Bardo: Life's Transitions from a Tibetan Buddhist Worldview
'‘Bardo’ is a Tibetan word that simply means a ‘transition’ or a gap between the completion of one situation and the onset of another. ‘Bar’ means ‘in between,’ and ‘do’ means ‘suspended’ or ‘thrown’… We can divide the whole of our existence into four realities: life, dying and death, after-death, and rebirth…'
- Sogyal Rinpoche
In Buddhism, transience is such an intrinsic characteristic of life (indeed, the only intrinsic characteristic of life, according to Gautama the Buddha), that the Tibetan language has evolved to present reality as a series of transitions. Each moment leads to the next, without any pause and without any single instance of stability. Even mathematicians and physicists have been unable to pin down a universally applicable law of nature that does not change into something else as the perspective of the observer inevitably shifts.
- Sogyal Rinpoche
In Buddhism, transience is such an intrinsic characteristic of life (indeed, the only intrinsic characteristic of life, according to Gautama the Buddha), that the Tibetan language has evolved to present reality as a series of transitions. Each moment leads to the next, without any pause and without any single instance of stability. Even mathematicians and physicists have been unable to pin down a universally applicable law of nature that does not change into something else as the perspective of the observer inevitably shifts.