What happens to us after we die, if anything, is perhaps life’s biggest mystery, one all the world’s religions try to address. The Buddhist text popularly known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead offers us a unique and very specific answer. It gives us a step-by-step description of what happens during and after death, and it offers practical advice about how to work with our mind as we go through these experiences. In doing so, The Tibetan Book of the Dead also shows us how to work with the challenges we face in this life, which are not fundamentally different from those we’ll face after death.
“The Tibetan Book of the Dead” is the English title popularly given to a Tibetan text called the Bardo Thodol, or “The Great Liberation Through Hearing.” It’s one of a number of Tibetan Buddhist texts that can be read out loud to people during and after their death. The goal is to help them take advantage of the real opportunities for liberation that are available in the period after death, and if that’s not possible, to at least have a good rebirth. Simply hearing this text is believed to provide great benefit as a guide through the period between this life and the next.
The structure of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is straightforward. It describes a journey that begins with death, traverses an intermediate period, or bardo in Tibetan, and ends at the point of taking rebirth.
In Eastern culture, the idea of an ongoing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth is the norm. It’s as ordinary as day and night or the four seasons. Although this way of viewing life in terms of cycles might land a bit differently in a society like ours with a more linear approach, the cycle of continuous arising and dissolving marks all experience, at every level, and it is endless.
As The Tibetan Book of the Dead takes us through the different stages we experience after death, it gives an extremely detailed description of our deep-rooted emotional and habit patterns, and an equally detailed description of our inherent wisdom and its manifestations. Its message is that wisdom is always an option. Yet, even so, we generally choose confusion instead.
The Buddha’s Parinirvana. 18th–19th c., Tibetan thangka painting, courtesy of Gallery Zacke, Lot 39, Fine Asian Art Holiday Sale, auction held on 13.12.2023
The Bardos as Opportunities for Awakening
Bardo means intermediate or in-between state. Any gap in life can be understood as a form of bardo. The Tibetan Book of the Dead points to the opportunities for liberation that come up in these times of transition from one state to another, including but not limited to the bardo or in-between state that follows death.
There are many different bardos we experience. For instance, right now in this life we’re in between our birth and our death, and after our death we’ll be between this life and our birth into the next. This sense of in-between-ness can apply to many experiences, such as between asleep and awake, or between one thought and the next. In fact, we’re always in an in-between state, since in each moment we’re in the uncertain ground between the past and the future. If you pay attention to these many in-between states, you can gradually familiarize yourself with the accompanying feeling of groundlessness, which can be a doorway to liberation.
In fact, throughout The Tibetan Book of the Dead there’s a great emphasis on simply paying attention. Over and over the text reminds you not to let your mind wander but to stay with experience as it arises. In a bardo, this means staying with the experience of uncertainty rather than immediately rushing to reestablish your sense of solidity and control. Instead, you simply pause and allow a little gap or openness before regrouping or resolidifying.
The bardo teachings are rich and complex. They are counterintuitive, in that they point to the tremendous potential in the very experiences we tend to avoid. We learn that it’s not by clinging to security that we awaken but by resting in uncertainty. We may think we build strength by fortifying ourselves, but that kind of strength is brittle. It’s from an honest connection to change and uncertainty that true strength takes root.
You can begin to connect with bardo experience in ordinary life by paying attention to the many simple changes that take place all the time. You can pay greater attention to daily transitions between now and then, this and that.
But too often we fixate on getting from here to there and miss those intermediate spaces, which are so open and vulnerable. Through mindfulness meditation practice, you can learn to be more at ease with uncertainty and groundlessness. When you cultivate an awareness of transitions, you may experience moments of openness and spiritual insight. You may begin to recognize that life itself is a continuous series of bardos. Fundamentally, when you lessen your need for certainty and control, it’s possible that a fresh new world may open up, hidden within the places you usually avoid.
The Bardos of The Tibetan Book of the Dead
The Tibetan Book of the Dead focuses on six primary bardos or intermediate states. Three take place in this life, and three occur from the time of death in this life to the time of taking rebirth in the next.
The three bardos of this life coincide within the recurring cycles of daily life. At this point we’ve already been born, and we’ve not yet died, so we’re in the bardo of this life, the intermediary period between our birth and our death. The bardo of dreams takes place between falling asleep and waking up, and the bardo of meditation takes place at the boundary between enlightenment and ego, between sanity and madness. These simple and fundamental experiences can all be looked at in terms of bardo or in-between states.
The main focus of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is on the remaining three bardo states, which take place in the dying and after-death periods. The bardo of death takes place at the time of death, when the collapse of this life and the shock of impermanence leads to a powerful encounter with one’s true nature or primordial awareness. The bardo of dharmata, or is-ness, takes place next as your consciousness, ungrounded by the physical body, encounters an overwhelming display of your mind’s projections. Finally, the bardo of becoming arises when the energy and groundlessness become too much, and you desperately seek to resolidify by taking birth once again. Let’s look at these three bardos in more detail.
Mahottara Heruka. 18th c., Eastern Tibetan thangka painting, courtesy of Himalayan Art Resource
The Bardo of Death
The bardo of death is described as a process of dissolution that takes place in stages. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, there are detailed observations of the signs of death as well as practice instructions for the dying person. In these teachings, dying is described as a transition or process that takes place over a period of a few days, rather than as an abrupt end.
As your death approaches, you’re instructed to be open to curiosity and maintain awareness, kindness, and compassion. You could approach your death as an opportunity to attain realization for the benefit of all beings. It’s a time to connect with your teacher if you have one and the meditation practice closest to your heart.
When we experience dying, we face the truth of impermanence in its most raw and unmediated form. As the body dissolves, the mind becomes unmoored. Mindfulness is the key to staying present during this experience of instability. Paying attention to experiences as they arise and dissolve is a key thread in the bardo teachings. They teach that in your darkest moments, there’s always the potential for awakening if you remain open.
According to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the moment of death is a gateway to liberation and an opportunity for profound realization. As your body dissolves, the luminosity of the undistorted mind arises, and you have an opportunity to attain liberation on the spot.
At this moment, you’re brought face to face with the luminous clarity of your own mind, and the meditation instruction is simple: recognize it and rest. That sounds easy, yet for most of us the raw power of this experience is overwhelming, and when we’re shown the true nature of our mind, we don’t recognize it. We get confused, and we don’t know whether we’re coming or going, dead or alive. Our own wisdom mind has upset the apple cart, and we’re in a sea of bewilderment.
However, the luminous clarity of mind described in the bardo teachings is not foreign to us or otherworldly. It’s always present, hidden beneath our distractions and fears. Death simply strips away the layers that obscure it. The good news is that we don’t need to wait until we die and just hope for the best. We can cultivate glimpses of mind’s luminous nature through our meditation practice and through Buddhist teachings that point it out. We can begin to make acquaintance with our inherent wisdom, and the more we do that now, the more likely we’ll be able to recognize its full arising in the bardo of death.
The Bardo of Dharmata
If you don’t recognize the luminous clarity of mind in the first bardo, you’ll move on to the second bardo: the bardo of dharmata.
After the simplicity of the bardo of death, the bardo of dharmata, or is-ness, roars in with great intensity. It’s dramatic, emotional, colorful. It is important during this intense stage to recognize that you’re not alone, that death comes to everyone, and that no matter how much you yearn to hold onto your old life, it won’t help. You need to let go of that desire.
In this bardo, you’re confronted head on with the power of your own projections, because without the physical body to ground it, the mind runs wild. You’re brought to the razor-sharp boundary that separates wisdom from confusion, sanity from neurosis. It’s like the battle of the titans: extreme wisdom versus extreme confusion.
The teachings we get in this bardo are uniquely powerful and atmospheric. They take the form of sound and images, and they’re very direct. Transmitting reality in this way bypasses the conceptual mind and pierces through to the heart and emotions.
In the bardo of dharmata, you encounter an array of deities, both peaceful and wrathful, so it’s important to understand the role of deities in Vajrayana or tantric Buddhism. The key in this bardo is to see through the apparent solidity of all this activity and recognize that the deities and whatever else appears are your own projections.
The many deities in Tibetan Buddhism, including those experienced in the bardo, are simply reflections of your own mind. They’re not external figures to be worshipped; rather they’re like mirrors that reflect your own inherent wisdom. In other words, they help you recognize more deeply who you really are at your core. Both the peaceful and wrathful deities are a vivid display of awareness and compassion.
In the bardo of dharmata, you encounter ten powerful deities one after the other. First come the five peaceful deities and after that come the five wrathful ones. These deities are the vital energies of our own minds—our insights, habits, and emotions. They’re a map of our mental universe, which contains all of this and more.
The Peaceful Deities
Each of the five peaceful deities represents one of the five facets of enlightened mind or wisdom. They are: all-encompassing space, mirror-like wisdom, equanimity, discriminating awareness, and all-accomplishing action.
As these deities with their powerful wisdoms appear, so do their corresponding negative emotions or kleshas, such as passion, aggression, ignorance, pride, greed, and envy. Such negative emotions may start out as tiny reactions or simple flickers of thought, but they quickly take hold over us and expand so greatly that they color every aspect of our experience, creating and lording over entire realms of existence.
So, as each peaceful deity arises, a parallel realm of confusion appears to us simultaneously. Traditionally, there are said to be six of these klesha-controlled worlds: the god realm, jealous god realm, human realm, animal realm, hungry ghost realm, and hell realm. The peaceful deities appear in succession, and as each deity arises, one of the five wisdoms appears along with its corresponding klesha and associated realm.
With each successive encounter with the peaceful deities, wisdom and confusion are brought face to face, and you have an opportunity to make a choice: Do you go for wisdom, or do you stick with confusion?
This dual arising is painfully revealing. Although we may talk a good line about seeking after wisdom, when we directly confront the possibility, we find it too intense. We prefer to retreat to the more toned-down familiarity and predictability of the six confused realms. But the comfort you seek there is a false one. What seems to provide security instead traps you further under the control of powerful negative emotions and habits.
The peaceful deities with their quiet intensity invite you into a vaster world of brilliance and sanity. Though you might find that invitation overwhelming, they reflect immovable and relentless sanity that’s not outside you but inherent to your nature. This is important to understand. Wisdom is a part of you, and it won’t go away.
The challenge in this bardo is to stop looking for escape in the dull yet comforting realms of the kleshas—it’s to overcome your fear and go directly toward wisdom. You can switch your allegiance on the spot from confusion to sanity. That opportunity is right in front of you.
The Wrathful Deities
As with the peaceful deities, the five wrathful deities appear one after the other. But these deities are not serene and peaceful. The wrathful deities are loud, fierce, gigantic, and terrifying, and come charging right at you. They carry weapons and are extremely scary and threatening.
In your encounter with the wrathful deities, it’s as though wisdom is jumping up and down trying to get your attention. You’re paralyzed by fear, yet they keep coming at you. With the peaceful deities, you still had hope of escape; if the choice between sanity and ego felt too intense, you could hide out in one of the six realms. But with the wrathful deities, there’s no escape. It’s just you and them, and they’re coming at you.
The five wrathful deities represent the same five wisdoms the peaceful deities represent. You could think of them as the same deities in a bad mood. However, their fierceness is not designed to harm you but to wake you up. Like the peaceful deities, they’re projections of your own mind and reflections of your own wisdom.
Your encounters with the deities at this stage are abrupt and direct. You’re in a world of fear. Yet as soon as you realize that these deities are not external threats but aspects of your own mind, the fear dissolves. When you recognize them as your own projections, recognition and liberation are simultaneous. You’re liberated on the spot.
Padmasambhava. 20th c., Tibetan thangka painting, photo by Linda Lane
Bardo of Becoming
If you still have not recognized the nature of mind in your encounter with the deities of the bardo of dharmata, on you go to the bardo of becoming.
In this bardo, dealing with the shiftiness and uncertainty of the in-between state without a body to ground you keeps getting more difficult. The flash of openness of the first bardo and the confused projections of the second bardo have left you lost and adrift. You realize that your old life has completely fallen apart, and you become desperate to replace it with another.
So, in this stage, your focus is on rebirth. You realize that you can’t magically jump back into your previous life, so your attention turns to the future. This leap from life to life is a very deep habit and hard to resist. My teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche compared this kind of approach to frogs jumping from one lily pad to the next. We’re afraid of letting go of any solid ground until we have secured the next. But The Tibetan Book of the Dead encourages you to resist the urge to immediately resolidify by taking another birth. You don’t need to panic. You can take your time.
If the momentum toward rebirth becomes too strong to resist, you can at least choose wisely. When you’re desperate, when you have an any-port-in-a-storm mentality, you’re likely to choose badly. It’s easy to be misled when we’re speedy and mixed up.
This is a time to cut attachment. It’s a time to see through your wishful thinking and illusions, and not believe everything you see. The past is gone. There’s no point trying to resurrect it, and the future is questionable. So, there’s really nothing solid to cling to. It’s better to remain in equanimity and not try to get anywhere or to run away from anything. If you let go of clinging, you can go forward with confidence.
At this point you take birth again, and the cycle continues. According to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, you may find yourself taking birth in any of the six realms. There are three higher realms (gods, jealous gods, and humans) and three lower realms (animal, hungry ghosts, and hell).
In Buddhism, the most fortunate is considered the human realm. Why? Because in this realm you can encounter the dharma. Too much pleasure, as in the higher realms, breeds complacency. Too much pain, as in the lower realms, is immobilizing. But in the human realm, pain is not so extreme and pleasure is not so solid, which provides the right mix for entering the path of dharma.
A Guide for Living
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a guide for living as much as it is for dying. It raises questions that are just as relevant in this life as they are after death: What do you do when your seemingly solid world collapses? How can you hold steady in a swirl of intensified emotions and mental speediness? When you are hit with the truth, gently or abruptly, how can you cultivate the courage to stay with it rather than run away? How can you break the habit of being so attached to what’s familiar that you keep repeating it over and over?
You don’t need to wait until you’re on your deathbed to benefit from these teachings; you can work with them while you’re alive. Just like the bardo journey described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, our lives are marked by constant change and loss, by shifting and overwhelming energies and emotions, and by the desperate search for solid ground. So, we can begin to work with these teachings now. They apply to the challenges we face daily.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead reminds us that awakening is always available. No matter how stuck we may feel, and how often we miss the mark, awakening is an open invitation. The realms of confusion that ego spins so cunningly and that seem so very solid are mere overlays.
The pages of The Tibetan Book of the Dead are filled with practice instructions. The most fundamental one, repeated over and over is: Pay attention! Don’t let your mind wander! Especially in times of intensity or fear, instead of checking out, we need to hold our mind. Even at the time of death we can hold steady, one breath at a time.
The closer we pay attention, the more we learn not to believe everything we think or see. In heightened times, we’re especially prone to deluded perception, and we’re easily fooled by believing in our own projections. How often have we gotten in trouble or freaked out about something that turned out to be a product of our own imagination? To see clearly and to overcome fear and false hope, it’s essential to recognize the damaging power of projections, as true in life as after death!
May the bardo teachings of The Tibetan Book of the Dead inspire you to deepen your practice and understanding. May they enhance your kindness and care for others. May they introduce you to the luminous clarity that is your inherent birthright.
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