Bardos, in-betweens and spirituality
The potency of hinterlands in fiction
The word “bardo” (literally “between two”) can be translated into English as “a gap, interval, intermediate state, transitional process, or in-between”. This is often understood by the philosophical skim-reader to mean the embryonic staging area a soul loiters around in once life ends but before definitive death. Which it is. But, personally, I think the more interesting kinds of bardo are the ones that define our life, not our death. Stick with me - I promise it’s less depressing than it sounds.
Bardos are something I started thinking about a lot when I was studying for my masters. One of the novels on the required reading list was Lincoln in the Bardo - the first full-length novel by the prolific short story writer George Saunders. The book winds through the interlinked stories of a massive cast of (dead) characters, traversing the course of one single, but very busy, night in a graveyard.
I won’t ruin the book for those of you who haven’t read it but might want to, so I’ll just say that it’s an exploration of grief, spirituality, purgatory and the after-life. It’s fantastical and theatrical, and, even though it wasn’t actually my favourite read, it got me thinking about the liminal spaces we move through over the course of our lives (and deaths).
Which is what led me down a bardo rabbit hole. Because I love a good rabbit hole - especially one that intersects literature, philosophy, spirituality and mental health. Let’s jump in.
What is a bardo?
A bardo is “is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth”. In the event of their death, a bardo-believing Buddhist says their soul will pass through a number of intermediate states on its journey to wherever souls eventually end up. (I won’t go into them here, because this is quite a long read already and other people explain them better. If you want a full breakdown of the six bardo states, check out this article.)
“Bardo” originally only referred to that life>afterlife journey, but the Buddhism-approved concept has since expanded into scenarios that span the entire cycle of life, death and rebirth. Which basically means that, if one looks closely enough (as determinedly introspective Buddhists tend to) bardos can be found everywhere.
We’re made of bardos
Nothing about life stays static for long. Our most foundational sense of self is, when you reflect on it deeply enough, wafer thin and in constant flux. This is a fact most people generally try to ignore, to squash down and forget about. People don’t tend to enjoy the idea that even they don’t, and can’t, truly know themselves. Tibetan Buddhists study this fact deeply, because of their core belief that true enlightenment lies in the understanding and acceptance of our own impermanence.
We, as humans, are inherently, wonderfully unstable - continually dying and being reborn as infinitesimally altered iterations of ourselves, blindly wandering the samsara* of human existence. Most of these deaths slip into and out of our reality unnoticed and inconsequential, which allows us to maintain a wilful illusion of self-consistency. Each tiny bardo becomes a single stitch in the chaotic tapestry of who we are as a person.
Little bardos are everywhere, and they’re in constant use across novels. We live each day through commonplace bardos, made of minor reinventions, meditation, professional and personal conflicts, daydreams and the unnoticeably small daily changes of childhood, adolescence, adulthood and beyond. Bardos are furtively concealed inside the boundaries of mental illnesses and addictions, crumbling relationships and wavering faith. The bardo of teetering on the edge of a breaking point, of indecisive or pre-decisive groundlessness. Bardos made of all the mundane purgatories that come from recklessly projecting our fragile eggshell selves onto an unforgiving world.
But when something big happens, like the death of a loved one, a brush with insanity or any other rending of reality, our world warps - twisting into unfamiliarity for one long liminal heartbeat before clarifying into a new version of itself. These are the most obvious experiential bardos, and their impact on us as people, and the characters in the fiction we create, is monumental.
We can only grow by traversing bardos. If, for any reason, a transitional bardo is bypassed, madness may follow. We can see this mirrored societally with the collapse and subsequent chaos of shifting political systems where steps are missed. Or in the stories of people who, for whatever reason, refuse to walk the path of grief and instead plunge prematurely into a healed stage they aren’t ready for, and eventually end up stuck, unable to move beyond their leapfrogged life stage.
Bardos in books
I’ve read many wonderful books in my life. And the very best of them forge, line by line, the emotional closeness that demands I dive into the characters’ personal bardos and stand, shoulder to shoulder as they face their fates. These books transplant their readers from our comfortable reading nooks, snuggly lamp-lit bedrooms or busy commuter trains into somewhere unfamiliar and wild, where we are so thoroughly borne along by the authors’ words that we can feel the soft brush of snow against our faces, even as we lie reading on the gently toasted grass of a sunny Mancunian afternoon. We mourn alongside the characters and feel pierced by their pain.
That’s the potency of a proper bardo. Some find Lincoln in the Bardo to be one of these kinds of transportative books. Many people with big flashy authorial names extol the compassionate virtues of Saunders’s writing, and detail the rush of emotional connection the novel roused in them. Which made it difficult for me to admit how much of a disappointing slog I found it. The subject matter was fascinating, and reading it has opened many intriguing spiritual doors for me, but Saunders’s juvenile form-twisting immediately dampened the flickering flame of interest the book’s impressive blurbs kindled in me. I failed to forge a proper connection with any of the enormous character cast, possibly due to my low tolerance for boundary-breaking for the sake of it. Some readers clearly found this to be refreshingly avant garde. I thought it was trite.
I read Winter’s Bone, the seventh novel from Daniel Woodrell, and his fourth that explores the wilderness of the Ozarks, in the same week as I read Lincoln in the Bardo, and I enjoyed it much more. I’d recommend reading the book before watching the film, as the bleak and beautiful lyrical writing is downright delightful.
Both novels share strong foundations (powerful bardos of future-focussed uncertainty; the breaking of a parent/child bond; and a primary quest that is, at once, selfish and selfless), but they share very few touchpoints across their narrative structures. One is firmly planted in an easily-pictured pivotal moment in American history, the other is modern but somehow timeless, ancient, planted in the present but rooted in something more primal than the modern reader may be used to. They are, however, tethered together by a powerful grief. Not really for the deceased - in both books we’re grieving for those that got left behind.
The Bardo Thödol, or a manual to dying properly
As is (somewhat superficially, in my opinion) demonstrated in Lincoln in the Bardo, Tibetan Buddhists believe that we’re actively living alongside spirits. Gods, demons and everything in the grey area in between them, live on earth beside humans, and the activities they engage in range from benevolent to benign to downright evil. For those who believe, the spiritual ecology of the world is incredibly complex; an unsteady foundation that is constantly changing, just as we are, and it relies upon dedicated worshippers to sort out the ethereal balance. The spirits exist behind a one-way glass - able to see the world but unable to be seen, knowing but unknowable, living through a finite life just as humans are. Although we can’t see them, human prayers and dedication can have an effect on the actions of spirits - we can even help right the karmic wrongs of these demons to try and secure a step-up reincarnation for them when they snuff it.
Because of the inherent closeness of the spiritual realm to a believing Buddhist, death is a very different affair for them than it is for people of most other creeds. When a Buddhist feels their death drawing near, they seek preparation instead of escape. They read from the Bardo Thödol to intellectually move closer to the spirit realm, and therefore get the best chance of a good quality reincarnation. After that Buddhist has died, a lama (a Buddhist religious teacher) reads aloud to them from the Bardo Thödol, as they believe that the soul can still hear words spoken to the body it’s just exited, and those words will help them choose the right path through the bardo.
The Bardo Thödol is effectively a guide to dying, and it warms the soul up for transition through the afterlife. Here’s an excerpt of the kind of advice you could expect to hear echoing through your corporeal form and into your spirit, as a lama recites by your deathbed:
“Be not fond of that dull bluish-yellow light from the human [world]. That is the path of thine accumulated propensities of violent egotism come to receive thee. If thou art attracted by it, thou wilt be born in the human world and have to suffer birth, age, sickness, and death; and thou wilt have no chance of getting out of the quagmire of worldly existence. That is an interruption to obstruct thy path of liberation. Therefore, look not upon it, and abandon egotism, abandon propensities; be not attracted towards it; be not weak.”
If you haven’t read the manual closely enough, and you aren’t properly prepared for death, (as demonstrated by the reluctantly dead characters in Saunders’s novel) the soul’s slapdash journey through the bardos will culminate in a sub-par dying experience and a bargain incarnation. If you’ve followed instructions properly and prepared your soul for a departure from its fleshy prison, you may just, if you’re a very lucky duck, achieve Nirvana. Nirvana is a state of peace, a cessation of the cyclic existence of life that your soul has been trapped in since the beginning of time, and where you can transition into your new existence as a spiritually-awakened Buddha.
If you’re still unenlightened when you reach the end of the final bardo, which, let’s face it, seems the more likely option, you’ll go right back into the human world (or the demon world if you’ve been dead naughty) and start a new incarnation, plunging back into the agony of human existence, forced to live through another life and all the grief that accompanies it. You can then, if you fancy it, try again to study hard enough to go through the Nirvana door next time you die. Rinse and repeat ad infineum.
But we really shouldn’t whinge about grief. It’s part of being human, and we’d be much poorer if we didn’t experience it. We’re all creatures of contrast - unhappy only when the concept of happiness is tangible and out of reach, poor only in the shadow of wealth, demonstrably alive only because death exists. We are only primed to be consumed by grief if we have, at some point, been consumed by the love that mirrors it.
Of course, it’s painless to philosophise. To callously assure other people that they should be delighted to suffer, as it’ll make their contentment all the more enjoyable when it finally arrives. Often, it’s harder to justify it to ourselves. It doesn’t take a massive imaginative stretch to see how a soul could end up in a situation like one of the stuck Lincoln in the Bardo characters - too afraid of a long-dreaded consequence to take anything resembling an action, frozen in a moment and unwilling to accept pain, or death, as a part of life.
To understand and truly accept death, in the Tibetan Buddhist sense, means a worshipper is able to enter the bardo at will. They abandon their societally imposed idea of a contrived and stable self, and allow themselves to be reborn into unreality on a wave of primordial creativity and openness. Which sounds pretty neat.
We all instinctively resist the facts of pain and death. Most of us scurry away from it as best we can - straining to keep life clutched inside our closed fists, pushing the fragility of our bodies to the back of our minds and convincing ourselves that wellness may lie just around the next twisting Styxian bend if only we keep our minds occupied and busy. Consequently, as the ever-wise Alan Watts put it, writing with wisdom beyond his 24 years during the tense, grief-sodden and grief-expectant hinterland between the First and Second World Wars, “...we keep the windows closed and shuttered until we die from suffocation, overwhelmed by stagnant air”, and exist suspended in a bardo built on avoidance. Avoidance of other people, avoidance of responsibility, avoidance of reality; of history, hurt and horror. But avoiding the discomfort doesn’t make it go away, it only makes it harder to deal with when you finally let it in. Which is, I think, part of the reason we enjoy reading about people working through these bardos in fiction.
Feel those feelin’s
Bardos make books compelling. We seek out this pain in the literature we consume for the same reason we revel in on-screen drama. The same reason we binge-watch true crime documentaries, sit in stuffed stalls and immerse ourselves in plays full of heartbreak and loss, and buckle our bodies into the flimsy harnesses of rollercoasters. It highlights our own comparative safety, our security, our aliveness, in a way that day to day life cannot. And the lessons we learn help us to write, often subconsciously, our own Thödol to help us navigate fear, hurt and danger when we experience it ourselves.
Good bardo writers understand this and work hard to exploit it. We’re comforted by their displays of love and loss and see ourselves reflected in the feelings of the bereaved. Indeed, much like the spirited exodus from the bardo and into the unknown that plays out across the final pages of Lincoln in the Bardo (sorry, spoiler alert), if we, whilst alive, come to understand that death and chaos are natural default stages of a rich and well-lived life, we will find ourselves liberated.
In order to fully appreciate the majesty of a life, we must first learn to accept that “impermanence is interwoven with every moment of our existence”. To struggle against this fact is to remain trapped, as with Saunders’s ghosts, ever striving for a contentment that will always remain stubbornly out of reach.
So just let it go, yo. Feel those feelings and then exhale them onto the breeze. Accept the joy and the ouchies of a life and embrace the fleeting nature of existence.
Or don’t. You do you.
*This is a Sanskrit word, which means “flowing around”. In Buddhism, “samsara” describes the endlessly repetitive cycle of reincarnation.
