Now when the bardo of this life is dawning upon me,

I will abandon laziness for which life has no time,

enter, undistracted, the path of listening and hearing,

reflection and contemplation, and meditation,

making perceptions and mind the path,

and realize the “three kayas”: the enlightened mind.

Now that l have once attained a human body,

there is no time on the path for the mind to wander.

Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava

i. What does this mean to me?

I can be the ultimate procrastinator. Why do today what you can do next week, or maybe the week after, is what I say to myself. Just the idea that we can do something tomorrow assumes a lot. For one thing, it assumes we’ll wake up the next day. What makes us so sure of that?

The first line of this proverb says, “Now when the bardo of this life is dawning upon me. . .”. What’s a bardo? Our local friendly AI tells us that a bardo is a “gap, interval, intermediate state, transitional process, or in between…”. That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? A bardo is an interval that has a beginning and an end. Sleep, for instance, is a bardo. It’s an interval that begins when we fall asleep and ends when we wake up. Sleep is usually in between one day and the next. We take this bardo for granted. We assume we’ll awaken the next day.

The writer talks about “…the bardo of this life…”. What does he mean? What is life between? Well, we’re born, we die, and in between there’s the bardo of life. The writer says that the bardo of this life is “…dawning upon me…”. Many times we go about our lives in a routine that’s day-to-day. We usually don’t pause to look at life itself, especially when we’re younger. It doesn’t dawn on us that life is a bardo. We can’t even be certain of our next breath, let alone our next day

But samsara with its distractions, sucks us in. We enter a cycle that begins with struggle. When we struggle for something, there are only three possible outcomes. First, and most common, we don’t get it. Or, you get what you want, but it’s not what you thought it would be. And the least common outcome is you get what you want, it’s exactly what you thought it would be, but then you lose it because nothing lasts forever in samsara. When this happens, we are undeterred. We simply find something else to want, thinking this time I’ll get it. This time it will be what I want and it will last forever. We do this because we mistakenly believe that if we look hard enough, we’ll find something in samsara that will make us happy. Sadly, this isn’t so.

The writer goes on to say that now with the bardo of this life “…dawning upon me, I will abandon laziness for which life has no time…”. Once we remember or once it dawns on us that life is just a bardo between birth and death, our perspective can change. We can start seeing that life itself is only a limited time and we have no time to waste.

Does this mean we should all become monastics and pursue spiritual matters the rest of our lives? No. To me it means that this bardo of life that we take so much for granted is exactly that – a bardo. It’s going to end sooner than we think. So why waste time on the shiny distractions of samsara? How will that prepare us for the end of this bardo?

ii. How would I explain this to someone else?

Life is like a vacation from work. Why do I say that? When we go on a vacation, we make all sorts of plans so that everything goes just so. Some people even have very strict itineraries for vacation. Why is that? Because we recognize that, compared to the rest of our work-a-day life, vacation is very short.

When we believe we have an entire lifetime yawning out before us, it’s easy to be lazy. It’s easy to watch Netflix instead of meditating or doing mantra or even contemplating the Dharma. If we believe that our lives will just go on and on, we live our lives with a complete lack of urgency.

But the writer here uses strong language about life. He says he will “abandon” the habit of laziness. He’s not saying, ‘maybe I won’t be so lazy’. No, he says he’ll abandon laziness. To abandon is to “…give up completely…” according to our local dictionary. This is a pretty radical statement to make. The writer is not going to do his very best not to be lazy anymore. He is going to give up completely the habit of being lazy. Why is that? Because no one gets out of samsara alive.

This may sound doom and gloom, but really it’s an encouragement. We’re all here in this realm of struggle and desire because of our karma. Does that mean we’ve been lazy in previous lifetimes? Hard to say. But once we are blessed with the perspective that life is a bardo, a short time between birth and death, that can really light a fire under us. And we can live our lives accordingly.

iii. How do I bring this into my life?

Like I said, I can be the ultimate procrastinator. I used to wait until the absolute last second to get something done. But like the writer I’m blessed to know the Dharma and understand that life is a bardo. It’s a very short time. Some turtles live to be hundreds of years old. Compared to that, the lifespan of the human species is a flash in the pan.

I would like to say that having come to understand the truth of life as a bardo by studying the Dharma, I really lived life with a sense of urgency. But I didn’t. It’s only now as I have come into old age that I feel a sense of urgency. I have so few years left compared to what I’ve already lived. And now, I’m starting to wake up and truly realize that life is a bardo and there is no time for laziness.

When is it time to study the Dharma? It’s always time to study the Dharma. It’s unavoidable. The truth of it rings out all around us every day. As I work to bring this teaching into my life, I find that it’s a matter of priority. Without ever leaving my house and with an internet connection, I quite literally have thousands of distractions at my fingertips. I also have the Dharma which is nothing more than an undistorted view of reality.

When I first began studying the Dharma, my teacher the Venerable Tashi Nyima called it ‘mind training’. There was so much to learn. It seemed overwhelming. I thought I had to know all of it, chapter and verse. But gradually as I began  to study and meditate, I saw that no matter what ‘part’ of the Dharma you study, you’re studying all of it.

Because the Dharma is seeing reality as it truly is, there’s no way to break down the Dharma and say, ‘I’m only going study this part’. Since studying the Dharma really is mind training, it doesn’t matter where you start. It’s said that there are 84,000 gates to the Dharma. No matter which gate works for you, you will encounter the entire Dharma. This is because studying the Dharma, after a short while, shifts your perspective. The minds starts to see things differently. The Dharma is a point of view.

From this point of view we can understand that life really is a bardo, and there really is no moment to waste. This is the blessing for me of bringing these lines into my life. Once we see things as they truly are, samsara gradually loses its hold on us. We begin to see that the distractions of samsara are but a waste of our time. And our time here is very short.