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.

Luminous Essence is a complete introduction to the world of tantric thought and practice. Composed by the renowned Tibetan master Jamgon Mipham (1846-1912), the text provides an overview of the theory and experiential assimilation of a seminal tantric scripture, the Tantra of the Secret Essence (Guhyagarbha Tantra). Embodying the essence of tantric practice, this text has been a central scripture in Tibetan Buddhism for well over a thousand years. Mipham's explanation of this text, here translated for the first time, is one of the most celebrated commentaries on the Tantra of the Secret Essence, which today occupies an important place in the tantric curriculum of Tibetan monastic colleges. Luminous Essence is a specialized guide meant for initiated tantric practitioners. To fully appreciate and assimilate its message, it should be studied under the guidance of a qualified teacher by those who have received the appropriate empowerments, reading transmissions, and oral instructions.

Buddhism is in many ways a visual tradition, with its well-known practices of visualization, its visual arts, its epistemological writings that discuss the act of seeing, and its literature filled with images and metaphors of light. Some Buddhist traditions are also visionary, advocating practices by which meditators seek visions that arise before their eyes. Naked Seeing investigates such practices in the context of two major esoteric traditions, the Wheel of Time (Kalacakra) and the Great Perfection (Dzogchen). Both of these experimented with sensory deprivation, and developed yogas involving long periods of dwelling in dark rooms or gazing at the open sky. These produced unusual experiences of seeing, which were used to pursue some of the classic Buddhist questions about appearances, emptiness, and the nature of reality. Along the way, these practices gave rise to provocative ideas and suggested that, rather than being apprehended through internal insight, religious truths might also be seen in the exterior world-realized through the gateway of the eyes. Christopher Hatchell presents the intellectual and literary histories of these practices, and also explores the meditative techniques and physiology that underlie their distinctive visionary experiences.
The book also offers for the first time complete English translations of three major Tibetan texts on visionary practice: a Kalacakra treatise by Yumo Mikyo Dorje, The Lamp Illuminating Emptiness, a Nyingma Great Perfection work called The Tantra of the Blazing Lamps, and a Bon Great Perfection work called Advice on the Six Lamps, along with a detailed commentary on this by Drugom Gyalwa Yungdrung."

Happiness lies within you

His Holiness the Dalai Lama has captured the attention and admiration of the world through his wisdom. This jewel of a book offers some of his most helpful insights on daily living, compassion and inner peace.

A timeless collection of advice and teachings from the world’s most revered spiritual leader, it will guide you through good and troubled times.

Whoever you are, whatever your beliefs, the Dalai Lama’s words have the power to calm and inspire.

The Way of the Bodhisattva, composed by the monk and scholar Santideva in eighth-century India, is a Buddhist treatise in verse that beautifully and succinctly lays out the theory and practice of the Mahayana path of a bodhisattva. Over one thousand years after Santideva's composition, Kunzang Soenam (1823-1905) produced the most extensive commentary on the Way of the Bodhisattva ever written. This book is the first English translation of Kunzang Soenam's overview of Santideva's notoriously difficult ninth chapter on wisdom. The ninth chapter of the Way of the Bodhisattva is philosophically very rich but forbiddingly technical, and can only be read well with a good commentary. Kunzang Soenam's commentary offers a unique and complete introduction to the view of Prasangika-Madhyamaka, the summit of Buddhist philosophy in Tibet, as articulated by Tsongkhapa. It brings Santideva's text, and Tsongkhapa's interpretation of Prasangika-Madhyamaka, into conversation with a vast Buddhist literature from India and Tibet. By articulating the integral relationship between emptiness and interdependence, this text formulates a sustained and powerful argument for emptiness as a metaphysical basis of bodhisattva ethics. This volume makes the ninth chapter accessible to English-speaking teachers and students of the Way of the Bodhisattva.

Through the eventful life of a Himalayan Buddhist teacher, Khunu Lama, this study reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern. In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this elusive wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama's death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The many surviving stories about him reveal significant dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of religious affect and memory that reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern. In Renunciation and Longing, Annabella Pitkin explores devotion, renunciation, and the teacher-student lineage relationship as resources for understanding Tibetan Buddhist approaches to modernity. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, affective connection, and mourning. Refuting long-standing caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist narrators have used themes of renunciation, devotion, and lineage as touchstones for negotiating loss and vitalizing continuity.

In 1995, the People's Republic of China resurrected a Qing-era law mandating that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn. The Chinese Communist Party hoped to limit the ability of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile to independently identify reincarnations. In so doing, they elevated a long-forgotten ceremony into a controversial symbol of Chinese sovereignty in Tibet. In Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann ventures into the polyglot world of the Qing empire in search of the origins of the golden urn tradition. He seeks to understand the relationship between the Qing state and its most powerful partner in Inner Asia-the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism. Why did the Qianlong emperor invent the golden urn lottery in 1792? What ability did the Qing state have to alter Tibetan religious and political traditions? What did this law mean to Qing rulers, their advisors, and Tibetan Buddhists? Working with both the Manchu-language archives of the empire's colonial bureaucracy and the chronicles of Tibetan elites, Oidtmann traces how a Chinese bureaucratic technology-a lottery for assigning administrative posts-was exported to the Tibetan and Mongolian regions of the Qing empire and transformed into a ritual for identifying and authenticating reincarnations. Forging the Golden Urn sheds new light on how the empire's frontier officers grappled with matters of sovereignty, faith, and law and reveals the role that Tibetan elites played in the production of new religious traditions in the context of Qing rule.

Following the fall of the Tibetan empire and the ensuing "period of fragmentation," the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw tremendous religious efflorescence in Tibet. Although the Tibetan scholars and adepts of this period continued to draw from the texts and practices of Indian Buddhism, they also began to craft distinctly Tibetan intellectual and spiritual traditions. Hundreds of important masters lived and worked during this time, some of whom founded institutions that still exist today. Equally important were the scholars who lived on the margins of institutionalized Buddhism, teachers and meditators whose works, despite their great creativity, have been largely forgotten.
Jose Cabezon offers a study of the life and most important extant work of one such figure, Rog Bande Sherab, also known as Rogben (1166-1244). Rogben studied under some of the greatest teachers of his day. An itinerant scholar and yogi, he devoted his life to collecting important textual cycles and meditation techniques. Rogben's most important work, The Lamp of the Teachings, cuts across the genres of history, doctrinal studies, and doxography. It is one of the earliest philosophically robust explanations of the "nine vehicle" system of the Ancient or Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. TheBuddha's Doctrine and the Nine Vehicles is the first scholarly study of Rog Bande Sherab, a pivotal figure in both the Pacification (Zhiche) and Ancient traditions of Tibet, and one of the most original thinkers in Tibetan intellectual history."

In Travels in the Netherworld, Bryan J. Cuevas examines a fascinating but little-known genre of Tibetan narrative literature about the delok, ordinary men and women who claim to have died, traveled through hell, and then returned from the afterlife. These narratives enjoy audiences ranging from the most sophisticated monastic scholars to pious townsfolk, villagers, and nomads. Their accounts emphasize the universal Buddhist principles of impermanence and worldly suffering, the fluctuations of karma, and the feasibility of obtaining a favorable rebirth through virtue and merit. Providing a clear, detailed analysis of four vivid return-from-death tales, including the stories of a Tibetan housewife, a lama, a young noble woman, and a Buddhist monk, Cuevas argues that these narratives express ideas about death and the afterlife that held wide currency among all classes of faithful Buddhists in Tibet. Relying on a diversity of traditional Tibetan sources, Buddhist canonical scriptures, scholastic textbooks, ritual and meditation manuals, and medical treatises, in addition to the delok works themselves, Cuevas surveys a broad range of popular Tibetan Buddhist ideas about death and dying. He explores beliefs about the vulnerability of the soul and its journey beyond death, karmic retribution and the terrors of hell, the nature of demons and demonic possession, ghosts, and reanimated corpses. Cuevas argues that these extraordinary accounts exhibit flexibility between social and religious categories that are conventionally polarized and concludes that, contrary to the accepted wisdom, such rigid divisions as elite and folk, monastic and lay religion are not sufficiently representative of traditional Tibetan Buddhism on the ground. This study offers innovative perspectives on popular religion in Tibet and fills a gap in an important field of Tibetan literature.

'Impressive in its clarity this biography [is] the most detailed and accurate to date. Written in an engaging prose, [it] ends with an insightful prediction of the legacy of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and a cleareyed assessment of the challenges that the fifteenth will face' The New York Times The Dalai Lama's message of peace and compassion resonates with people of all faiths and none. Yet, for all his worldwide fame, he remains personally elusive. Now, Alexander Norman, acclaimed Oxford-trained scholar of the history of Tibet, delivers the definitive biography-unique, multi-layered, and at times even shocking. The Dalai Lama illuminates an astonishing odyssey from isolated Tibetan village to worldwide standing as spiritual and political leader of one of the world's most profound and complex cultural traditions. Norman reveals that, while the Dalai Lama has never been comfortable with his political position, he has been a canny player-at one time CIA-backed-who has manoeuvred amidst pervasive violence, including placing himself at the centre of a dangerous Buddhist schism. Yet even more surprising than the political, Norman convinces, is the Dalai Lama's astonishing spiritual practice, rooted in magic, vision, and prophecy-details of which are illuminated in this book for the first time. A revelatory life story of one of today's most radical, charismatic, and beloved world leaders.

The Qing empire and the Dalai Lama-led Geluk School of Tibetan Buddhism came into contact in the eighteenth century. Their interconnections would shape regional politics and the geopolitical history of Inner Asia for centuries to come. In Common Ground, Lan Wu analyzes how Tibetan Buddhists and the Qing imperial rulers interacted and negotiated as both sought strategies to expand their influence in eighteenth-century Inner Asia. In so doing, she recasts the Qing empire, seeing it not as a monolithic project of imperial administration but as a series of encounters among different communities. Wu examines a series of interconnected sites in the Qing empire where the influence of Tibetan Buddhism played a key role, tracing the movement of objects, flows of peoples, and circulation of ideas in the space between China and Tibet. She identifies a transregional Tibetan Buddhist knowledge network, which provided institutional, pragmatic, and intellectual common ground for both polities. Wu draws out the voices of lesser-known Tibetan Buddhists, whose writings and experiences evince an alternative Buddhist space beyond the state. She highlights interactions between Mongols and Tibetans within the Qing empire, exploring the creation of a Buddhist Inner Asia. Wu argues that Tibetan Buddhism occupied a central-but little understood-role in the Qing vision of empire. Revealing the interdependency of two expanding powers, Common Ground sheds new light on the entangled histories of political, social, and cultural ties between Tibet and China.

This book examines the potential of conducting studies in comparative hagiology, through parallel literary and historical analyses of spiritual life writings pertaining to distinct religious contexts. In particular, it focuses on a comparative analysis of the early sources on the medieval Christian Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) and the Tibetan Buddhist Milarepa (c. 1052-1135), up to and including the so-called 'standard versions' of their life stories written by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221-1274) and Tsangnyoen Heruka (1452-1507) respectively. The book thus demonstrates how in the social and religious contexts of both 1200s Italy and 1400s Tibet, narratives of the lives, deeds and teachings of two individuals recognized as spiritual champions were seen as the most effective means to promote spiritual, doctrinal and political agendas. Therefore, as well being highly relevant to those studying hagiographical sources, this book will be of interest to scholars working across the fields of religion and the comparative study of religious phenomena, as well as history and literature in the pre-modern period.

Ritual is one of the most pervasive religious phenomena in the Tibetan cultural world. Despite its ubiquity and importance to Tibetan cultural life, however, only in recent years has Tibetan ritual been given the attention it deserves. This is the first scholarly collection to focus on this important subject. Unique in its historical, geographical and disciplinary breadth, this book brings together eleven essays by an international cast of scholars working on ritual texts, institutions and practices in the greater Tibetan cultural world - Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and Mongolia. While most of the chapters focus on Buddhism, two deal with ritual in Tibet's indigenous Bon religion. All of the essays are original to this volume. An extensive introduction by the editor provides a broad overview of Tibetan ritual and contextualizes the chapters within the field of Buddhist and Tibetan studies. The book should find use in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on Tibetan religion. It will also be of interest to students and scholars of ritual generally.

Chatral Rinpoche, the quintessential "hidden yogi," has been a legend in the Himalayan region for the past seventy years. Although he has never traveled to the West, his amazing story and teachings have gradually been infiltrating the Western Buddhist consciousness since Father Thomas Merton first met him in 1968 and famously remarked that he was "the greatest man I ever met." This is the first English-language book of this living legend; it includes his biography and autobiography, six of his essays, five prayers he composed, an exclusive interview, and sixteen pages of photos from throughout his life.

A favorite of Tibetans and recommended by the Dalai Lama and other senior Buddhist teachers, this practical guide to inner transformation introduces the fundamental spiritual practices common to all Tibetan Buddhist traditions.The Words of My Perfect Teacher is the classic commentary on the preliminary practices of the Longchen Nyingtig-one of the best-known cycles of teachings and a spiritual treasure of the Nyingmapa school-the oldest Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Patrul Rinpoche makes the technicalities of his subject accessible through a wealth of stories, quotations, and references to everyday life. His style of mixing broad colloquialisms, stringent irony, and poetry has all the life and atmosphere of an oral teaching. Great care has been taken by the translators to render the precise meaning of the text in English while still reflecting the vigor and insight of the original Tibetan. A preface by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, insightful introductory essays, explanatory notes, and classic illustrations enhance this quintessential introduction to Tibetan Buddhist practice. This new edition includes translations of a postface to the text written a century ago (for the first printed edition in Tibetan) by the first Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche, and a new preface by the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. The notes, glossary and bibliography have been expanded and updated, Sanskrit names and terminology have been given their proper transliterated form, and the illustrations have been improved in quality and supplemented with new material.

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.

Traditional medicine enjoys widespread appeal in today's Russia, an appeal that has often been framed either as a holdover from pre-Soviet times or as the symptom of capitalist growing pains and vanishing Soviet modes of life. Mixing Medicines seeks to reconsider these logics of emptiness and replenishment. Set in Buryatia, a semi-autonomous indigenous republic in Southeastern Siberia, the book offers an ethnography of the institutionalization of Tibetan medicine, a botanically-based therapeutic practice framed as at once foreign, international, and local to Russia's Buddhist regions. By highlighting the cosmopolitan nature of Tibetan medicine and the culturally specific origins of biomedicine, the book shows how people in Buryatia trouble entrenched center-periphery models, complicating narratives about isolation and political marginality. Chudakova argues that a therapeutic life mediated through the practices of traditional medicines is not a last-resort response to sociopolitical abandonment but depends on a densely collective mingling of human and non-human worlds that produces new senses of rootedness, while reshaping regional and national conversations about care, history, and belonging.

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 divination system called "Mo" has been relied upon for centuries to give insight into the future turns of events, undertakings, and relationships. It is a clear and simple method involving two rolls of a die to reveal one of the thirty-six possible outcomes described in the text. This Mo, which obtains its power from Manjushri, was developed by the great master Jamgon Mipham from sacred texts expounded by the Buddha.

In a remote Himalayan village in 1721, the Jesuit priest Ippolito Desideri awaited permission from Rome to continue his mission to convert the Tibetan people to Christianity. In the meantime, he forged ahead with an ambitious project: a treatise, written in classical Tibetan, that would refute key Buddhist doctrines. If he could convince the Buddhist monks that these doctrines were false, thought Desideri, he would dispel the darkness of idolatry from Tibet. Offering a fascinating glimpse into the historical encounter between Christianity and Buddhism, Dispelling the Darkness brings Desideri's Tibetan writings to readers of English for the first time. This authoritative study provides extended excerpts from Inquiry concerning the Doctrines of Previous Lives and Emptiness, Desideri's unfinished masterpiece, as well as a full translation of Essence of the Christian Religion, a companion work that broadens his refutation of Buddhism. Desideri possessed an unusually sophisticated understanding of Buddhism and a masterful command of the classical Tibetan language. He believed that only careful argumentation could demolish the philosophical foundations of Buddhism, especially the doctrines of rebirth and emptiness that prevented belief in the existence of God. Donald Lopez and Thupten Jinpa's detailed commentary reveals how Desideri deftly used Tibetan literary conventions and passages from Buddhist scriptures to make his case. When the Vatican refused Desideri's petition, he returned to Rome, his manuscripts in tow, where they languished unread in archives. Dispelling the Darkness brings these vital texts to light after centuries of neglect.

In The Healthy Mind, Dr. Henry M. Vyner presents the findings of twenty-seven years of research spent interviewing Tibetan lamas about their experiences of the mind. The interviews have generated a science of stream of consciousness that demonstrates that the healthy human mind is the egoless mind, given the paradox that the egoless mind has an ego. Vyner presents this science and also shows his readers how to cultivate a healthy mind. The Healthy Mind features extensive interview excerpts, theoretical maps of the egoless and egocentric mind, discussions of the history of science, and thought experiments that unpack the implications of his findings. This is a useful book for all those interested in the dialogue between Buddhism and psychology and in understanding the nature of the healthy mind.

This work proposes a theological investigation of the community of the Church as outlined by liberation theology and a possible conversation with "liberation" from suffering in Tibetan Buddhism. What unites both is the human process of sublimation for others, whereby liberation theologians as well as enlightened lamas give the best of themselves for the liberation of others. At this stage of discussions between inclusivists and exclusivists this work proposes that dialogue with world religions and therefore with Buddhism is not about finding possible dogmatic similarities but a common place, a common purpose through a common humanity.

This unique book features the wise, funny, and uplifting affirmations of Ani Trime, a Buddhist nun and beloved teacher whose instruction on mindfulness and gratitude have applications for people of all denominations. Each affirmation is accompanied by an illustrated interpretation, ranging from the playful to the contemplative, rendered by one of 41 well-known artists and providing an engaging entry point for readers. Born in West Virginia, Trime encountered Tibetan Buddhism in the 1970s through the teachings of Choegyam Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the first wave of Tibetan teachers in the U.S. As a teacher, Trime brought a sense of humor and a no-nonsense, real-world approach to everyday spiritual practice. She taught for 15 years at the Princeton Buddhist Meditation Group and alongside Pema Choedroen at the Omega Institute, where she touched thousands of lives and was cherished by students for her clarity and down-to-earth talk. As Trime neared the end of her life, she collected the 52 most important teachings she learned during her 30 years of practice. Brought together in this beautiful gift book, these affirmations help readers focus on positivity, peace, and self-reliance.