I've been writing a brief overview of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. This is the oldest school of Tibetan Buddhism. Its founding teachers came to Tibet from India and also from Uddiyana, located in what is now the Swat Valley of northern Pakistan. I believe Nyingmapa is the only living tradition of Buddhism that can trace at least part of its ancestry directly to Gandhara, the lost Buddhist kingdom of the Middle East.
Probably the Nyingma teacher best known in the West is Sogyal Rinpoche. I'm sure some of you have read some of his books, such as The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I thought I'd post a couple of quotes from the book, but I'm having a terrible time choosing one. There are so many good ones.
Well, here are a couple, and if you have other quotes you want to add, feel free.
"Don't let us take doubts with exaggerated seriousness nor let them grow out of proportion, or become black-and-white or fanatical about them. What we need to learn is how slowly to change our culturally conditioned and passionate involvement with doubt into a free, humorous, and compassionate one. This means giving doubts time, and giving ourselves time to find answers to our questions that are not merely intellectual or 'philosophical,' but living and real and genuine and workable. Doubts cannot resolve themselves immediately; but if we are patient a space can be created within us, in which doubts can be carefully and objectively examined, unraveled, dissolved, and healed. What we lack, especially in this culture, is the right undistracted and richly spacious environment of the mind, which can only be created through sustained meditation practice, and in which insights can be given the change slowly to mature and ripen."
One more:
"We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We donīt know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.
"Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home."
Just for fun, I opened to a page at random — my eyes landed on the bottom of p.148:
“Recognize beyond any doubt that that this sky-like nature of your mind is the absolute master. Where else would all the enlightened beings be but in the Rigpa, in the nature of your mind?
Secure in that realization, in a state of spacious and carefree ease, you rest in the warmth, glory and blessing of your absolute nature. Your have arrived at the original ground: the primordial purity of natural simplicity.”
we come into life empty an bare. then through time we get gready and don’t like to share. in end of our time we are underground. where everybody is there.
First, your writing is much appreciated, bringing to light so many interesting aspects. Thanks much.
The telling of Gandhara gives rise to the possibility that from there the ‘idealized’ kingdom of Shambala might have originated.
The ‘high’ Buddhist culture, and origin of Buddha Tantra might be the original source of The Kalachakra.
The ‘Kalachakra Prophecies’ seem, at least in part, to have been fulfilled in some detail with the decline of Gandhara.