Kalachakra Tantra Rite of Initiation 3th (third) edition Text Only

by Dalai Lama XIV

tantric practice

Genres: Buddhism

Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso (born Lhamo Döndrub), the 14th Dalai Lama, is a practicing member of the Gelug School of Tibetan Buddhism and is influential as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the world's most famous Buddhist monk, and the leader of the exiled Tibetan government in India.

Tenzin Gyatso was the fifth of sixteen children born to a farming family. He was proclaimed the tulku (an Enlightened lama who has consciously decided to take rebirth) of the 13th Dalai Lama at the age of two.

On 17 November 1950, at the age of 15, he was enthroned as Tibet's ruler. Thus he became Tibet's most important political ruler just one month after the People's Republic of China's invasion of Tibet on 7 October 1950. In 1954, he went to Beijing to attempt peace talks with Mao Zedong and other leaders of the PRC. These talks ultimately failed.

After a failed uprising and the collapse of the Tibetan resistance movement in 1959, the Dalai Lama left for India, where he was active in establishing the Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan Government in Exile) and in seeking to preserve Tibetan culture and education among the thousands of refugees who accompanied him.

Tenzin Gyatso is a charismatic figure and noted public speaker. This Dalai Lama is the first to travel to the West. There, he has helped to spread Buddhism and to promote the concepts of universal responsibility, secular ethics, and religious harmony.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, honorary Canadian citizenship in 2006, and the United States Congressional Gold Medal on 17 October 2007.

Reviews

[Carrie]

Finally finished the introduction, which has multiple chapters, so I was very confused about "who" I was reading for quite a while

[R · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is #3 of 6 books I chose from the library, to acquaint myself with my neighbors, that I found especially helpful.

((I was provided with access to a library as part of spending this winter in close proximity to a cultural center. I have been involved in some way with Buddhism for my entire adult life, but this tradition is the least familiar to me, and for good reason. Imagine that once upon a time there were seven great libraries, and all but one of them was burned down. So this tradition also protects the thoughts and scholarship of entire cultures, many vanished, while at the same time provides a long continuous record of striving to move into the future by acquiring knowledge and living a principled life. The result of this reading list has been to discover uncanny similarities in such colorful difference, which has brought me closer to the philosophy of non-duality that has meant so much to my education. I am sharing a list that I can recommend, this does not make an expert in the slightest, but I can promise these are rich and better distillations than many I have scanned.))

Completely worth it just for the Dalai Lama's introduction. It absolutely gave me a picture of him as a human being, especially as a superb scholar that could serve as an example to anyone.

This amounts to what was a grad-level course, it deals with emanation, the union of opposites, and all-in-one conceptualism. Challenging topics even for a disciplined philosophy student. This book is useful to present to anyone who doubts that Buddhism incorporates a mysticism not very different from western traditions, and questions the decadent notion that this is not possible by labeling it atheist, while at the same time explaining how this appearance comes from its own journey, one that is unique to the labor of non-dualism. Non-dualism is an historical part of western poly and mono-theology as well, but was almost entirely abandoned, or banned, long ago. For Christians, it especially had a strong presence in the libraries of Syria, but also had an 8 century legacy in the Academies, and modern students of Plato and transcendental subjects owe it to themselves to see what became of the very same scholarship as it was also studied to the east of the great divide. This material is some of the clearest evidence, for timing and topic, that it is closely related to many of the seeds that built western traditions... this work is the outcome of a shared ancestry. I am not unaware of what a fine time it is to live, that I can stumble through with my limitations a work such as this which was once and not long ago almost completely inaccessible.

[Sandi]

Another good book to prepare for initiation.

[Nadinedebussy]

"Le savoir est une épreuve-expérience"