Tibet S Great Yog Milarepa

This extraordinary work is the life story of Milarepa--the important Tibetan religious leader who lived over 800 years ago. While there are many differences among the several sects of Tibetan Buddhism, each holds the Great Yogi Milarepa in the highest reverence and esteem ...

This life story of Milarepa--the important Tibetan religious leader who lived over 800 years ago--is part of a remarkable four-volume series on Tibetan Buddhism produced by the late W.Y. Evans-Wentz, all four of which are being published by Oxford in new editions. While there are many parochial differences among the several sects of Tibetan Buddhism, each holds the Great Yogi Milarepa in the highest reverence and esteem. For exemplified in Milarepa's life, as we discover in these pages, are all of the teachings of the great yogis of India--including those of Gautama the Buddha, the greatest yogi known to history. Amid his detailed introductory and explanatory notes for this text, Evans-Wentz also reveals compelling similarities between the life and thought of Milarepa and those of Jesus, Gandhi, and "saints...in ancient China, or India, or Babylonia, or Egypt, or Rome, or in our own epoch." In composing this translation from the original Tibetan, the late L=ama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, who was Evans-Wentz's guru for many years, aimed to show Western readers "one of our great teachers as he actually lived...much of which is couched in the words of his own mouth, and the remainder in the words of his disciple Rechung, who knew him in the flesh." For this third edition, Donald S. Lopez, author of Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, has written a critical foreword that updates and contextualizes this crucial part of Evans-Wentz's scholarship within the yoga tradition.

This life story of Milarepa--the important Tibetan religious leader who lived over 800 years ago--is part of a remarkable four-volume series on Tibetan Buddhism produced by the late W.Y. Evans-Wentz, all four of which are being published by Oxford in new editions. While there are many parochial differences among the several sects of Tibetan Buddhism, each holds the Great Yogi Milarepa in the highest reverence and esteem. For exemplified in Milarepa's life, as we discover in these pages, are all of the teachings of the great yogis of India--including those of Gautama the Buddha, the greatest yogi known to history. Amid his detailed introductory and explanatory notes for this text, Evans-Wentz also reveals compelling similarities between the life and thought of Milarepa and those of Jesus, Gandhi, and "saints...in ancient China, or India, or Babylonia, or Egypt, or Rome, or in our own epoch." In composing this translation from the original Tibetan, the late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, who was Evans-Wentz's guru for many years, aimed to show Western readers "one of our great teachers as he actually lived...much of which is couched in the words of his own mouth, and the remainder in the words of his disciple Rechung, who knew him in the flesh." For this third edition, Donald S. Lopez, author of Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, has written a critical foreword that updates and contextualizes this crucial part of Evans-Wentz's scholarship within the yoga tradition.

Books, audiotapes, and classes about yoga are today as familiar as they are widespread, but we in the West have only recently become engaged in the meditative doctrines of the East--only in the last 70 or 80 years, in fact. In the early part of the 20th century, it was the pioneering efforts of keen scholars like W. Y. Evans-Wentz, the late editor of this volume, that triggered our ongoing occidental fascination with such phenomena as yoga, Zen, and meditation. Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines--a companion to the popular Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is also published by Oxford in an authoritative Evans-Wentz edition--is a collection of seven authentic Tibetan yoga texts that first appeared in English in 1935. In these pages, amid useful photographs and reproductions of yoga paintings and manuscripts, readers will encounter some of the principal meditations used by Hindu and Tibetan gurus and philosophers throughout the ages in the attainment of Right Knowledge and Enlightenment. Special commentaries precede each translated text, and a comprehensive introduction contrasts the tenets of Buddhism with European notions of religion, philosophy, and science. Evans-Wentz has also included a body of orally transmitted traditions and teachings that he received firsthand during his fifteen-plus years of study in the Orient, findings that will interest any student of anthropology, psychology, comparative religion, or applied Mah=ay=ana Yoga. These seven distinct but intimately related texts will grant any reader a full and complete view of the spiritual teachings that still inform the life and culture of the East. As with Evans-Wentz's other three Oxford titles on Tibetan religion, which are also appearing in new editions, this third edition of Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines features a new foreword by Donald S. Lopez, author of the recent Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West.

This volume provides a faithful account of the yogic practices which Milarepa, the best known of the Tibetan yogins, successfully put to the test of practice. It explores some of the Kargylitpa School's chief doctrines from Indian Buddhistic sources.

One of the most beloved stories of the Tibetan people and a great literary example of the contemplative life The Life of Milarepa, a biography and a dramatic tale from a culture now in crisis, can be read on several levels. A personal and moving introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, it is also a detailed guide to the search for liberation. It presents a quest for purification and buddhahood in a single lifetime, tracing the path of a great sinner who became a great saint. It is also a powerfully evocative narrative, full of magic, miracles, suspense, and humor, while reflecting the religious and social life of medieval Tibet. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.