Even at twelve years old, Chris Lemig knows he's gay. He just doesn't want to believe it. Spurred on by intolerance, ignorance and fear, he takes his first steps into the closet and so begin twenty-three years of drinking, drugs and attempted suicides. It's only after he wakes up one morning, beaten and still bleeding from a hate crime, that he finally finds the courage to come out and make a change. Renewed and refreshed, he finds sanity and healing in the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and without looking back, sets off on an inspired pilgrimage to India and Nepal. The Narrow Way is the harrowing and sometimes beautiful story of a man who lost his mind only to find it again in a strange new religion, in a strange new place, halfway across the world.

This book presents a clear and straightforward road map to how we might end our experience of suffering and discover happiness, drawn by the most celebrated spiritual master of Tibetan Buddhism: His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. In this insightful volume, not only does His Holiness describe what religion can contribute to mankind, but he also accentuates the significance of truly practising religion and understanding what it is that mankind really needs. Familiar for his ever-smiling face and his message of love, compassion and peace, he explains the three turnings of the wheel of dharma; the purpose and the means of generating the mind of enlightenment; and the twelve links of dependent arising, among other things. This new title offers an easily accessible and illuminating glimpse into the core of Tibetan Buddhism.

First published in 1932. As well as an extensive introduction, this edition contains notes to all four books, a bibliographical index, a general index and an index of Tibetan words. The introduction is particularly valuable in that it sets the importance of Desideri's mission in the general context of the Jesuit Missions to Tibet. In Desideri's account we receive the first accurate general description of Tibet: from the natural world to the sociological and anthropological aspects of the people and a complete exposition of Lamaism. His is the only complete reconstruction that we possess of the Tibetan religion, founded entirely on canonical texts. And all of this more than a century before Europeans had any knowledge of the Tibetan language.

A clear and straightforward introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, this book presents the basic teachings of Buddha in a way that people can readily comprehend and put into practice in their daily lives. Topics such as reincarnation, actions and their effects, emptiness, liberation and enlightenment are discussed. Designed primarily for those coming to the subject for the first time, the book also offers new insights for the more advanced student of Tibetan Buddhism. Originally published in 1989.

En "El camino de la iluminacion," Su Santidad el Dalai Lama extrae practicas de meditacion del Budismo tradicional para presentar paso a paso ejercicios contemplativos disenados para expandir la capacidad de enriquecimiento espiritual del lector, junto con marcas claras para reconocer su progreso.
Repleto de anecdotas personales y de recuentos intimos de las experiencias del Dalai Lama, "El camino de la iluminacion" ofrece al lector todo el conocimiento, el apoyo, la guia y la inspiracion necesarias para ser exitoso en su vida espiritual.
In "Becoming Enlightened," His Holiness the Dalai Lama draws from traditional Buddhist meditative practices to present step-by-step contemplative exercises designed to expand the reader's capacity for spiritual growth, along with clear milestones to mark progress.
Complete with personal anecdotes and intimate accounts of the Dalai Lama's experiences, "Becoming Enlightened "gives readers all the wisdom, support, guidance, and inspiration" "they need to become successful in their spiritual" "lives.

El Bardo Thodol, tambien llamado El Libro Tibetano de los Muertos, es la guia espiritual de iniciacion en el arte de la muerte. Traducido por primera vez al espanol, prologado y anotado por Juan Bautista Bergua, incluye ademas un relato personal. Aparentemente escrito por Padma Sambhava, el monje tibetano fundador del lamaismo, El Bardo Thodol son textos funerarios donde se detallan las practicas y ceremonias que deben realizarse para que el proceso de la muerte transcurra armonicamente. El Bardo es un estado intermedio entre la Muerte y el "Renacimiento," y tradicionalmente se cree que dura 49 dias. El objetivo consiste en preparar la conciencia del difunto para el siguiente "renacer" al mundo material. Segun la tradicion tibetana, el libro debe ser leido al menos una vez en la vida, ya que permite conocer de antemano lo que sucedera. Como lo describe el propio Juan B. Bergua: "Los ritos funerarios propiamente dichos comprenden la lectura del Bardo para que sepa lo que le va a ocurrir...para alcanzar el Paraiso Occidental de Amitaba." Ediciones Ibericas y Clasicos Bergua fue fundada en 1927 por Juan Bautista Bergua, critico literario de los clasicos y celebre autor de una gran coleccion de obras de la literatura clasica. Las traducciones de Juan B. Bergua, con sus prologos, resumenes y anotaciones son fundamentales para el entendimiento de las obras mas importantes de la antiguedad. LaCriticaLiteraria.com ofrece al lector a conocer un importante fondo cultural y tener mayor conocimiento de la literatura clasica universal con experto analisis y critica.

When circumstances are challenging, how do we react? This book offers methods to help us develop greater inner strength and openness to life by changing the habit of what Rob Preece calls self-preoccupation the tendency to act from a narrow perspective dominated by insecurity and isolation. When we learn to look outside this mentality and truly cherish others as well as ourselves, we create a happier, relaxed mind and more fulfilling relationships, as well as realizing our life's purpose in a meaningful way. A long-time Buddhist practitioner and psychotherapist, Preece shares traditional meditations and practices for awakening the mind and heart including tonglen, but he also offers a Jungian perspective on these and his own sense-cultivated during many years' experience of the ways in which Westerners may need to re-see these practices to benefit most from them. Preece's insightful fusion of East and West will help readers tap inner resources of compassion and integrity in order to flourish in times of uncertainty and ultimately generate the altruistic aspiration to realize the awakened mind for the benefit of all living beings. Preece offers meditation practices at the end of many chapters to help the reader digest and integrate the book's information.

This wide-ranging, keenly observed study provides a groundbreaking account of the highly contested process through which the Tibetan Buddhist region of Labrang became incorporated into the People's Republic of China. Drawing from thirteen years of archival research and fieldwork in and around the famous Geluk sect Tibetan Buddhist monastery, Charlene Makley situates the process of incorporation in the violent upheavals of Maoist socialist transformation that took place from 1950 through the 1970s and in the transition to globalization via Deng Xiaoping's capitalist market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Synthesizing social theory drawn from anthropology, political economy, gender studies, and linguistic anthropology, she finds that incorporation had quite different effects for Tibetan men and women, creating painful dilemmas across generations. Her study provides a sensitive and controversial examination of many different Tibetan voices and opens a new perspective on Sino-Tibetan relations in this important frontier region.

The word Chod in Tibetan means cutting, and the practice severs the self-cherishing mind so we can cherish others more than we cherish ourselves. Here Kyabje Zong Ripoche, an abbot for 70 years, explains why the practice of Chod is essential to overcoming fear, internalizing transcendent wisdom, attaining altruistic aspiration to enlightenment,

This commentary on Padampa Sangye's classic verses of advise to Tibetan villagers of Tingri--by renowned and beloved meditation master Dilgo Khyentse--offers guidance for people trying to lead a dharmic life in the workaday world. These hundred verses, studied for centuries by Tibetans and students of Buddhism, contain a complete survey of the Tibetan Buddhist path. Dilgo Khyentse's lively explication of each stanza brings to light subtleties and amplifies the richness of the words and their pertinence to our lives. These two venerable teachers advise us in relating to everyday difficulties such as loneliness, craving, family squabbles, competition in business, disagreements with neighbors, and betrayal by friends--as challenging to us as they have been to meditators for centuries.

Few teachers in the West possess both the spiritual training and the scholarship to lead us along the path to enlightenment. Robert Thurman is one such teacher. Now, in his first experiential course on the essentials of Tibetan Buddhism, adapted and expanded from a popular retreat he led, Thurman -- the first Westerner ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself -- shares the centuries-old wisdom of a highly valued method of insight used by the great Tibetan masters.

Tibetans think of their cherished tradition of Buddhism as a "wish-fulfilling jewel tree" for its power to generate bliss and enlightenment within all who absorb its teachings. Happiness, in fact, is the true goal of Tibetan spirituality, and the wish-fulfilling jewel tree will enable you to reach that goal. Using a revered, once-secret text of a seventeenth-century Tibetan master, with thorough explanations for contemporary Westerners, "The Jewel Tree of Tibet" immerses you fully in the mysteries of Tibetan spiritual wisdom. A retreat in book form as well as a spiritual and philosophical teaching, "The Jewel Tree of Tibet" offers a practical system of understanding yourself and the world, of developing your learning and thought processes, and of gaining deep, transforming insight.

One of the most explicit teachings of the steps on the path of enlightenment available, explained by a skilled Western teacher, "The Jewel Tree of Tibet" will enable you to honor the full subtlety and hidden depths of the Tibetan Buddhist path and realize at last its deeper rewards -- for yourself and others.

For inspiration, Buddhists turn to the life stories of how the great masters of their lineage struggled with their circumstances and achieved enlightenment. This important and very readable volume tells the extraordinary tales of the greatest teachers of the Kagyu the lineage with the widest following in the U.S.

The work explores the historical and intellectual context of Tsongkhapa's philosophy and addresses the critical issues related to questions of development and originality in Tsongkhapa's thought. It also deals extensively with one of Tsongkhapa's primary concerns, namely his attempts to demonstrate that the Middle Way philosophy's deconstructive analysis does not negate the reality of the everyday world. The study's central focus, however, is the question of the existence and the nature of self. This is explored both in terms of Tsongkhapa's deconstruction of the self and his reconstruction of person. Finally, the work explores the concept of reality that emerges in Tsongkhapa's philosophy, and deals with his understanding of the relationship between critical reasoning, no-self, and religious experience.

In this new book, Khenchen Thrangu provides an exhaustive commentary on the longest and most comprehensive of the three classic treatises on Mahamudra composed by the sixteenth-century scholar Wangchuk Dorje, the Ninth Karmapa. Khenchen Thrangu's teachings encompass the entire path of Mahamudra, including the preliminaries, the main practice, removing obstacles, and attaining the result of buddhahood--with detailed instruction in tranquility and insight meditation. This is the only available volume that presents Khenchen Thrangu's detailed commentary on this entire text.

Mahamudra and Dzogchen are perhaps the most profound teachings within all of Tibetan Buddhism. The experience of "Mahamudra, or "great symbol," is an overwhelming sense of extraordinary clarity, totally open and nondualistic. "Dzogchen, or "great perfection," is the ultimate teaching according to the Nyingma tradition and also represents the pinnacle of spiritual development. These are the two paths that provide practitioners with the most skillful means to experience the fully awakened state and directly taste the reality of our mind and environment. And yet these concepts are notoriously difficult to grasp and challenging to explain. In "Wild Awakening, Tibetan Buddhist master Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche presents these esoteric teachings in a style that reveals their surprising simplicity and great practical value, emphasizing that we can all experience our world more directly, with responsibility, freedom, and confidence. With a straightforward approach and informal style, he presents these essential teachings in a way that even those very new to Tibetan Buddhism can understand.

Here two Western-born lamas of the Nyingma tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism explore what it means to be utterly emotionally alive. Written in contemporary, nonacademic language, this book is a radical challenge to the misconception that inner Vajrayana is primarily an esoteric system of ritual and liturgy. The authors teach that emotions can be embraced as a rich and profound opportunity for realization. This fiercely compassionate battle cry rallies all who are audacious enough to appreciate emotions for their supreme potential as vehicles for awakening.

Robert Desjarlais's graceful ethnography explores the life histories of two Yolmo elders, focusing on how particular sensory orientations and modalities have contributed to the making and the telling of their lives. These two are a woman in her late eighties known as Kisang Omu and a Buddhist priest in his mid-eighties known as Ghang Lama, members of an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people whose ancestors have lived for three centuries or so along the upper ridges of the Yolmo Valley in north central Nepal.
It was clear through their many conversations that both individuals perceived themselves as nearing death, and both were quite willing to share their thoughts about death and dying. The difference between the two was remarkable, however, in that Ghang Lama's life had been dominated by motifs of vision, whereas Kisang Omu's accounts of her life largely involved a "theatre of voices." Desjarlais offers a fresh and readable inquiry into how people's ways of sensing the world contribute to how they live and how they recollect their lives.

In this revised edition of June Campbell's ground-breaking and ambitious work, many of the key issues concerning gender, identity and Tibetan Buddhism, are now broadened and further clarified in order to create a better understanding of the historical importance of gender symbolisation in the very construction of religious belief and philosophy. With its cross-cultural stance, the book concerns itself with the unusual task of creating links between the symbolic representations of gender in the philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism, and contemporary western thinking in relation to identity politics and intersubjectivity. A wide range of sources are drawn upon in order to build up arguments concerning the complexities of individual gender roles in Tibetan society, alongside the symbolic spaces allocated to the male and female within its cultural forms, including its sacred institutions, its representations and in the enactment of ritual. And in the light of Tibetan Buddhisms popularity in the west, timely questions are raised concerning gender and the potential uses and abuses of power and secrecy in Tibetan Tantra, which, with its unique emphasis on guru-devotion and sexual ritual, is now being disseminated worldwide. What is made clear in this new edition, however, is that Campbell's ultimate aim is to elucidate, through the use of a psychoanalytical perspective, something of the dynamic inter-relationship between the inner lives of individuals, their gender identities in society, and the belief systems which they create in order to provide cohesion, continuity and meaning, whether it be in the east or the west.

Westerners wanting to know about tantra--particularly the Buddhist tantra of Tibet--often find only speculation and fancy. Tibet has been shrouded in mystery, and "tantra" has been called upon to name every kind of esoteric fantasy. In "The Dawn of Tantra " the reader meets a Tibetan meditation master and a Western scholar, each of whose grasp of Buddhist tantra is real and unquestionable. This collaboration is both true to the intent of the ancient Tibetan teachings and relevant to contemporary Western life.

In Tibetan, the word for Buddhist means "insider"--someone who looks not to the world but to themselves for peace and happiness. The basic premise of Buddhism is that all suffering, however real it may seem, is the product of our own minds.Rebecca Novick's concise history of Buddhism and her explanations of the Four Noble Truths, Wheel of Life, Karma, the path of the Bodhisattva, and the four schools help us understand Tibetan Buddhism as a religion or philosophy, and more important, as a way of experiencing the world.

The Tibetan word "bardo" is usually associated with life after death. Here, Chogyam Trungpa discusses bardo in a very different sense: as the peak experience of any given moment. Our experience of the present moment is always colored by one of six psychological states: the god realm (bliss), the jealous god realm (jealousy and lust for entertainment), the human realm (passion and desire), the animal realm (ignorance), the hungry ghost realm (poverty and possessiveness), and the hell realm (aggression and hatred). In relating these realms to the six traditional Buddhist bardo experiences, Trungpa provides an insightful look at the "madness" of our familiar psychological patterns and shows how they present an opportunity to transmute daily experience into freedom.