of being. It is the period of change from one reality to another.
The bardo teaches us that the core existence of being is not something
we have control over. This can be difficult to confront, as Pema Khandro
Rinpoche explains in “ The Four Points of Letting Go in the Bardo.”
“Until now, we have been holding on to the idea of an inherent
continuity in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves
on artificial ground,” she writes. “By doing so, we have been missing
the very flavor of what we are.”
The teachings below dive into this concept of bardo. In our lives, we
will all experience moments of total, earth-shifting change. When we
understand the bardo, we can loosen our grip on what we hold onto too
tightly, and recognize that what makes us us, is far simpler, and far
beyond our control.
In my favourite scene of the book, our heroine stops her wandering to
lie down in between two old trees, watching the seasons change in their
branches. I hope these pieces bring you the same feeling of groundedness
this weekend.
– Martine Panzica, assistant digital editor, Lion’s Roar
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It’s when we lose the illusion of control—a “bardo” state where we are
most vulnerable and exposed—that we can discover the creative potential
of our lives.
Anyone who has experienced this kind of loss knows what it means to be
disrupted, to be entombed between death and rebirth. We often label that
a state of shock. In those moments, we lose our grip on the old reality
and yet have no sense what a new one might be like. There is no ground,
no certainty, and no reference point—there is, in a sense, no rest.
This has always been the entry point in our lives for religion, because
in that radical state of unreality we need profound reasoning—not just
logic, but something beyond logic, something that speaks to us in a
timeless, nonconceptual way. Milarepa referred to this disruption as a
great marvel, singing from his cave, “The precious pot containing my
riches becomes my teacher in the very moment it breaks.”
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Bardo is a Tibetan word referring to what we experience in the period
between death and rebirth; however, more generally, the word may refer
to the gap or space we experience between any two states.
The Tibetan tradition typically describes six bardos, three of which are
experienced during this life and three that are experienced during the
death and rebirth process. As contemporary Tibetan teacher Dzogchen
Ponlop Rinpoche writes, “When the six bardos are viewed in full, we see
that they encompass the entire spectrum of our experience as conscious
beings, both in life and in death.”
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According to Tibetan Buddhism, all life and death take place in the gap,
or bardo, between one state and another. While the most famous bardo is
the one between death and rebirth, there are others that also shape our
lives. Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen presents a commentary on Milarepa’s
song of realization “The Eight Bardos.”
Bardo is a Tibetan word. The first syllable, bar, means “in between”;
the second syllable, do, means “two.” So together, they mean “place in
between two.” While the bardo between lives is the most well known, the
word can be used to indicate a state between any two things: hungry and
full, happiness and suffering, delusion and enlightenment, laughing and
crying, this life and the next, or between meditation sessions. Our life
constantly plays out in between, in duality. This song is a teaching on
how to transcend duality or, in other words, how to purify the concept
of duality.
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