The Bardo — the Tibetan Buddhist concept of an intermediate state between death and rebirth — occupies a singular position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as eschatological cartography, psychological allegory, and initiatory framework. The primary textual locus is the Bar do thos grol (Liberation in the Intermediate State through Hearing), transmitted through Evans-Wentz’s 1927 edition and its successive commentatorial accretions, which together constitute an interpretive tradition as much as a translation. Jung’s engagement with the Bardo Thödol is decisive: he reads its three stages — Chikhai, Chönyid, and Sidpa — as a phenomenology of the unconscious in reverse, arguing that the text’s sequence of luminosities and projections maps the soul’s descent from primordial awareness into the compulsions of rebirth. This reading aligns the Sidpa Bardo with Freudian preoccupations and the higher states with the collective unconscious. Lama Govinda restores the specifically tantric and contemplative register, insisting on the Bardo’s pedagogical function for living practitioners. Campbell situates it within a mythic iconography of wrathful and peaceful deities. Strassman introduces the contested analogy between Bardo states and psychedelic phenomenology. The central tension throughout is between literal soteriology and psychological hermeneutics — whether the Bardo describes an actual post-mortem itinerary or a symbolic grammar of consciousness.
For years, ever since it was first published, the Bardo Thödol has been my constant companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights.
Jung establishes the Bardo Thödol as a foundational psychological text, arguing that its depiction of deities as samsaric projections of the human psyche represents the quintessence of Buddhist psychological criticism.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
This penetration into the ground-layers of consciousness is a kind of rational maieutics in the Socratic sense… the realm that corresponds to the last and lowest region of the Bardo, known as the Sidpa Bardo.
Jung maps the three Bardo stages onto the history of Western depth-psychology, identifying the Sidpa Bardo with Freudian sexual psychology and proposing that psychoanalytic practice constitutes the West’s only surviving initiation process.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
Sidpa psychology consists in wanting to live and to be born. (The Sidpa Bardo is the ‘Bardo of Seeking Rebirth.’) Such a state, therefore, precludes any experience of transubjective psychic realities.
Jung argues that the Sidpa Bardo’s drive toward rebirth corresponds psychologically to ego-resistance against the objective powers of the psyche, making genuine transpersonal experience inaccessible without complete capitulation of egohood.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
The third part, or Sidpa Bardo, concerns the onset of the birth-instinct and of prenatal events… the illuminative lights growing ever fainter and more multifarious, and the visions more and more terrifying.
Jung’s prefatory commentary to Evans-Wentz describes the Bardo’s structural logic as a progressive estrangement of consciousness from liberating truth as it descends toward physical rebirth.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis
What the percipient on the Bardo plane sees is due entirely to his own mental-content; that there are no visions of gods or of demons, of heavens or of hells, other than those born of the hallucinatory karmic thought-forms constituting his personality.
Evans-Wentz advances a psychological-idealist reading of the Bardo, arguing that all post-mortem visions are projections of the deceased’s own karmic thought-forms rather than objectively existing entities.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis
Life in the Bardo brings no eternal rewards or punishments, but merely a descent into a new life which shall bear the individual nearer to his final goal.
Jung’s commentary characterizes the Bardo as an ethically purposive but non-punitive intermediate state, framing its philosophy as heroic and distinguished from the absolutist afterlife doctrines of Christianity and Islam.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis
The primary Clear Light is recognized and Liberation attained. But if it be feared that the primary Clear Light hath not been recognized, then there is dawning upon the deceased that called the secondary Clear Light.
The Bardo Thödol’s ritual text presents the Chikhai Bardo as a sequential opportunity structure, wherein failure to recognize the primary Clear Light at death initiates a cascading descent through progressively less luminous states.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis
Thou seest thy relatives and connexions and speakest to them, but receivest no reply. Then, seeing them and thy family weeping, thou thinkest, ‘I am dead! What shall I do?’ and feelest great misery.
The Sidpa Bardo section characterizes intermediate-state existence as a condition of bewildered attachment, in which the consciousness perceives the living world but cannot interact with it, producing anguish that obstructs liberation.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis
This is the high spiritual state vouchsafed by the teachings set forth in the Bardo Thödol. Thereby the initia[tion]…
Govinda argues that the Bardo Thödol functions as an initiatory document whose teachings progressively transform intuitive feeling and intellectual understanding into direct experiential certainty for living practitioners.
, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960thesis
Above, in the Great Bardo-Thödol, The Bardo called Chönyid was taught; And now, of the Bardo called Sidpa, The vivid reminder is brought.
The introductory verses to the Sidpa Bardo section mark the textual transition between the Chönyid and Sidpa Bardos, establishing the sequential and cumulative structure of the after-death teachings.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
The body which now thou possessest being a mental-body of karmic propensities, though slain and chopped to bits, cannot die. Because thy body is, in reality, one of voidness, thou needest not fear.
The Chönyid Bardo teaching instructs the deceased that the terrifying wrathful forms of Dharma-Raja are projections of the deceased’s own intellect, and that the mental body of the intermediate state is invulnerable as voidness.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
May we be saved from the fearful narrow passage-way of the Bardo, May we be placed in the state of the perfect Buddhahood.
The liturgical prayers of the Bardo Thödol frame the intermediate state as a dangerous passage requiring supernal guidance, reinforcing the text’s function as a protective and navigational ritual document.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
the Bardo Thödol is, as Dr. Evans-Wentz also feels, an initiation process whose purpose it is to restore to the soul the divinity it lost at birth.
Jung interprets the Bardo Thödol as a reversed initiation whose structural movement — from highest illumination down to rebirth — mirrors and inverts the ascending logic of Western initiatory traditions.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
Bardo is sometimes defined as ‘intermediary state,’ that is, between life, death, and rebirth. Many descriptions of the bardos echo unerringly reports gathered from those who have had an NDE.
Strassman draws a structural parallel between Bardo phenomenology and near-death experience reports, using DMT session accounts to argue that pharmacologically induced states recapitulate the intermediate-state topography of Tibetan thanatology.
, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences, 2001supporting
Tibetan Buddhist practitioners have ‘charted’ out the various bardo states that one enters along the path from dying to rebirth into one’s next life-form.
Strassman situates the Bardo as an empirically charted map of consciousness transitions, framing the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as a systematic phenomenology of dying analogous to his own clinical research.
, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 2001supporting
there is a period between two lives where we wait in a place called Bardo, which is very much like a big, crowded bus depot.
Easwaran offers a deliberately demystifying gloss on the Bardo as a transitional waiting-zone within the karmic cycle, linking Tibetan eschatology to the Hindu-Vedantic doctrine of rebirth as developed in the Bhagavad Gita.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting
After the corpse has been removed from the house for final disposal, an effigy of the deceased is put in the corner of the room… food continues thus to be offered until the forty-nine days of the Bardo have expired.
Evans-Wentz documents the Tibetan funerary practice surrounding the Bardo’s forty-nine-day duration, showing how the text’s temporal framework is embedded in living ritual structures of communal mourning and spiritual assistance.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
Therefore it is said in the Bardo Thödol: ‘On the fifth day the pure form of the element air shines forth as a green light.’
Govinda situates the Bardo Thödol’s elemental luminosity schema within his broader account of Tibetan tantric cosmology, demonstrating how the five-day structure of the Chönyid visions corresponds to the five Buddha-wisdoms and elemental principles.
, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting
The Tibetan text that forms the point of departure for the front matter is entitled the Bar do thos grol, Liberation in the Intermediate State through Hearing.
The editorial introduction establishes the Bardo Thödol’s textual identity as a ‘treasure’ text of the Nyingma tradition recovered by Karma gling pa, providing the philological grounding for all subsequent psychological and comparative readings.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
‘The Root Verses of the Bardo’; ‘The Prayer to Rescue One from the Narrow Places of the Bardo’; ‘The Setting-Face-to-Face of the Sidpa-Bardo’
The enumeration of the seventeen treatises composing the Bardo Thödol cycle reveals the text’s composite, liturgically organized structure, contextualizing the famous liberation narrative within a broader apparatus of prayers, diagnoses, and supplementary teachings.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
this Great Doctrine of the Bardo Thödol, as well as any other religious texts, may… going near the body of one who hath passed out of this life — impress this upon the spirit of the deceased vividly, again and again.
The ritual instructions emphasize the efficacy of repeated oral reading of the Bardo Thödol near the corpse, foregrounding the text’s operative — rather than merely descriptive — function in the Tibetan mortuary rite.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
the Secondary Clear Light, having fallen to a lower state of the Bardo, wherein the Dharma-Kāya is dimmed by karmic obscurations.
The translator’s commentary describes the Bardo’s luminosity structure as a series of diminishing spiritual rebounds, each stage representing a further occlusion of the primordial Dharma-Kāya by accumulated karma.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
Evans-Wentz transformed it into The Tibetan Book of the Dead and set it afloat in space, touching down at various moments in various cultures over the course of the past century.
The editorial afterword reflects on the Bardo Thödol’s cross-cultural dissemination, arguing that Evans-Wentz’s decontextualized translation enabled the text to function as a projective screen for successive cultural imaginations of death.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927aside
if one’s gaze cannot endure the rainbow radiance of the light of this pair, there will be seen a dull red glow… arising from the world of the Hungry Ghosts.
Campbell reads the Bardo’s sequence of Dhyani Buddhas and their correlative dull-light temptations as a mythic image of the soul’s choice between wisdom and compulsion, integrating the Tibetan material into his comparative mythology of the hero’s journey.
, The Mythic Image, 1974aside