Bd Breaking Open in the Bardo
Breaking Open in the Bardo BY PEMA KHANDRO RINPOCHE
It’s when we lose the illusion of control—when we’re most vulnerable and exposed—that we can discover the creative potential of our lives. Pema Khandro Rinpoche explains four essential points for understanding what it means to let go, and what is born when we do.
We are always experiencing successive births and deaths. We feel the death of loved ones most acutely—there is something radical about the change in our reality. We are not given options, there is no room for negotiation, and the situation cannot be rationalized away or covered up by pretense. There is a total rupture in our who-I-am-ness, and we are forced to undergo a great and difficult transformation.
In bereavement, we come to appreciate at the deepest, most felt level exactly what it means to die while we are still alive. The Tibetan term bardo, or “intermediate state,” is not just a reference to the afterlife. It also refers more generally to these moments when gaps appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives. In American culture, we sometimes refer to this as having the rug pulled out from under us, or feeling ungrounded. These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty are what is being referred to by the term bardo. But to be precise, bardo refers to that state in which we have lost our old reality and it is no longer available to us.
Until now, we have been holding on to the idea of an inherent continuity in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves on artificial ground. By doing so, we have been missing the very flavor of what we are. Anyone who has experienced this kind of loss knows what it means to be disrupted, to be entombed between death and rebirth. We often label that a state of shock. In those moments, we lose our grip on the old reality and yet have no sense what a new one might be like. There is no ground, no certainty, and no reference point—there is, in a sense, no rest. This has always been the entry point in our lives for religion, because in that radical state of unreality we need profound reasoning—not just logic, but something beyond logic, something that speaks to us in a timeless, nonconceptual way. Milarepa referred to this disruption as a great marvel, singing from his cave, “The precious pot containing my riches becomes my teacher in the very moment it breaks.”
This is the Vajrayana idea behind successive deaths and rebirths, and it is the first essential point to understand: rupture. The more we learn to recognize this sense of disruption, the more willing and able we will be to let go of this notion of an inherent reality and allow that precious pot to slip out of our hands. Rupture is taking place all the time, day to day and moment to moment; in fact, as soon as we see our life in terms of these successive deaths and rebirths, we dissolve the very idea of a solid self grasping onto an inherently real life. We start to see how conditional who-I-am-ness really is, how even that does not provide reliable ground upon which to stand.
At times like this, if we can gain freedom from the eternal grasping onto who I am and how things are—our default mode—then we can get to the business of being. Until now, we have been holding on to the idea of an inherent continuity in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves on artificial ground. By doing so, we have been missing the very flavor of what we are.
The Contrived Self
The cause of all suffering can be boiled down to grasping onto a fictional, contrived existence. But what does that mean? If we really come to understand, then there is no longer even a container to hold together our normal concepts, to make them coherent. The precious pot shatters, and all our valuables roll away like marbles on a table. Reality as we thought we knew it is disrupted; the game of contriving an ideal self is suddenly irrelevant.
This is shunyata, which gets translated in various ways, most commonly as “emptiness,” but there is no real correlate in our language, no single word or idea that can cover this ground of disrupted reality. Because “emptiness” in English has negative connotations, shunyata is sometimes translated as “voidness,” “open spaciousness,” and even “boundlessness”; Nyingmas such as Longchenpa explained emptiness in positive terms inextricably associated with presence, clarity, and compassion. But in the context of death and birth, shunyata refers to a direct experience of disruption felt at the core of our being, when there is no longer any use manufacturing artificial security.
The bardo teachings are really about recognizing the value of giving up the game, which we play without even giving it a second thought. We’re not talking about giving up our precious human life here, of course; we’re talking about giving up on this subtle game. We hold pictures of our ideal self in an ideal world. We imagine that if we could only manipulate our circumstances or other people enough, then that ideal self could be achieved, and in the meantime, we try to pretend to have it together. It’s the game we play all the time: we keep postponing our acceptance of this moment in order to pursue reality as we think it should be.
When we suffer disruption, we find we just can’t play that game anymore. The bardo teachings are really about recognizing the value of giving up the game, which we play without even giving it a second thought. But when we are severely ill or in hospice, and we have to cede control over our own bodily functions to strangers, holding it all together is not an option.
There are times like these in our lives—such as facing death or even giving birth—when we are no longer able to manage our outer image, no longer able to suspend ourselves in pursuit of the ideal self. It’s just how it is—we’re only human beings, and in these times of crisis we just don’t have the energy to hold it all together. When things fall apart, we can only be as we are. Pretense and striving fall away, and life becomes starkly simple.
The value of such moments is this: we are shown that the game can be given up and that when it is, the emptiness that we feared, emptiness of the void, is not what is there. What is there is the bare fact of being. Simple presence remains—breathing in and out, waking up and going to sleep. The inevitability of the circumstances at hand is compelling enough that for the moment, our complexity ceases. Our compulsive manufacturing of contrived existence stops. Perhaps in that ungrounded space, we are not even comforting ourselves, not even telling ourselves everything is okay; we may be too tired to do even that. It’s just total capitulation—we’re forced into non-grasping of inherent reality. The contrived self has been emptied out along with contrived existence and the tiring treadmill of image maintenance that goes along with it. What remains is a new moment spontaneously meeting us again and again.
There is an incredible reality that opens up to us in those gaps if we just do not reject rupture. In fact, if we have some reliable idea of what is happening in that intermediate, groundless space, rupture can become rapture.
Emerging Presence
It is said that the great fourteenth-century terton in the Nyingma lineage, Karma Lingpa, soon after losing his wife and their child within just a few days of each other, extracted a treasure of teachings from the side of a mountain. Because of all the spiritual practice he had done, the disruption he experienced sparked a volcanic eruption of wisdom from which flowed The Self-Emergence of the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities from Enlightened Awareness, known here in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
If I lose all my possessions, my job, all my money, then what remains of me? That act of revelation is in itself a key teaching, the idea that death and loss are great teachers if we can just open to the experience of profound disruption. Just like Karma Lingpa, encountering death can open us up to a basic level of being—raw, unmanaged, unmanipulated. That natural condition, that unconditioned state, is what shunyata points to.
What’s underneath all of our experience? If there is no inherent existence to hold on to, then what is ultimate reality? Even the most shallow person yearns to know this point; it’s what we’re always looking for. It’s why we fight with people we love about petty little things—because this unanswered question drives us. If we lose that fight, what’s there? What becomes of us? If we lose this relationship, what’s left? Who are we? If I lose all my possessions, my job, all my money, then what remains of me? If we don’t know the answer, then the question becomes a primordial anxiety that forms the background of all we say and do and think.
And so the third principle we can learn about death, birth, and reincarnation is this: the extent to which we know what’s underlying everything—the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, that which we can control, that which we can’t—is the extent to which we can relax. To the extent that we know our presence of awareness as reality, it becomes bearable. As we gain intimacy with that ground, we can even have sanity when life is hard, even when knowing that an experience is going to be painful. Think how willing we are to bear that pain for someone we really love. It’s how life begins, after all, with our mother, through love, enduring the pain of childbirth.
Why should we be any less willing to bear the pain of death or loss or change? If we’re in touch with the ground of being, perhaps there may be ease and comfort even in dying. That ground allows us to walk the earth with a clarity that accommodates whatever arises. So when we have to lose, we can lose. And when we have to let go, at times of great loss or when we depart from this body, then something else becomes possible. This is what emerges in the bardo—presence as the ground of being.
What makes death and impermanence so painful is our idea of the strict dichotomy between existence and nonexistence. Knowing something beyond that dualism is paramount. At the moment of death, instead of being caught between the ideas of existence and nonexistence, instead of this crisis of having everything that matters to us taken away all at once, something else can open up entirely; we shift our attention to the nucleus of being, to presence itself, experiencing itself.
But when we are not in crisis, recognizing presence as our nucleus and grounding ourselves in the sense of experience itself is a difficult endeavor. The fact is that we are disassociated from our true nature. We experience it all the time—in little tastes, in the gaps between realms, between all of our many identities and roles, and even between thoughts—but since we don’t even recognize it, we don’t know how to be with it, to rest in it. We contract with our wounded sense of self and with frantic efforts to create something more ideal, more secure, more definite. In this way, we experience ourselves over and over as both confusion and wisdom—a treacherous and fantastic situation. We taste the ground here and there but can’t ingest it, which creates a dramatic friction, one that gives rise to all the mental poisons as a means of coping with this chronic cognitive dissonance between open ground and contracted being.
Confusion is the raw material of wisdom.
Without some way of managing this experience, this unsettling discontinuity punctuated by occasional disruptions to the very idea of our being, we never know if we are going to show up in the next moment as a buddha or as a demon. We’re like gods one moment, tasting the fruit of the kingdom, and hungry ghosts the next, not even able to swallow it. How confusing—and how fantastic! This confusion is the raw material of wisdom. Our path is to find presence in each of these experiences. In the case of the bardo, when presence is the only real thing left, if we are searching for security instead, wisdom can be elusive. It’s no wonder that religion becomes so poignant during times of crisis; suddenly, presence is all we are. Everything else recedes except what is right in front of us. Recognizing this opens up the potential to experience life with awareness of impermanence and the presence it illuminates.
