A Treatise On Wisdom

Excerpt from A Treatise on Wisdom La wraze sczehce et le wraz etude de Z'homme, c'est l'izomme. (sharron, De la Sagesse, Lib. 1, Ch. 1, 1601. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The best gift ever given to the Māra was given to him by the mortal enemy of the Buddha, King Ajatasattu of Maghada when he organized, after the Master's death and without his having suspected it, a council to leave to posterity the corrupted teachings of the Buddha, kept and administered by an idle clergy that flourished in the heat of populist rulers who used it in their economic disputes with the Brahmins. It had never happened that the Sāsana of a Buddha survived him, let alone corrupted. The success of Buddhism and its expansion will drown like a fireproof blanket any paccekhabuddhas that might have arisen. And without solitary Buddhas there is no Sammasambuddha. And this is because a Buddha must take refuge exclusively in himself, without any external influence and all external contamination in the form of ideas, concepts, doctrines, visions represent an obstacle that can become insurmountable. The Māra with that movement not only succeeded in not bringing forth Buddhas, but also in turning millions of people away from the path, henceforth, and made unscrupulous, lazy and idle individuals, parasites living on the devotion of the people the public face of liberation. A liberation that was impossible. Only in the most remote place, not only geographically but ideologically, the most refractory to Buddhism, in the most unsuspected time could Metteyya emerge. And they go and build there, in that place, those same corrupt people, an immense monastery. Nothing like this has ever happened. We will see how it goes on...

The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Tib. Lam rim chen mo) is one of the brightest jewels in the world’s treasury of sacred literature. The author, Tsong-kha-pa, completed it in 1402, and it soon became one of the most renowned works of spiritual practice and philosophy in the world of Tibetan Buddhism. Because it condenses all the exoteric sūtra scriptures into a meditation manual that is easy to understand, scholars and practitioners rely on its authoritative presentation as a gateway that leads to a full understanding of the Buddha’s teachings. Tsong-kha-pa took great pains to base his insights on classical Indian Buddhist literature, illustrating his points with classical citations as well as with sayings of the masters of the earlier Kadampa tradition. In this way the text demonstrates clearly how Tibetan Buddhism carefully preserved and developed the Indian Buddhist traditions. This first of three volumes covers all the practices that are prerequisite for developing the spirit of enlightenment (bodhicitta).