Echoes of Enlightenment: The Life and Legacy of Soenam Peldren explores the issues of gender and sainthood raised by the discovery of a previously unpublished "liberation story" of the fourteenth-century Tibetan female Buddhist practitioner Soenam Peldren. Born in 1328, Peldren spent most of her adult life living and traveling as a nomad in eastern Tibet until her death in 1372. Existing scholarship suggests that she was illiterate, lacking religious education, and unconnected to established religious institutions. That, and the fact that as a woman her claims of religious authority would have been constantly questioned, makes Soenam Peldren's overall success in legitimizing her claims of divine identity all the more remarkable. Today the site of her death is recognized as sacred by local residents. In this study, Suzanne Bessenger draws on the newly discovered biography of the saint, approaching it through several different lenses. Bessenger seeks to understand how the written record of the saint's life is shaped both by the specific hagiographical agendas of its multiple authors and by the dictates of the genres of Tibetan religious literature, including biography and poetry. She considers Peldren's enduring historical legacy as a fascinating piece of Tibetan history that reveals much about the social and textual machinations of saint production. Finally, she identifies Peldren as one of the earliest recorded instances of a historical Tibetan woman successfully using the uniquely Tibetan hermeneutic of deity emanation to achieve religious authority.

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.

This study analyzes the growing appeal of Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese in contemporary China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It examines the Tibetan tradition's historical context and its social, cultural, and political adaptation to Chinese society, as well as the effects on Han practitioners. The author's analysis is based on fieldwork in all three locations and includes a broad range of interlocutors, such as Tibetan religious teachers, Han practitioners, and lay Tibetans.

Over the course of the last millennium in Tibet, some tantric yogins have taken on norm-overturning modes of behavior, including provoking others to violence, publicly consuming filth, having sex, and dressing in human remains. While these individuals were called "mad," their apparent mental unwellness was not seen as resulting from any unfortunate circumstance, but symptomatic of having achieved a higher state of existence through religious practice. This book is the first comprehensive study of these "holy madmen," who have captured the imaginations of Tibetans and Westerners alike. Focusing on the lives and works of three "holy madmen" from the fifteenth century - the Madman of Tsang (Tsangnyon Heruka, or Sangye Gyeltsen, 1452-1507, and author of The Life of Milarepa), the Madman of U (Unyon Kungpa Sangpo, 1458-1532), and the Madman of the Drukpa Kagyu (Drukpa Kunle, 1455-1529). DiValerio shows how literary representations of these madmen came to play a role in the formation of sectarian identities and the historical mythologies of various sects. DiValerio also conveys a well-rounded understanding of the human beings behind these colorful personas by looking at the trajectories of their lives, their religious practices and their literary works, all in their due historical context. In the process he ranges from lesser-known tantric practices to central Tibetan politics to the nature of sainthood, and the "holy madmen" emerge as self-aware and purposeful individuals who were anything but crazy.

Advances in Contemplative Psychotherapy offers mental health professionals of all disciplines and orientations the most comprehensive and rigorous introduction to the art of integrating contemplative psychology, ethics, and practices, including mindfulness, compassion, and embodiment techniques. It brings together clinicians, scholars, and thought leaders of unprecedented caliber, featuring some of the most eminent pioneers in the rapidly growing field of contemplative psychotherapy. The new edition offers an expanded array of effective contemplative interventions, contemplative psychotherapies, and contemplative approaches to clinical practice. New chapters discuss how contemplative work can effect positive psychosocial change at personal, interpersonal, and collective levels to address racial, gender, and other forms of systemic oppression. The new edition also explores the cross-cultural nuances in the integration of Buddhist psychology and healing practices by Western researchers and clinicians and includes the voices of leading Tibetan doctors. Advances in Contemplative Psychotherapy offers a profound and synoptic overview of one of psychotherapy's most intriguing and promising fields.

"The Essence of Jung's Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism" cuts to the heart of two very different yet remarkably similar traditions. The author touches on many of their major ideas: the collective unconscious and karma, archetypes and deities, the analyst and the spiritual friend, and mandalas. Within Tibetan Buddhism she focuses on tantra and relates its emphasis on spiritual transformation, also a major concern of Jung. This expanded edition includes new material on the integration of the two traditions, and the importance of these paths of the heart in today's unsteady world.

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.

Disruptive practices to revolutionize your relationship with meditation and fully engage with the full breadth of your experience. Why do we meditate? The main reason most modern people start meditating is because it helps us feel better--reducing anxiety, improving sleep, decluttering the mind, and so forth. "But where does your meditation go when things go bad?" asks Andrew Holecek. "Where is your spirituality when 'rock meets bone, ' as they say in Tibet--when the crap hits the fan?" Reverse Meditation is for anyone who wants to bring the challenges of life onto the path of awakening. When things get hard, it's time to turn your practice on its head--and throw out any assumption that meditation exists to insulate you from the confusion, difficulties, and uncertainty of life. "By putting your meditation into reverse," Holecek teaches, "you'll actually find yourself going forward. Step into your pain and you can step up your evolution." With his signature blend of depth and accessibility, Holecek invites you to explore: - Three core forms of meditation--mindfulness, open awareness, and the boundary-smashing reverse meditations - How to know when you're ready to engage with reverse meditation - On-the-spot practices for snapping into a meditative mindset in difficult situations - Contraction and expansion--how to dismantle habits of avoidance to become more open, resilient, and fully alive - How reverse meditation opens you to a direct experience of the fundamental perfection of reality--just as it is "These unique meditations are designed to reverse our relationship to unwanted experiences, which means going directly into them instead of avoiding them," says Andrew Holecek. "It's not an easy journey--yet this path leads to the discovery of unconditional happiness, basic goodness, and true freedom in the most turbulent situations."

This is a major anthropological study of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist monasticism and tantric ritual in the Ladakh region of North-West India and of the role of tantric ritual in the formation and maintenance of traditional forms of state structure and political consciousness in Tibet.
Containing detailed descriptions and analyses of monastic ritual, the work builds up a picture of Tibetan tantric traditions as they interact with more localised understandings of bodily identity and territorial cosmology, to produce a substantial re-interpretation of the place of monks as ritual performers and peripheral householders in Ladakh. The work also examines the central and indispensable role of incarnate lamas, such as the Dalai Lama, in the religious life of Tibetan Buddhists.

A Textbook in Classical Tibetan is the first comprehensive course book in the Classical Tibetan language written in English. The textbook describes the grammar of pre-16th-century Classical Tibetan works for beginners and students of intermediate level. It is intended to cover the most essential topics that can be mastered within two semesters of an academic class. Classical Tibetan is a written Middle Tibetan language that has been in use in Tibet from the 9th century. Until the early 20th century it served all purposes, from administrative, to medical, to religious. Nowadays Classical Tibetan remains an important part of religious identity and services for communities also outside of cultural Tibet, foremost in India, Nepal, and Bhutan, but also elsewhere, most importantly in Europe, North America and Australia. The main body of the textbook consists of an introduction to the Tibetan script, eighteen lessons, and a reading section. Each lesson elucidates several grammatical topics which are followed by an exercise and a word list. The chapter readings contain four supplementary readings. In addition to the main parts of the textbook, a brief introduction to Tibetic languages provides linguistic context for the language taught in the textbook, whereas the chapter Translations of Exercises and Readings contains translations and explanatory notes to the exercises provided at the end of each lesson, as well as to the readings. A Textbook in Classical Tibetan is essential reading for both undergraduate and graduate students without any knowledge of Classical Tibetan, but also for those who would like to deepen their experience of the language by reading annotated excerpts from well-known pieces of Tibetan literature.

First published in 1970, The Way of Power is an exploration of the school of Mahayana Buddhism prevalent in Tibet and Mongolia, known as the Vajrayana. Divided into two parts, the book provides an introduction to the background and theory behind the Vajrayana before progressing to a study of Vajrayana in practice. In doing so, it provides an overview of the history, development, and contemporary status of the Vajrayana, and takes a look at the different schools and sects. The book's primary focus is the use of Tantric mystical techniques. The Way of Power will appeal to those with an interest in Buddhism, religious psychology, and religious history.

Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama enjoy global popularity and relevance, yet the longstanding practice of oracles within the tradition is still little known and understood. The Nechung Oracle, for example, is believed to become possessed by an important god named Pehar, who speaks through the human medium to confer with the Dalai Lama on matters of state. The Dalai Lama and the Nechung Oracle is the first monograph to explore the mythologies and rituals of this god, the Buddhist monastery that houses him, and his close friendship with incarnations of the Dalai Lama over the centuries. In the seventeenth century, during the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama, the protector deity Pehar and his oracle at Nechung Monastery were state-sanctioned by the nascent Tibetan government, becoming the head of an expansive pantheon of worldly deities assigned to protect the newly unified country. The governments of later Dalai Lamas expanded the deity's influence, as well as their own, by establishing Pehar at monasteries and temples around Lhasa and across Tibet. Pehar's cult at Nechung Monastery came to embody the Dalai Lama's administrative control in a mutual relationship of protection and prestige, the effects of which continue to reverberate within Tibet and among the Tibetan exile community today. The friendship between these two immortals has spanned nearly five hundred years across the Tibetan plateau and beyond.

This acclaimed spiritual masterpiece is widely regarded as one of the most complete and authoritative presentations of the Tibetan Buddhist teachings ever written. A manual for life and death and a magnificent source of sacred inspiration from the heart of the Tibetan tradition, The Tibetan Book Of Living and Dying provides a lucid and inspiring introduction to the practice of meditation, to the nature of mind, to karma and rebirth, to compassionate love and care for the dying, and to the trials and rewards of the spiritual path.

Dzogchen, a tradition of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, is considered by many to be an extremely powerful path to enlightenment. This ground-breaking book offers translations of four sacred texts of the Dzogchen tradition: "Secret Instruction in a Garland of Vision," "The Flight of the Garuda," "Emptying the Depths of Hell," and the "Wish-Granting Prayer of Kuntu Zangpo." With an informative introduction by the translator, "Flight of the Garuda" is an invaluable resource for both practice and scholarship.
"Flight of the Garuda" conveys the heart advice of one of the most beloved nonsectarian masters of Tibet. Ordained as a Gelug monk, the itinerant yogi Shabkar was renowned for his teachings on Dzogchen, the heart practice of the Nyingma lineage. He wandered the countryside of Tibet and Nepal, turning many minds toward the Dharma through his ability to communicate the essence of the teachings in a poetic and crystal-clear way. Buddhists of all stripes, including practitioners of Zen and Vipassana, will find ample sustenance within the pages of this book, and be thrilled by the lyrical insights conveyed in Shabkar's words.
Along with the song by Shabkar, translator Keith Dowman includes several other seminal Dzogchen texts. Dzogchen practice brings us into direct communion with the subtlemost nature of our experience, the unity of samsara in nirvana as experienced within our own consciousness. Within the Nyingma school, it is held higher than even the practices of tantra for bringing the meditator face to face with the nature of reality.

The imperialist ambitions of China - which invaded Tibet in the late 1940s - have sparked the spectacular spread of Tibetan Buddhism worldwide, and especially in western countries. This work is a study on the malleability of a particular Buddhist tradition; on its adaptability in new contexts. The book analyses the nature of the Tibetan Buddhism in the Diaspora. It examines how the re-signification of Tibetan Buddhist practices and organizational structures in the present refers back to the dismantlement of the Tibetan state headed by the Dalai Lama and the fragmentation of Tibetan Buddhist religious organizations in general. It includes extensive multi-sited fieldwork conducted in the United States, Brazil, Europe, and Asia and a detailed analysis of contemporary documents relating to the global spread of Tibetan Buddhism. The author demonstrates that there is a "de-institutionalized" and "de-territorialized" project of political power and religious organization, which, among several other consequences, engenders the gradual "autonomization" of lamas and lineages inside the religious field of Tibetan Buddhism. Thus, a spectre of these previous institutions continues to exist outside their original contexts, and they are continually activated in ever-new settings. Using a combination of two different academic traditions - namely, the Brazilian anthropological tradition and the American Buddhist studies tradition - it investigates the "process of cultural re-signification" of Tibetan Buddhism in the context of its Diaspora. Thus, it will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Asian Religion, Asian Studies and Buddhism.

Contextualising the seemingly esoteric and exotic aspects of Tibetan Buddhist culture within the everyday, embodied and sensual sphere of religious praxis, this book centres on the social and religious lives of deceased Tibetan Buddhist lamas. It explores how posterior forms - corpses, relics, reincarnations and hagiographical representations - extend a lama's trajectory of lives and manipulate biological imperatives of birth and death. The book looks closely at previously unexamined figures whose history is relevant to a better understanding of how Tibetan culture navigates its own understanding of reincarnation, the veneration of relics and different social roles of different types of practitioners. It analyses both the minutiae of everyday interrelations between lamas and their devotees, specifically noted in ritual performances and the enactment of lived tradition, and the sacred hagiographical conventions that underpin local knowledge. A phenomenology of Tibetan Buddhist life, the book provides an ethnography of the everyday embodiment of Tibetan Buddhism. This unusual approach offers a valuable and a genuine new perspective on Tibetan Buddhist culture and is of interest to researchers in the fields of social/cultural anthropology and religious, Buddhist and Tibetan studies.

The life of the Sixth Dalai Lama does not end with his supposed death at Kokonor in November 1706, on the way to Beijing, and an audience with the Manchu Emperor Kangxi. This book, the so-called Hidden Life, presents a very different Tsangyang Gyamtso, neither a louche poet nor a drinker, but a sober Buddhist practitioner, who chose to escape at Kokonor and to adopt the guise of a wandering monk, only appearing some years later, after many fantastical and mystical adventures, in what is today Inner Mongolia, where he oversaw monasteries and lived as a Buddhist teacher. The Hidden Life was written by a Mongolian monk in 1756, ten years following the death of the lama, his spiritual teacher, whom he identifies as Tsangyang Gyamtso, and in whose identity as the Sixth Dalai Lama he clearly has complete faith. However, as one might imagine, there is nowadays no agreement among the wider Tibetan, Mongolian and Tibetological scholarly community as to whether this man was a charlatan or deluded, or whether he was indeed the Sixth Dalai Lama. The text is divided into four parts. The first part gives an account of the background and birth of the Sixth Dalai Lama, while the opening section of the second part (which is in direct speech, dictated by the lama) continues on, through the political intrigue in Lhasa at the end of the seventeenth century, to the lama's escape at Kokonor. The remainder of the second part consists of a visionary narrative, in which the lama travels through Tibet and Nepal, and in which he encounters divine figures, yetis, zombies and a man with no head, all of which is presented as fact. The third and longest part is an account of the final thirty years of the lama's life, and his activity in Mongolia as an influential Buddhist teacher, including a lengthy and moving description of his death. The final part includes a list of his students and, most interestingly perhaps, a theological and philosophical justification for the coexistence of the Sixth and Seventh Dalai Lamas.

Padmasambhava, the Indian mystic and tantric Buddhist master, is second only to Buddha Shakyamuni as the most famous personage in the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism. In the ninth century, he made the journey across the Himalayan Mountains to establish Buddhism for the people in that country. He also concealed timeless instructions and practices to benefit future generations. The volume presents in-depth explanations of the Tibetan Buddhist perspective. The Light of Wisdom, Vol. II will be of special interest to students of Buddhism for its clear overview from a Vajrayana perspective of teachings particular to Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism. Included is an extensive commentary by Jamgon Kongtrul the Great, one of the most prominent Buddhist masters of nineteenth-century Tibet.

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.