Buddhism

Tsongkhapa established a relationship with Manjushri through the medium, Lama Umapa, who himself had encountered Manjushri in a visionary experience that changed the course of his life. Jinpa describes this relationship in depth in this book and provides important new insights on the way in which this collaboration provided new perspectives on classic texts, including Nagarjuna’s and Atisha’s teachings.

Pilgrimage condenses the journey for spiritual liberation that can take an entire human lifetime or more into a few short weeks on the road.

We all seek wholeness, to connect the wounded part of us with something completely beyond ourselves, and that is made possible through devotion.

As Jesus and Buddha have been remembered, they both had a common starting point for their preaching: the sufferings that all humans (though some more than others) have to face: the inadequacies, the perplexities, the insufficiencies, the diminishments, the pains and disappointments that darken human existence.

Roughly until the middle of the first millennium CE, an important general dis- tinction opposed Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophical thought in the South Asian subcontinent: Buddhist philosophers were of the opinion that our com- mon sense world is not ultimately real, Brahmanical philosophers were convinced that it is. During a number of centuries, all Buddhist philosophers denied the reality of the world of our everyday experience, and all Brahmanical philosophers accepted it.

Buddhism is a vast, sprawling heterogeneous and internally inconsistent tradition dying and flowering over and over in various times and places over around 2500 years. Anyone who tells you its “core” teachings or practices is ignorant or lying. This is okay; as long as you know it is so.

According to Buddhism, the basis of reality consists of ever-changing processes rather than static ‘things’. If any ‘thing’ is analysed in enough depth, and observed over a long enough timescale, it can be seen to be a stage of a dynamic process, rather than a static, stable thing-in-itself.