Description: A key explanatory work on the primary sources of Buddhist tantra by Tibet's leading authority, Tsong Khapa's guide clarifies the cryptic verses of the Esoteric Community Tantra and details the practical implementation of the instructions of its commentary, the Illuminating Lamp.
Tsong Khapa's Illuminating Lamp Annotational Supercommentary marks a watershed moment in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist history, unlocking with startling clarity the layers of meaning associated with unexcelled yoga tantra practice. On the verge of disappearing, the transmission of the Esoteric Community Tantra was revived dramatically in fifteenth-century Tibet by Tsong Khapa's precise elucidations of its keys for practice, here illuminated by Chandrakirti's commentary. With masterful erudition, Tsong Khapa draws on a wealth of related tantras and Indian commentaries, produced over many centuries, to clarify the Buddha's supreme teachings, the Esoteric Community. Generations of Tibetan scholars had misunderstood these teachings as antinomian utterances about sex and death antithetical to monastic Buddhism. Transmitted within elite circles for centuries, the Esoteric Community's hermeneutical keys contained within Illuminating Lamp are here presented in the Annotational Supercommentary with great precision, guiding the practitioner through the architecture of the subtle mind and body and explaining how, in exact detail, to transform the death process into the means for complete, fully embodied enlightenment. Moreover, Tsong Khapa explores the profound semiotic processes by which language and concepts transform ordinary identity to enlightened identity at its insubstantial foundation, thereby showing how unexcelled yoga is the practical application of Centrist (Madhyamaka) philosophy, which preceded the linguistic turn in Western thought by two millennia. In making these connections, Tsong Khapa created out of this secretive guru-disciple transmission lineage of the Esoteric Community Tantra a comprehensive monastic-yogic educational curriculum that transformed the Tibetan into Asia's premier center for spiritual and intellectual development.Brief description: Robert Thurman (1941-2026) was an American Buddhist author and academic who wrote, edited, and translated many books on Tibetan Buddhism. He was the Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, before retiring in June 2019. He held the first endowed chair in Buddhist Studies in the West. After education at Philips Exeter and Harvard, he studied Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism for almost thirty years as a personal student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He wrote both scholarly and popular books and lectured widely all over the world. As President of the American Institute for Buddhist Studies, he convened the First Inner Science Conference with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Amherst College in 1984. He was also a founding trustee of Tibet House New York.
Review Quotes: "Tsongkhapa's Guhyasamaja annotations--the culmination of a lifetime of critical engagement with the heritage of Southern Asian Buddhism--brought that Sanskrit scripture to vivid and compelling life in lucid Tibetan for generations of Central Asian Buddhists. Through a kind of serendipity, this meticulous English translation shines forth now as the culmination of the life's work of Robert A.F. Thurman, whose indefatigable exuberance for the study of Tibetan literature, ideas, and disciplines has electrified students and scholars the world over."--Christian K. Wedemeyer, University of Chicago