The Mind of Mahamudra ─ Advice from the Kagyu Masters

Enjoy six key texts on the cornerstone meditation practice of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism by some of its most illustrated forebearers.

This third volume in the Tibetan Classics series highlights mahamudra, the central meditation practice of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. The six texts range in date from the twelfth to the seventeenth century and include such celebrated authors as Lama Shang and the Third Karmapa. Mahamudra is essentially a simple, direct method for looking beyond our thoughts to the very nature of conscious experience. Mahamudra literally means "the great seal" and masters of this tradition have explained it to mean that everything is sealed with buddhahood, and there is no liberation to be attained other than what is already present. Mahamudra, it is said, is not attained not because it is too difficult, but because it is too easy; not because it is too far, but because it is too close; and not because it is hidden but because it is too evident. Because of its universality and directness, mahamudra meditation is particularly suited to the modern West. Eminent scholar Peter Alan Roberts draws on his thirty-plus years of experience of translating for Tibetan lamas to illuminate these benchmark translations.

Peter Alan Roberts was born in Wales and lives in Hollywood, California. He obtained a B.A. in Sanskrit and Pali and a Ph.D. in Tibetan Studies from Oxford University. For more than thirty years he has been working as an interpreter for lamas and as a translator of Tibetan texts.