Featured Titles of the Gelug Tradition

Tsongkhapa: A Buddha in the Land of Snows

By Thupten Jinpa

In this groundbreaking addition to the Lives of the Masters series, Thupten Jinpa, a scholar-practitioner and long-time translator for His Holiness the Dalai Lama, offers the most comprehensive portrait available of Jé Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), one of the greatest Buddhist teachers in history. A devout monastic, Tsongkhapa took on the difficult task of locating and studying all of the Indian Buddhist classics available in Tibet in his day. He went on to synthesize this knowledge into a holistic approach to the path of awakening. In an achievement of incredible magnitude, he integrated the pivotal yet disparate Mahayana teachings on emptiness while retaining the important role of critical reason and avoiding the extreme of negating the reality of the everyday world.

Guhyasamaja Practice in the Arya Nagarjuna System, Volume One: The Generation Stage

Translated by Artemus B. Engle
By Gyumé Khensur Lobsang Jampa

The Guhyasamāja Tantra is one of the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras of Vajrayana Buddhism. In the initial, generation-stage practice, one engages in a prescribed sequence of visualizations of oneself as an enlightened being in a purified environment in order to prepare one’s mind and body to engage in the second stage: the completion stage. The latter works directly with the subtle energies of one’s mind and body and transforms them into the enlightened mind and body of a buddha. In this book, Gyumé Khensur Lobsang Jampa, a former abbot of Gyumé Tantric College, provides complete instructions on how to practice the generation stage of Guhyasamāja, explaining the visualizations, offerings, and mantras involved, what they symbolize, and the purpose they serve.

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Tibetan Buddhist Books in 2021: A Review

See our other Year in Review Guides: Theravada/Pali/Insight | Chan, Zen, Mahayana | Tibetan Buddhism...

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Nagarjuna: A Reader’s Guide

This article for the Great Masters Series focuses on Nagarjuna, the first of what His Holiness the Dalai Lama refers to as the Seventeen Pandits of Nalanda, whose works form the foundation for M...

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Precious Human Birth

To Listen, Contemplate, and Meditate Is the Practice of a Bodhisattva Excerpt from A Guide to the Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva...

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Kālachakra Practice (Edward Henning Collection)

, and certainly no explanation how such practices should be performed. Similarly, there are no practice texts (sādhanas, pūjas, and so forth) available here for download, as availability of such mat...

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Snow Lion Articles

Asanga on the First Meditative Absorption

Asanga glosses the term “meditative absorption” in the following manner: The term “meditative absorption” refers to [a state in which the mind] meditates correctly on an object and recollection holds fast [to an object] one-pointedly. The sutras describe each of the four meditative absorptions...
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The Gelug Tradition of Breath Practice

Geluk presentations do not explain why the exhalation and inhalation of the breath is considered the best object of observation for “purifying” discursiveness. Simply, it works; the choice seems to be an empirical one, based on a long tradition of Buddhist practice. The governing principle seems...
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How Empty Is Emptiness?

One cannot become a Buddha without both compassionate action and nondual wisdom—and one cannot have these two types of paths without both of the two truths, conventional and ultimate. If only emptiness existed and there were, in fact, no conventional truths, then there would be no living beings, no...
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Running (Well) On Empty: An Interview with Guy Newland

Emptiness is perhaps the most important—yet difficult to define—topic in Buddhism. Guy Newland, author of Introduction to Emptiness—a kind of every-person’s guide to the intricacies of various explanations of emptiness—based his book on The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path: The Lamrim...
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