The Stages of the Buddha's Teachings: Three Key Texts

Stages of the Buddha's Teachings is an extraordinary and systematized representation of the complete path to enlightenment.

The “stages of the teachings” or tenrim genre of Tibetan spiritual writing expounds the Mahayana teachings as a graded series of topics, from the practices required at the start of the bodhisattva’s career to the final perfect awakening of buddhahood. The three texts in the present volume all exerted seminal influence in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The first text, The Blue Compendium, presents the instructions of the Kadam teacher Potowa (1031–1106) as recorded by his student Dölpa (1059–1131). This text is followed by Gampopa’s (1079–1153) revered Ornament of Precious Liberation, which remains the most authoritative text on the path to enlightenment within the Kagyü school. The final text is Clarifying the Sage’s Intent, a masterwork by the preeiment sage of the Sakya tradition, Sakya Pandita (1182–1251).

Ken Holmes studied in Dharamsala before joining Samye Ling in Scotland, the first Tibetan monastery in the West, in 1970. There, he and his wife Katia have devoted the past forty years to researching, translating, publishing, and teaching the practice and study texts of Tibetan Buddhism. As the center’s Director of Studies, Ken spends much of the year teaching at Samye Ling’s branches in Europe and Africa. 

David P. Jackson has studied the writings of Sakya Pa??ita for some years, publishing in 1987 the third chapter of another of Sapa?’s major works, the Entrance Gate for the Wise. He also investigated the recent history of the Sakya school, publishing a biography of the twentieth-century Sakyapa mystic Dezhung Rinpoche (1906–87) entitled A Saint in Seattle. 

Ulrike Roesler received her PhD in Indian Studies from the University of Mu¨nster (Germany) with a thesis on the notion of “light” in the Vedas. For more than a decade she has been teaching Indian and Tibetan Studies as well as Buddhist Studies at the universities of Marburg, Freiburg, and Oxford. Her research interests include Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, the history of the Tibetan Kadam school, and Tibetan biographical and narrative literature. With Linda Covill and Sarah Shaw, she coedited Lives Lived, Lives Imagined: Biography in the Buddhist Traditions.