bardo

thumb|Tibetan art|Tibetan illustration of the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities of the post-mortem intermediate state (bardo). Some Tibetan Buddhists hold that when a being goes through the intermediate state, they will have visions of various deities. In some schools of Buddhism, bardo ( 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) philosophical tradition. Later Buddhism expanded the bardo concept to six or more states of consciousness covering every stage of life and death. In Tibetan Buddhism, bardo is the central theme of the Bardo Thodol (literally Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State), the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text intended to both guide the recently deceased person through the death bardo to gain a better rebirth and also to help their loved ones with the grieving process.