Masters of Enchantment: The Lives and Legends of the Mahasiddhas (English and Tibetan Edition) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 089281053X ISBN 13: 9780892810536

Publisher: Inner Traditions, 1989

Synopsis

Keith Dowman has spent 20 years in India and Nepal, studying Buddhist and Hindu metaphysics and psychology with the adepts of living traditions of meditation and yoga. He is an initiate of the Nyingmapa school of Tibetan Buddishm and is the author of "The Divine Madman" and "Sky Dancer".

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English, Tibetan (translation)

Review:

These are extraordinary, riveting tales of men and women of ancient India who achieved self-realization and perfection of consciousness in the human form. The book itself is a marvel of inspired creation-a ten-year project, according to its patient publisher. The collaboration of Dowman, an eminent translator-interpreter of Tibetan Buddhism, and Beer, a master thangka painter and artistic visionary, has produced a book of high merit and high adventures, stories through whose cosmic transparency shines the illimitable Buddha-nature. The original twelfth-century A.D. text, "Me Legends of the Eighty-Four Mahasiddhas," comprised orally transmitted accounts of the meditations and biographies of the great saint-magicians of a much earlier India. Dowman has engagingly retold fifty-four of these tales of the holy madmen to which Beer has contributed thirty evocative full-color paintings and numerous line drawings. From their efforts we gain a glimpse of the startling reality of the mahasiddha, an enlightened human who uses his/her spiritual-magical prowess for teaching purposes. The mahasiddha has a great, even flamboyant, disregard for convention and spiritual protocol coupled with an unquenchable intention to achieve mahamudra, complete illumination of the Buddha-Mind, and release from the endless wheel of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth. The format of the biographies of these masters of enchantment is fairly uniform. A person is profoundly dissatisfied with life, whether it is a ceaseless round of drudgery or a worry-free regime of high opulence. The guru, or spiritual master, provides the practices, called sadhanas ("psycho-experimental techniques of personality transcendance and ecstasy," says Dowman) which the disciple then practices in solitude for at least twelve years. Often he receives assistance-or hindrance-from the dakinis, the alluring, powerful, otherworldly goddesses. Finally, illumination and siddhis are achieved, and the newly-born mahasiddha may find himself able to walk on water, levitate, fly, materialize objects, walk through matter, even make an elixir of immortality. The secret is simple: Everything is Mind and Mind is empty. Ultimately, after a long period of service, sometimes hundreds of years, the mahasiddha ascends with his/her retinue into the Paradise of the Dakinis. -- From Independent Publisher

About this edition

• Publisher: Inner Traditions
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 089281053X
• ISBN 13: 9780892810536
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 205
• Illustrator: Beer Robert