Steven > Recent Status Updates

Tsongkhapa really was a Buddhist polymath. He explains concepts on an academic level that is on par with the way that most Western universities publish research. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Buddhist scripture and he is able to synthesize information in a way that's incredibly complicated and logically sound.

This book is already wonderful and incredibly complicated. When the Dalai Lama speaks in public, and particularly when he doesn't have a translator, some of his profundity gets lost in translation. This book is material proof that the Dalai Lama is actually one of the foremost philosophical thinkers of our time. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire Buddhist canon.

FINALLY getting to the section of the sadhana where you meditate on death and rebirth. This tantra is so elaborate, it's going to take years to perfect it

Starting to get deeper into the sadhana now. I'm very thankful for the guidance of our beloved Lama Jhampa because I would not be able to understand it without him.

I'm going to keep this in my "currently reading" section BUT I'm already not interested in reading the rest of this book right now, sadly. I just find it hard to read fiction nowadays for some reason, and the plot (if you could call it that) is slow moving even though I'm a third of the way through the book

I'm really not a huge fan of poetry, and that poem was too long. So, hopefully the "commentary" will redeem it. The poem itself wasn't really anything groundbreaking either--Certainly not groundbreaking enough for a crazy guy to be obsessed with it. I'm pretty sure the editor killed Shade but we'll see if my prediction is correct or not

I'm still having issues with the way this author is narrating her Tibetan experience. She simply cannot resist comparing Vajrayana Buddhism to what she calls "Orthodox Buddhism," or Theravada. I have to give her the benefit of the doubt though, because of the time period in which this book was written. At the time, westerners had no other reference point besides their own orientalist opinions.

This book was written in the early 20th century, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the author is a bit orientalist in her attitudes towards the Tibetan people. However, Alexandra David-Neel was one of the first westerners to ever travel to Tibet, so I'm interested to see what the rest of the book is like. Despite the orientalism, her writing style is very readable.

This is not the fault of Marcelo Gleiser, because he's trying his best to give a very brief crash course of particle physics, but the second part of this book is a slog. I'm still not exactly sure what a scalar field is. BUT I only have a little further to read until he starts answering interesting philosophical stuff, and that's my real forte. I'm no good at science, unfortunately.