Authors From Tibet

"Auspicious – what dwells in the heart of all sentient beings, The selfness of all, the highest lord of all lineages, The producer of sentient beings without exception, great bliss, In that way, may auspiciousness bring peace to you today! Auspicious – what in the triple world is pure form, Formless, good form, and form free of subtle particles, Indivisible with all living beings, Buddha Nature good in that way, May its auspiciousness bring peace to you today! Auspicious – what takes form resembling eight prognostic images, Form that is indestructible like space, free of beginning, end and middle, Referenced as shunyata, Buddha Nature good in that way, May its auspiciousness bring peace to you today!"

"Dolpopa Sherab Gyeltsen was born in 1292, in the Dolpo region of present-day Nepal. He took ordination as a novice monk in 1304 and spent the following years studying the tantras of the Nyingma tradition. In 1309 he traveled to Mustang to study the treatises on the vehicle of the perfections, epistemology, and abhidharma... In the year 1321, when he was twenty-nine years old, Dolpopa ascended to the monastic seat (gdan sa) of Sakya Monastery... The Karmapa significantly prophesied that Dolpopa would quickly become even more expert in the view and practice... Yonten Gyatso convinced Dolpopa to teach in the assembly at Jonang, and also taught him many more systems of esoteric knowledge, such as Lamdre, the Five Stages (rim lnga) of the Guhyasamāja and the Cakrasaṃvara, Zhije and Chod... [After he passed, his] ...body was placed in a wooden casket anointed with perfume and adorned with silk and precious ornaments, and put inside the crematorium...When the cremation began, the smoke rose only a few feet and then streaked to the stupa, circled it many times, and finally disappeared to the west. The men and women practitioners offered butter lamps on the roofs of their individual meditation huts, so that the entire valley sparkled... each of them made prayers with tears flowing down their faces."

"Alas, my share of good fortune may be inferior, but I think a discovery such as this is good fortune... My intelligence has not been refined in three-fold knowledge, but I think the raising of Mount Meru has caused the ocean to gush forth. I bow in homage to the masters, buddhas, and kalkis, by whose kindness the essential points, difficult for even exalted beings to realize, are precisely realized, and to their great stupa."

"I bow down to and go for refuge in the glorious sublime master and all the glorious accomplished ones. Please accept us with your great love at all times. I bow down to the dharmadhātu, the ground which is devoid of all relative conceptual labeling, which is the ultimate, the thoroughly established1. I bow down to the ground which is free from all kinds of thought, the unconditioned self-arisen wisdom."

"# To professors of Sakara, "freedom from the four extremes" means understanding that the object of cognition exists in a momentary mode, empty of thought-constructions and lacking objectification."

"# To know the emptiness of objects is to know emptiness free of appearance and free of coverings. That is the Middle Way from which the "subsequent" or conventional has been purged."

"# To professors of Mayopamadvaya, "freedom from the four extremes" is [to know that] the characteristics are false, and [in reality] clear light. The following system had evidence for its beliefs."

"# "Middle way" is defined [by professors of Nirakara] in terms of a self-awareness that is not nil; it appears as blue, etc. objects, but characteristics do not arise in it."

"Above all, you must constantly train your mind to be loving, compassionate, and filled with Bodhicitta. You must give up eating meat, for it is very wrong to eat the flesh of our parent sentient beings."

"There are many great masters and very great realized beings in India and there have been many great realized beings in Tibet also, but they are not saying, “I'm realized, therefore I can do anything; I can eat meat and drink alcohol.” It's nothing like that. It should not be like that. According to the Kagyupa school, we have to see what the great masters of the past, the past lamas of Kagyupas, did and said about eating meat. The Drikung Shakpa [sp?] , master of Drikungpa, said like this, “My students, whomever are eating or using meat and calling it tsokhor or tsok, then these people are completely deserting me and going against the dharma.” I can't explain each of these things, but he said that anybody that is using meat and saying it is something good, this is completely against the dharma and against me and they completely have nothing to do with dharma. He said it very, very strongly. Other great masters also said this."

"'Righteous hatred' is in the same category as 'righteous cancer' or 'righteous tuberculosis'. All of them are absurd concepts."

"“James was well aware of the importance of developing such sustained, voluntary attention, but he acknowledged that he did not know how to achieve this task[48].”"

"“Descartes, whose ideological influence on the Scientific Revolution is hard to overestimate, was deeply committed to the introspective examination of the mind. But like his Greek and Christian predecessors, he did not devise any means to refine the attention so that the mind could reliably be used to observe mental events… Moreover, in a theological move that effectively removed the human mind from the natural world, Descartes decreed that the soul is divinely infused into the body, where it exerts its influence on the body by way of the pineal gland… This philosophical stance probably accounts in large part for the fact that the Western scientific study of the mind did not even begin for more than two centuries after Descartes.”"

"“With the advent of the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, the gradual decline of Christian contemplative inquiry into the nature of consciousness rapidly accelerated. Given the Protestant emphasis on the Augustinian theme of the essential iniquity of the human soul, and man's utter inability to achieve salvation or know God except by faith, there was no longer any theological incentive for such inquiry. Salvation was emphatically presented as an undeserved gift from the Creator.”"

"“the widespread conclusion among Christian mystics that the highest states of contemplation are necessarily fleeting, commonly lasting no longer than about half an hour[45]. This insistence on the fleeting nature of mystical union appears to originate with Augustine, [46]and it is reflected almost a millennium later in the writings of Meister Eckhart, who emphasized that the state of contemplative rapture is invariably transient, with even its residual effects lasting no longer than three days[47].”"

"“The first step in developing a science of any kind of phenomena is to develop and refine instruments that allow one to observe and possibly experiment with the phenomena under investigation. The only instrument we have that enables us to observe mental phenomena directly is the mind itself. But since the time of Aristotle, the West has made little, if any, progress in developing means of refining the mind so that it can be used as a reliable instrument for observing mental events. And… there continues to be considerable resistance against developing any such empirical science even today.”"

"Alan Wallace explains the role of mind in any empirical investigation of consciousness: “The primary instrument that all scientists have used to make any type of observation is the human mind…” However, like any scientific laboratory, one has to first clean, fine-tune, and calibrate the mind: “The untrained mind, which is prone to alternating agitation and dullness, is an unreliable and inadequate instrument for observing anything. To transform it into a suitable instrument for scientific exploration, the stability and vividness of the attention must be developed to a high degree.” This is the scientific importance of yoga, meditation, kundalini, tantra and other systems of achieving higher states of mind, and more evolved states of body, which may then be used to discover deeper layer of reality: “Over the past three millennia, the Indic traditions have developed rigorous methods for refining the attention, and then applying that attention to exploring the origins, nature, and role of consciousness in the natural world. The empirical and rational investigations and discoveries by such great Indian contemplatives as Gautama the Buddha profoundly challenge many of the assumptions of the modern West, particularly those of scientific materialism.”"

"In short, the trajectory of Western science from the time of Copernicus to the modern day seems to have been influenced by medieval Christian cosmology. Just as hell was symbolized as being in the center of the earth, and heaven was in the outermost reaches of space, the inner, the subjective world of man was depicted as being the locus of evil, while the objective world was free of such moral contamination … And it was only in the closing years of the twentieth century that the scientific community began to regard consciousness as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry. Why did it take psychology – which itself emerged only after many scientists felt that they had already discovered all the principal laws of the universe – a century before it began to address the nature of consciousness?"

"Over the past three millennia, the Indic traditions have developed rigorous methods for refining the attention, and then applying that attention to exploring the origins, nature, and role of consciousness in the natural world. The empirical and rational investigations and discoveries by such great Indian contemplatives as Gautama the Buddha profoundly challenge many of the assumptions of the modern West, particularly those of scientific materialism."

"The point of Buddhist meditation is not to stop thinking, for … cultivation of insight clearly requires intelligent use of thought and discrimination. What needs to be stopped is conceptualisation that is compulsive, mechanical and unintelligent, that is, activity that is always fatiguing, usually pointless, and at times seriously harmful."