Designed as an intermediate Tibetan language textbook, much traditional material is presented in colloquial form, enabling students to learn to talk about Buddhist culture in Tibetan. Volume one deals with such topics as Buddhist training in Tibet, entering a monastery, studying for a gesbe degree and continuing training at a Tantric college. There are also discussions of Buddhist doctrine and its spread in Tibet. Volume two presents Lam-rim Teachings in a colloquial form, discussing the meditations associated with the three types of persons, such as impermanence, causality, and lower rebirth; the miseries of existence, the mind of enlightenment and practice of the six perfections. Each lesson consists of a Tibetan lecture accompanied by notes, explanation of new vocabulary, exercises and an English translation. Lectures on Tibetan Religious Culture Geshe Lhundup, LTWA, Paperback, 1993/2004, $25.00
Geshe Lhundup Sopa was born in the Tsang region of Tibet in 1923. He entered the Gaden Chokor monastery in 1932 and moved to Sera Je monastery in 1941, where he studied the major Buddhist philosophy in depth. He fled Tibet in 1959 following the Chinese occupation, and stayed in a refugee camp at Buxador in Bengal until 1962. The same year he was awarded the Lharmpa Geshe degree, he moved to America.
Since the late 1960s he has been a professor of Tibetan Buddhist Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and has given many teachings in Europe. In 1975 he founded the Deer Park Buddhist Center in the USA, and remains there to the present as a main teacher and abbot of Ewam monastery. He has written a number of authoritative articles and books on Mahayana Buddhism, including Practice and Theory of Tibetan Buddhism in collaboration with Prof. Jeffrey Hopkins, and Wheel of Time; The Kalachakra in Context.
|
