14/08/2025
Understanding Bardo. The intermediate or transitional state.
Bardo of Dying
This stage is when all five senses slowly shut down. Your sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch — along with all the thoughts and feelings tied to them — disappear. Ideas of beauty or ugliness, pleasure or pain, all fade away. It’s like the brain’s normal activity has stopped.
When that happens, your mind is left without the usual noise of emotions or senses. What remains is a clear, open space — like a sky without clouds. This is where one drifts into the Bardo of Dharmata. In this state, your awareness is pure and bright, similar to the mind of an enlightened being.
You might have felt closer to this after waking from a deep, dreamless sleep. For a few seconds, you don’t know where you are, what time it is, or what you need to do. Your mind feels blank but peaceful, without any emotional weight.
But it doesn’t last long. Soon, your thoughts return — you remember your tasks, check the time, and start acting again. This is the Bardo of Becoming — when the mind moves into action, taking on roles and responsibilities. Even getting up to go to the bathroom is already “becoming” something else.
Dharma practice teaches us to rest in the Bardo of Dharmata without acting or chasing thoughts. If we can stay there, that’s liberation — the enlightened state.
Once we act, we trigger the second link in the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination — volition, or the will to act. This pushes us from the Bardo of Becoming into the Bardo of Life, and the cycle of samsara continues.
If we haven’t truly realized emptiness or recognized our own Buddha-nature, we can’t stay in that pure awareness. This inability or the first link is called Ignorance.
The Buddha understood this chain of cause and effect — and by seeing it clearly, he stepped beyond it.
