A Guide to the Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva PDF Download

Author: Ngawang Tenzin Norbu
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834842866
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
A fresh translation and commentary to Tibet's most famous text on living like a bodhisattva Who are bodhisattvas and what do they practice? In the fourteenth century, the Tibetan Buddhist master Gyalse Tokmé Zangpo answered these questions in a now classic teaching called the Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva. This text, consisting of inspiring verses distilling the entire Mahayana path of compassion, continues to inspire modern-day Buddhist masters, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama. One of the most important commentaries on the Thirty-Seven Practices is by the twentieth-century master Dzatrul Ngawang Tenzin Norbu, known as the Buddha of Dza Rongphu, and is translated here along with associated meditation instructions for the first time. Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, who requested this translation by Christopher Stagg, provides an informative overview to the history of the text and commentary, introducing the reader to the world of one of Tibet's most widely studied texts.

Author: Karl Brunnhölzl
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1614295174
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
A key Dzogchen text—available together with its Tibetan commentaries, including from the fifteenth Karmapa—from a preeminent translator. The Aspiration Prayer of Samantabhadra, one of the most famous and often-recited Dzogchen texts, is at once an entreaty by the primordial buddha, Samantabhadra, that all sentient beings recognize the nature of their minds and thus become buddhas, and also a wake-up call by our own buddha nature itself. This monumental text outlines the profound view of Dzogchen in a nutshell and, at the same time, provides clear instructions on how to discover the wisdom of a buddha in the very midst of afflictions. In this volume, Karl Brunnhölzl offers translations of three versions of the Aspiration Prayer and accompanies them with translations of the commentaries by Jigmé Lingpa, the Fifteenth Karmapa, and Tsültrim Sangpo. He offers further contextualization with his rich annotation and appendices, which include additional translation from Jigmé Lingpa, Longchenpa, and Patrul Rinpoche. This comprehensive, comprehensible book illuminates this profound text and greatly furthers our understanding of Dzogchen—and of our own nature.

Author: Khedrup Norsang Gyatso
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0861717422
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 733

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Book Description
The premiere volume of Thupten Jinpa's thirty-two-volume Library of Tibetan Classics series, inaugurated to coincide with the Dalai Lama's conferral of the initiation rite of Kalacakra in Toronto in April 2004. The Kalacakra, or "wheel of time," tantra likely entered Indian Mahayana Buddhism around the tenth century. In expounding the root tantra, the Indian master Pundarika, one of the legendary Kalki kings of the land of Shambhala, wrote his influential Stainless Light.Ornament of Stainless Light is an authoritative Tibetan exposition of this important text, composed in the fifteenth century by Khedrup Norsang Gyatso, tutor to the Second Dalai Lama. One of the central projects of Kalacakra literature is a detailed correlation between the human body and the external universe. In working out this complex correspondence, the Kalacakra texts present an amazingly detailed theory of cosmology and astronomy, especially about the movements of the various celestial bodies. The Kalacakra tantra is also a highly complex system of Buddhist theory and practice that employs vital bodily energies, deep meditative mental states, and a penetrative focus on subtle points within the body's key energy conduits known as channels. Ornament of Stainless Light addresses all these topics, elaborating on the external universe, the inner world of the individual, the Kalacakra initiation rites, and the tantric stages of generation and completion, all in a highly readable English translation.

Author: Sogyal Rinpoche
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448116953
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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25th Anniversary Edition Over 3 Million Copies Sold 'I couldn't give this book a higher recommendation' BILLY CONNOLLY Written by the Buddhist meditation master and popular international speaker Sogyal Rinpoche, this highly acclaimed book clarifies the majestic vision of life and death that underlies the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It includes not only a lucid, inspiring and complete introduction to the practice of meditation, but also advice on how to care for the dying with love and compassion, and how to bring them help of a spiritual kind. But there is much more besides in this classic work, which was written to inspire all who read it to begin the journey to enlightenment and so become 'servants of peace'.

Author: Migmar Tseten
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834823098
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Treasures of the Sakya Lineage is a rich collection of teachings by both contemporary and ancient Sakya masters, showing a thousand years of lineage continuity. It provides an overview of the history, view, key lineage figures, and crucial teachings of the oldest continuously operating institution among the four lineages of Tibetan Buddhism. The Sakya School has long been known for its balanced approach to study and practice. The writings of Sakya scholars have been deeply influential in every school of Tibetan Buddhism and they continue to be now. A great resource for students and practitioners of all schools of Tibetan Buddhism, this volume contains teachings from great Sakya scholars and meditation masters, including: H. H. Sakya Trizin, Khenpo Appey, Sakya Pandita, Jetsun Dragpa Gyaltsen, Chogye Trinchen, Choegyal Phagpa, Migmar Tseten

Author: Levi McLaughlin
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824877896
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Soka Gakkai is Japan’s largest and most influential new religious organization: It claims more than 8 million Japanese households and close to 2 million members in 192 countries and territories. The religion is best known for its affiliated political party, Komeito (the Clean Government Party), which comprises part of the ruling coalition in Japan’s National Diet, and it exerts considerable influence in education, media, finance, and other key areas. Levi McLaughlin’s comprehensive account of Soka Gakkai draws on nearly two decades of archival research and non-member fieldwork to account for its institutional development beyond Buddhism and suggest how we should understand the activities and dispositions of its adherents. McLaughlin explores the group’s Nichiren Buddhist origins and turns to insights from religion, political science, anthropology, and cultural studies to characterize Soka Gakkai as mimetic of the nation-state. Ethnographic vignettes combine with historical evidence to demonstrate ways Soka Gakkai’s twin Buddhist and modern humanist legacies inform the organization’s mimesis of the modern Japan in which the group took shape. To make this argument, McLaughlin analyzes Gakkai sources heretofore untreated in English-language scholarship; provides a close reading of the serial novel The Human Revolution, which serves the Gakkai as both history and de facto scripture; identifies ways episodes from members’ lives form new chapters in its growing canon; and contributes to discussions of religion and gender as he chronicles the lives of members who simultaneously reaffirm generational transmission of Gakkai devotion as they pose challenges for the organization’s future. Readers looking for analyses of the nation-state and strategies for understanding New Religions and modern Buddhism will find Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution to be an especially thought-provoking study that offers widely applicable theoretical models.

Author: Courtney Bruntz
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824881184
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This innovative collaborative work—the first to focus on Buddhist tourism—explores how Buddhists, government organizations, business corporations, and individuals in Asia participate in re-imaginings of Buddhism through tourism. Contributors from religious studies, anthropology, and art history examine sacred places and religious monuments as they have been shaped and reshaped by socioeconomic and cultural trends in the region. Following an introduction that offers the first theoretical understanding of tourism from a Buddhist studies’ perspective, early chapters discuss the ways Buddhists and non-Buddhists imagine concepts and places related to the religion. Case studies highlight Buddhist peace in India, Buddhist heavens and hells in Singapore, Thai temple space, and the future Buddha Maitreya in China. Buddhist tourism’s connections to the state, market, and new technologies are explored in chapters on Indian package tours for pilgrims, thematic Buddhist tourism in Cambodia, the technological innovations of Buddhist temples in China, and the promotion of pilgrimage sites in Japan. Contributors then situate the financial concerns of Chinese temples, speed dating in temples in Japan, and the diffuse and pervasive nature of Buddhism for tourism promotion in Ladakh, India. How have tourist routes, groups, sites, and practices associated with Buddhism come to be possible and what are the effects? In what ways do travelers derive meaning from Buddhist places? How do Buddhist sites fortify national, cultural, or religious identities? The comparative research in South, Southeast, and East Asia presented here draws attention to the intertwining of the sacred and the financial and how local and national sites are situated within global networks. Together these findings generate a compelling comparative investigation of Buddhist spaces, identities, and practices.

Author: Gil Fronsdal
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 1611803241
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This easy-to-understand translation of one of the earliest surviving Buddhist texts offers a pathway to awakening that is simple, straightforward, and free of religious doctrine One of the earliest of all Buddhist texts, the Atthakavagga, or “Book of Eights,” is a remarkable document, not only because it comes from the earliest strain of the literature—before the Buddha, as the title suggests, came to be thought of as a “Buddhist”—but also because its approach to awakening is so simple and free of adherence to any kind of ideology. Instead the Atthakavagga points to a direct and simple approach for attaining peace without requiring the adherence to doctrine. The value of the teachings it contains is not in the profundity of their philosophy or in their authority as scripture; rather, the value is found in the results they bring to those who live by them. Instead of doctrines to be believed, the “Book of Eights” describes means or practices for realizing peace. Gil Fronsdal’s rigorous translation with commentary reveals the text to be of interest not only to Buddhists, but also to the ever-growing demographic of spiritual-but-not-religious, who seek a spiritual life outside the structures of religion.

Author: Vijay K. Jain
Publisher: Vikalp Printers
ISBN: 8190363980
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Āptamimāmsā by Ācārya Samantabhadra (circa 2nd century CE) starts with a discussion, in a philosophical-cum-logical manner, on the Jaina concept of omniscience and the attributes of the Omniscient. The Ācārya questions the validity of the attributes that are traditionally associated with a praiseworthy deity and goes on to establish the logic of accepting the Omniscient as the most trustworthy and praiseworthy Supreme Being. Employing the doctrine of conditional predications (syādvāda) – the logical expression of reality in light of the foundational principle of non-absolutism (anekāntavāda) – he faults certain conceptions based on absolutism. He finally elucidates correct perspectives on issues including fate, human effort, and bondage of karmas that lead to merit (punya) and demerit (pāpa).

Author: Gelong Lodro Sangpo
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
ISBN: 8120836081
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 941

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Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosa-Bhasya (ca. 380-390), besides its culminating achievement in streamlining the overall structure of the exposition of the preceding Abhidharma manuals, is unmatched by any of the preceding manuals in respect of its comprehensiveness-incorporating all important Vaibhasika doctrines since the time of the Abhidharma-mahavibhasa-of its excellent skill in definition and elucidation, and of its ability to clarify the difficult point involved in doctrinal disputations. Added to these qualities is its great value as a brilliant critique and insightful revaluation of all the fundamental Sar-vastivada doctrines developed up to its time. Since its appearance, it has been used as a standard textbook for the understanding of not only the Abhidharma doctrines but all the fundamental Buddhist doctrines in general. Translated into Chinese by Paramartha in 563 A.D. and by Hsuan-tsang in 651-654 A.D., Hsuan-tsang's disciple P'u-kuang tells us that in India the Abhidharmakosa-Bhasya was hailed as the 'Book of Intelligence'. In China, Japan and the Far-east, too, the Kosa has generally been highly treasured as a textbook of fundamental importance for Buddhist studies. Vasubandhu's brilliant critique of the doctrines of the Vaibhasika was answered by the equally brilliant Samghabhadra - a contemporary staunch defender and expounder of the doctrines of the Vaibhasikas - in his masterwork, the Abhidharmanyayanusara, now extant only in Hsuan-tsang's translation (653-654 A.D.). The Sanskrit text, considered for a long time to be irremediably lost, was discovered by Rahula Samkrtyayana in 1935 in the Tibetan monastery of Ngor and was published by P. Pradhan in 1967 (1st edition).