In 1927, Oxford University Press published the first western-language translation of a collection of Tibetan funerary texts (the Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Bardo) under the title The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Since that time, the work has established a powerful hold on the western popular imagination, and is now considered a classic of spiritual literature. Over the years, The Tibetan Book of the Dead has inspired numerous commentaries, an illustrated edition, a play, a video series, and even an opera. Translators, scholars, and popular devotees of the book have claimed to explain its esoteric ideas and reveal its hidden meaning. Few, however, have uttered a word about its history. Bryan J. Cuevas seeks to fill this gap in our knowledge by offering the first comprehensive historical study of the Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Bardo, and by grounding it firmly in the context of Tibetan history and culture. He begins by discussing the many ways the texts have been understood (and misunderstood) by westerners, beginning with its first editor, the Oxford-educated anthropologist Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, and continuing through the present day. The remarkable fame of the book in the west, Cuevas argues, is strikingly disproportionate to how the original Tibetan texts were perceived in their own country. Cuevas tells the story of how The Tibetan Book of the Dead was compiled in Tibet, of the lives of those who preserved and transmitted it, and explores the history of the rituals through which the life of the dead is imagined in Tibetan society. This book provides not only a fascinating look at a popular and enduring spiritual work, but also a much-needed corrective to the proliferation of ahistorical scholarship surrounding The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

These poignant and relevant dialogues, held just a few months prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, forcefully put to rest the misconception that the realms of science and spirituality are fundamentally at odds with one another. Questions such as "Why are rational and intelligent people often at the root of destructive behavior? "and "How can the emotions that produce violence be controlled?" are the basis of these dialogues between the Dalai Lama and a select group of Buddhists, Western psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers who gathered together to elucidate, understand, and combat destructive emotions. Estos dialogos relevantes y profundos que tuvieron lugar pocos meses antes de los atentados del 11 de septiembre, desacreditan la idea falsa de que la ciencia y la espiritualidad no pueden existir juntas. Preguntas como "Por que personas aparentemente racionales e inteligentes se portan destructivamente?" y "Como pueden controlar las emociones que conducen a impulsos violentos?" son los temas de este dialogo entre el Dalai Lama y un selecto grupo de eruditos budistas, psicologos occidentales, neurocientificos y filosofos, reunidos para dilucidar, comprender y combatir las emociones destructivas.

This extraordinary book clearly outlines and discusses the methods for transforming both body and mind through the highest forms of tantric practice.""Highest Yoga Tantra is the pinnacle of tantric systems found in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Part One discusses the practices common to sutra and tantra. Part Two presents the generation stage of Highest Yoga Tantra. Part Three covers the entirety of the completion stage yogas (i.e., physical isolation, verbal isolation, mental isolation, illusory body, clear light, and union). Part Four compares the Kalachakra and Guhyasamaja stages of completion. Remarkable for its definitive clarity, this exposition of the stages of Highest Yoga Tantra is the first of its kind in the English language and a must for anyone interested in these highest tantras.

Himalayan Hermitess is a vivid account of the life and times of a Buddhist nun living on the borderlands of Tibetan culture. Orgyan Chokyi (1675-1729) spent her life in Dolpo, the highest inhabited region of the Nepal Himalayas. Illiterate and expressly forbidden by her master to write her own life story, Orgyan Chokyi received divine inspiration, defied tradition, and composed one of the most engaging autobiographies of the Tibetan literary tradition.
The Life of Orgyan Chokyi is the oldest known autobiography authored by a Tibetan woman, and thus holds a critical place in both Tibetan and Buddhist literature. In it she tells of the sufferings of her youth, the struggle to escape menial labor and become a hermitess, her dreams and visionary experiences, her relationships with other nuns, the painstaking work of contemplative practice, and her hard-won social autonomy and high-mountain solitude. In process it develops a compelling vision of the relation between gender, the body, and suffering from a female Buddhist practitioner's perspective.
Part One of Himalayan Hermitess presents a religious history of Orgyan Chokyi's Himalayan world, the Life of Orgyan Chokyi as a work of literature, its portrayal of sorrow and joy, its perspectives on suffering and gender, as well as the diverse religious practices found throughout the work. Part Two offers a full translation of the Life of Orgyan Chokyi. Based almost entirely upon Tibetan documents never before translated, Himalayan Hermitess is an accessible introduction to Buddhism in the premodern Himalayas.

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.

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.

The Dalai Lama is both the living conscience of the Tibetan people and an internationally respected human rights symbol. His high-profile appearances and books have fueled the surging popularity of Buddhism in the United States and throughout the West. This new, up-to-date biography provides insight into the curious and winning personality of the Dalai Lama as a boy and his wisdom as a man. The Buddhist spiritual worlds and the Dalai Lama's rarified role are engagingly and evenly presented.

The Dalai Lama's story is revealed from his early family life to his experiences in the world, his education as the 14th incarnation of the Lama, his exile in India, and his current struggles to help Tibet regain its independence from China. Especially helpful is the clear historical overview of the Tibetan crisis after the Chinese invasion. A timeline and glossary also supplement the text. Though the book is written especially for high school students doing reports, it will also be of immense interest to general readers.

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.

Thanks to the international celebrity of the present Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism is attracting more attention than at any time in its history. Although there have been numerous specialist studies of individual Tibetan texts, however, no scholarly work has as yet done justice to the rich variety of types of Tibetan discourse. This book fills this lacuna, bringing to bear the best methodological insights of the contemporary human sciences, and at the same time conveying to non-specialist readers an impression of the broad domain of Tibetan religious and philosophical thought. Ranging widely over the immense corpus of Tibetan literature, Kapstein brilliantly illuminates many of the distinctive Tibetan contributions and points out some of the insights.

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.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead was traditionally used as a mortuary text, read or recited in the presence of a dying or dead person. As a contribution to the science of death and of rebirth, it is unique among the sacred books of the world. The texts have been discovered and rediscovered in the West during the course of almost the entire 20th century, starting with Oxford's edition by W Y Evans-Wentz in 1927. The new edition includes a new foreword, afterword and suggested further reading list by Donald S Lopez Jr to update and contextualize this pioneering work. Lopez examines the historical background of OUP's publication, the translation against current scholarship, and its profound importance in engendering both scholarly and popular interest in Tibetan religion and culture.

Thanks to the international celebrity of the present Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism is attracting more attention than at any time in its history. Although there have been numerous specialist studies of individual Tibetan texts, however, no scholarly work has as yet done justice to the rich variety of types of Tibetan discourse. This book fills this lacuna, bringing to bear the best methodological insights of the contemporary human sciences, and at the same time conveying to non-specialist readers an impression of the broad domain of Tibetan religious and philosophical thought. Ranging widely over the immense corpus of Tibetan literature, Kapstein brilliantly illuminates many of the distinctive Tibetan contributions and points out some of the insights.

Despite the many differences between the numerous sects of Tibetan Buddhism, they all unite in holding the Great Yogi Milarepa, a Tibetan religious leader who lived over 800 years ago, in the highest reverence and esteem. Evans-Wentz points to similiarities between the life and teachings of Milarepa and the greatest of modern India's spiritual leaders, Mahatma Gandhi. In translating from the original Tibetan, the late Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup, Evans-Wentz's Tibetan guru for many years, wishes to show Western readers one of our great teachers as he actually lived in a biography of him, much of which is couched in the words of his own mouth, and the remainder in the words of his disciple Rechung, who knew him in the flesh. In this new reissue, Lopez contributes a critical foreword to update and contextualize the historical significance of this volume in Evans-Wentz's Tibetan series.

The Tibetan district of Tsari with its sacred snow-covered peak of Pure Crystal Mountain has long been a place of symbolic and ritual significance for Tibetan peoples. In this book, Toni Huber provides the first thorough study of a major Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage center and cult mountain, and explores the esoteric and popular traditions of ritual there. The main focus is on the period of the 1940s and '50s, just prior to the 1959 Lhasa uprising and subsequent Tibetan diaspora into South Asia. Huber's work thus documents Tibetan life patterns and cultural traditions which have largely disappeared with the advent of Chinese colonial modernity in Tibet. In addition to the work's documentary content, Huber offers discussion and analysis of the construction and meaning of Tibetan cultural categories of space, place, and person, and the practice of ritual and organization of traditional society in relation to them.

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.

Tibetan biographers began writing Jetsun Milarepa's (1052--1135) life story shortly after his death, initiating a literary tradition that turned the poet and saint into a model of virtuosic Buddhist practice throughout the Himalayan world. Andrew Quintman traces this history and its innovations in narrative and aesthetic representation across four centuries, culminating in a detailed analysis of the genre's most famous example, composed in 1488 by Tsangny?n Heruka, or the "Madman of Western Tibet." Quintman imagines these works as a kind of physical body supplanting the yogin's corporeal relics.

The entire Buddhist path can be boiled down to three essential topics - the wish for freedom, the altruistic intention to be of benefit to others, and the wisdom realizing emptiness. This book goes right to the heart of these topics.

Conflict in a Buddhist Society presents a new way of looking at Tibet under the rule of the Dalai Lamas (1642-1959). Although this era can be clearly delineated as a distinct period in the history of Tibet, many questions remain concerning the specific form of rule established. Author Peter Schwieger attempts to make transparent the complexity and dynamics of the Dalai Lamas' domination using the work of sociologist Niklas Luhman (1927-1998) as his theoretical starting point. Luhman's systems theory allows Schwieger to approach Tibetan history and culture as a remarkable effort to create-under times of great conflict and stress and using uncommon means-a stable social and political order. Such a methodology provides the distance needed to move beyond event-based narrative history and understand the structures that made social action possible in Tibet and the operations by which its society as a whole distinguished itself from its environment. Schwieger begins by asking the crucial question of how Tibet's society dealt with conflict. The chapters that follow answer this question from various perspectives: history and memory; domination; hierarchy; center and periphery; semantics; morality and ethics; ritual; law; and war. Each reveals a different avenue for cross-cutting discourses in the historical and social sciences. Together, they provide a comprehensive picture of how conflicts were portrayed in Tibet society and how the manner in which they were handled stabilized the country for a considerable time but were ultimately unsuccessful in the face of radical upheavals in its environment. Situated at the intersection of systems theory, conflict theory, and Tibetan/Inner Asian history and society, Conflict in a Buddhist Society will be of considerable interest to students and scholars in these areas. Its theoretical rather than narrative-descriptive approach to the history of the three centuries of Dalai Lama rule will be welcomed as wide-ranging and insightful.

"Masters of Meditation and Miracles "presents colorful biographies of thirty-five realized teachers whose lives were full of peace, enlightenment, and amazing miracles. They flourished in Tibet, the Roof of the World, in its golden days. These teachers belong to the Longchen Nyingthig lineage of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, a cycle of mystical teachings revealed by the great scholar and adept Jigme Lingpa. From the first master, Garap Dorje, to the present, each spiritual personality has his or her own distinctive role to play in this great lineage. In retelling their stories in his own words, the author has sought to bring out their inner feelings as well as their external activities: how they faced and healed physical pain, how they dealt with emotional turmoil, how they overcame spiritual or meditative illusions, and most important, what experiences they had when they awakened their own inner Buddha Mind and Buddha qualities. These biographies not only provide great sources of teachings on meditation, but will also kindle a spiritual flame in the hearts of readers.

The assertion that there is nothing in the constitution of any person that deserves to be considered the self (atman) - a permanent, unchanging kernel of personal identity in this life and those to come - has been a cornerstone of Buddhist teaching from its inception. Whereas other Indian religious systems celebrated the search for and potential discovery of one's "true self," Buddhism taught about the futility of searching for anything in our experience that is not transient and ephemeral. But a small yet influential set of Mahayana Buddhist texts, composed in India in the early centuries CE, taught that all sentient beings possess at all times, and across their successive lives, the enduring and superlatively precious nature of a Buddha. This was taught with reference to the enigmatic expression tathagatagarbha - the "womb" or "chamber" for a Buddha - which some texts refer to as a person's true self. The Buddhist Self is a methodical examination of Indian teaching about the tathagatagarbha (otherwise the presence of one's "Buddha-nature") and the extent to which different Buddhist texts and authors articulated this in terms of the self. C. V. Jones attends to each of the Indian Buddhist works responsible for explaining what is meant by the expression tathagatagarbha, and how far this should be understood or promoted using the language of selfhood. With close attention to these sources, Jones argues that the trajectory of Buddha-nature thought in India is also the history and legacy of a Buddhist account of what deserves to be called the self: an innovative attempt to equip Mahayana Buddhism with an affirmative response to wider Indian interest in the discovery of something precious or even divine in one's own constitution. This argument is supplemented by critical consideration of other themes that run through this distinctive body of Mahayanist literature: the relationship between Buddhist and non-Buddhist teachings about the self, the overlap between the tathagatagarbha and the nature of the mind, and the originally radical position that the only means of becoming liberated from rebirth is to achieve the same exalted status as the Buddha.

The power of the breath has been recognized for millennia as an integral part of health and well-being. In Awakening the Sacred Body, teacher Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche makes accessible the ancient art of Tibetan breath and movement practices. In clear, easy-to-understand language, he outlines the theory and processes of two powerful meditations - the Nine Breathings of Purification and the Tsa Lung movements - that can help you change your relationship to yourself, to others and to the world. The simple methods presented in Awakening the Sacred Body and in the accompanying online video focus on clearing and opening your energetic centres to allow the natural human qualities of love, compassion, joy and equanimity to arise. When sadness releases, joy is able to arise. When anger releases, love becomes available. When prejudice releases, equanimity prevails. And when lack of kindness ceases, compassion is present. These practices, which focus the mind and breath together while performing specific body movements, will help you discover your inner wisdom and express your greatest potential.

Dzogchen (Great Perfection) goes to the heart of our experience by investigating the relationship between mind and world and uncovering the great secret of mind's luminous nature. Weaving in personal stories and everyday examples, Pema Rigtsal leads the reader to see that all phenomena are the spontaneous display of mind, a magical illusion, and yet there is something shining in the midst of experience that is naturally pure and spacious.