Bardo

Quick meaning: Bardo is a noun meaning (Tibetan Buddhism) The state of existence between death and subsequent reincarnation.

Meaning

(Tibetan Buddhism) The state of existence between death and subsequent reincarnation.

Example Sentences

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.

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, […]

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.

"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.

Word Forms

• bardos

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include bhava, bodhi, afterlife, samsara, mindstream, metempsychosis.

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