Calm Abiding and Special Insight

Abstract

This book vividly presents an intimate and detailed picture of the intricacies of meditation such that the reader is drawn into a Tibetan world-view of spiritual transformation. In a series of lectures at the University of Virginia during the spring and summer of 1979, Geshe Gedün Lodrö gradually unfolded for a group of advanced students of Tibetan language and Tibetan Buddhism the perspective of the Tibetan landscape of mental development. The environment for meditative change is comprised by the restoration of the landscape to its pristine state is wrought by techniques that are built from inner potentialities for stability, clarity, and calm, but these very techniques are fraught with pitfalls from inner habitual weaknesses. The dangers of not recognizing the actual causes of deprivation and distortion are great, and the possibilities of implementing the wrong antidote or of over-extending an appropriate one until it becomes counterproductive are many. Subtle distinctions between types of interfering factors are needed; there is seldom a simple way to coax the mind back to its natural state. The very measures taken to purify it can exacerbate old problems and introduce new ones. Through such detail Geshe Gedün Lodrö makes vividly clear a Tibetan approach to meditative therapy. Scholastic Buddhism is often thought to be dry, numerically oriented listings of mental and physical phenomena that fail to capture the vibrancy, the force, of life. In this series of lectures Geshe Gedün Lodrö shows that the heritage of Indian and Tibetan meditative lore that he embodied lives and breathes in a relevant and realistic tmosphere of intimately interwoven nuance. By constantly placing techniques of meditation in their larger Buddhist cultural context a culture whose être is spiritual.