Bardo

Biography & Overview

In some schools of Buddhism, bardo (Classical Tibetan: བར་དོ་ Wylie: bar do) or antarābhava (Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese: 中有, romanized in Chinese as zhōng yǒu and in Japanese as chū'u) is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth. The concept arose soon after Gautama Buddha's death, with a number of earlier Buddhist schools accepting the existence of such an intermediate state, while other schools rejected it.
That is to say that during the so-called third Council in Pataliputra (Patna) the Asokan section of early Buddhism rejected this concept of àntāra-bháva. Some of those monks who, during this Council, were disrobed and sent away re-introduced it in Hybrid Sanskrit manuscripts. Franklin D. Edgerton mentions àntarābhávika in the Bodhisatttva-bhumi: "someone living in the intermediate state", and àntarābháva in the Làlita-vistára and Abhidhárma-kosa.
The concept of antarābhava was brought into Buddhism from the Vedic-Upanishadic (later Hindu) ph...