Intermediate State

If liberation from cyclic existence is not achieved during this intermediate state it comes to an end at the moment of conception. Since consciousness is said to possess certain heightened qualities during this period there is a potential to achieve liberation, or at the very least a favourable rebirth

This passage defines the intermediate state of rebirth as a temporally bounded condition in which heightened consciousness offers graduated opportunities for liberation or favourable re-embodiment.

Coleman, Graham, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Penguin Classics), 2005thesis

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Intermediate State of Living / Intermediate State of Dreams / Intermediate State of Meditative Concentration / Intermediate State of the Time of Death / Intermediate State of Reality / Intermediate State of Rebirth

The passage presents the canonical sixfold taxonomy of intermediate states, demonstrating that the concept encompasses not only post-mortem experience but the full continuum of conscious life, dream, meditation, dying, reality, and rebirth.

Coleman, Graham, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Penguin Classics), 2005thesis

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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.

Evans-Wentz identifies the root text as a guide specifically designed for liberation during the intermediate state through the act of hearing, establishing the soteriological purpose of the entire Bardo Thödol tradition.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis

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O nobly-born, the possessor of that sort of body will see places [familiarly known on the earth-plane] and relatives [there] as one seeth another in dreams. Thou seest thy relatives and connexions and speakest to them, but receivest no reply.

The passage characterizes the phenomenology of existence in the intermediate state as a dream-like confusion of disembodied perception, in which the deceased cannot yet comprehend its own death.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis

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The very name Chonyid Bardo, ‘The Intermediate State (bar-do) of the Glimpsing of Reality (cho-nyid),’ announces the nature of the problem now to be confronted. It is to distinguish between the temporal and eternal aspects of phenomenality

Campbell reads the Chönyid Bardo as a mythologically structured ordeal in which the soul must discriminate temporal illusion from eternal reality, mapping the intermediate state onto the Kundalini system’s fifth chakra.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974thesis

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therefore, ‘Intermediate’ or ‘Transitional [State]’. The translator, in certain instances, favoured ‘Uncertain [State]’ as its English rendering. It might also be rendered as ‘Twilight [State]’.

Evans-Wentz records the translational debate over the Tibetan ‘bar-do,’ foregrounding the semantic ambiguity—Intermediate, Transitional, Uncertain, Twilight—that has shaped Western reception of the concept.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis

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the Ether, which produces the mind, or Knower, and the desire-body of the dwellers in the Intermediate State, does not dawn for the deceased, because—as the text tells us—the Wisdom Faculty of the Consciousness, that is to say, the supramundane Buddha (or Bodhic) consciousness, has not been developed in the ordinary humanity.

Evans-Wentz links the Intermediate State’s phenomenology to the elemental and consciousness-aggregate schema of Vajrayana cosmology, explaining why ordinary beings fail to recognize liberating light.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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The experiences of the ‘mental body’ (yid-kyi lus) during the intermediate states of reality and rebirth are described below in detail.

Coleman identifies the ‘mental body’ as the vehicle of experience through the intermediate states of reality and rebirth, grounding the subjective phenomenology in a technical Tibetan psychological category.

Coleman, Graham, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Penguin Classics), 2005supporting

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Aspirational Prayer which Rescues from the Dangerous Pathways of the Intermediate States / Aspirational Prayer which Protects from Fear of the Intermediate States

This table of contents entry shows that the Tibetan tradition developed specific liturgical prayers for navigating and being protected from the terrors of the intermediate states.

Coleman, Graham, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Penguin Classics), 2005supporting

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the technique of dying makes Death the entrance to good future lives, at first out of, and then again in, the flesh, unless and until liberation (Nirvana) from the wandering (Saṃsāra) is attained.

The passage situates the intermediate state within a broader soteriological framework in which the art of dying determines the quality of subsequent embodiment or final liberation.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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this one—the middle one—as liminality. It transpires ‘betwixt and between’ the more fixed structures of normal life (the larva and imago stages). In liminality, a person feels at a loss for steady points of reference.

Murray Stein draws on van Gennep and Turner’s concept of liminality to describe a psychologically cognate intermediate state of transformation, bridging the depth-psychological and Buddhist frameworks.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting

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The shadowy apparitions which have actually been seen there are the ghosts of those souls which have not got clear away, but still retain some portion of the visible, which is why they can be seen.

Campbell cites Plato’s Phaedo on souls haunting tombs as a Western analogue to the intermediate state, where attachment to the material world prolongs post-mortem wandering.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting

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And what is it? Death, he answered. And these, if they are opposites, are generated the one from the other, and have there their two intermediate processes also? Of course.

Plato’s argument in the Phaedo that life and death generate each other through intermediate processes provides a philosophical framework for understanding the intermediate state as a dialectical passage.

Plato, Phaedosupporting

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Its first spiritual bound, directly upon quitting the earth-plane body, is the highest; the next is lower. Finally, the force o

The passage articulates the graduated diminishment of consciousness-potential as it descends through successive bardos, explaining why the first moments of death constitute the supreme opportunity for liberation.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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By providing an intermediate step between conventional psychological reflection and the deeper process of meditation, this way of working has proved to be more congruent with my meditative experience

Welwood invokes the notion of an intermediate step—between psychological and contemplative practice—as a secular therapeutic analogue to the transitional logic underlying the bardo doctrine.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000aside

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the Aspirational Prayer which Protects from Fear of the Interme

A fragmentary reference to the protective liturgy for fear of intermediate states, confirming the ritual-practical dimension of the tradition.

Coleman, Graham, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Penguin Classics), 2005aside

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