Advice and encouragement from a leading young spiritual teacher on how to live with compassion, ethical principles, and bravery in the face of the global challenges facing humanity.
In his first major book, the Karmapa, a charismatic 28-year-old emerging leader of Tibetan Buddhism, offers heartfelt advice on how to live with integrity in the modern world. These teachings arose from the questions of sixteen college seniors who spent a month meeting and talking with the Karmapa about their concerns about the world and their own futures.
"This is not a book about Buddhism. I don't want to talk about Buddhist theory or practice, but about our experience of life. The shared ground we all meet on is our shared concern about our lives and our world, rather than philosophical views. On that ground, we can meet as friends."--from the Introduction
Sixteen American college students spent a month in India with His Holiness the Seventeenth Karmapa. Together, they discussed topics ranging from food justice to gender identities to sustainable compassion. The Karmapa's teachings in this book are the product of those meetings.
For those who wish to take up its challenge, this book can serve as a guide to being a friend to this planet and to all of us who share it. The Karmapa describes how to see the world as a global community, in which people are linked by their shared concerns for humanity--and their wish to bring about real change. While acknowledging the magnitude of this undertaking, the Karmapa shows us how to go about it, using the inner resources we have already.

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.