A Spacious Path to Freedom: Practical Instructions on the Union of Mahamudra and Atiyoga Karma Chagme; B. Alan Wallace and Gyatrul Rinpoche

This manual of Tibetan meditation simply and thoroughly presents the profound Dzogchen and Mahamudra systems of practice. Karma Chagmé sets forth the stages of meditation practice, including the cultivation of meditative quiescence and insight, the experiential identification of awareness, and the highest steps of Mahamudra and Atiyoga, leading to perfect enlightenment in one lifetime. Drawing from his enormous textual erudition and mastery of Tibetan oral traditions, he shows how these two meditative systems can be unified into a single integrated approach to realizing the ultimate nature of consciousness.

Karma Chagme was a major lineage-holder of the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, and his writings are central to the Payul Nyingma order.

Born in 1925 and recognized as a tulku of the great Payul contemplative Sampa Kunkyap, Gyatrul Rinpoche was educated in Payul Dhomang Monastery in Eastern Tibet. Trained by renowned adepts, he spent much of his life in Tibet in meditative retreat. Since the early 1970s, Gyatrul Rinpoche has taught thousands of students in North America, where he has established several centers for the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Drawing on his extensive experience in traditional Tibet and the modern West, he brings these profound teachings to contemporary students of Tibetan Buddhist meditation.

Trained for ten years in Buddhist monasteries in India and Switzerland, Alan Wallace has taught Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and America since 1976; and he has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars and contemplatives, including H. H. the Dalai Lama. After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he studied physics and the philosophy of science, he earned a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford University. He has edited, translated, authored, or contributed to more than thirty books on Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, language, and culture, as well as the interface between religion and science. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is launching one program in Tibetan Buddhist studies and another in science and religion.