Sat, 29 Oct 2005
Blazing Review Part Two
I read Blazing Splendor on the train trip up and back from KTD two weeks ago. The book is Tulku Urgyen's account of his family and his own life. There were two kinds of spiritual lineages in Tibet. The first type is successive incarnations of a spiritual teacher. H.H> Dalai Lama is the most famous example of this sort of lineage. The other type of lineage is the family lineage, when many different spiritual teachers are born in a single family. Obviously this is a lay and not a monastic lineage, but lay yogis are an important part of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Tulku urgyen's family is most notable because his great grandfather was Chogyur Lingpa, one of the great figures in the Ris Med (nonsectarian) movement of Tibetan Buddhism in the Nineteenth Century. The account is also interesting because it talks about other teachers and monasteries of Tibet. This interests me because my own teacher, Kheno Karthar Rinpoche, comes from Thrangu monastery in Eastern Tibet. Before this book the best source of information I had was Chögyam Trungpa's autobiography. There's a lot about the region that's still unclear to me though. Trungpa Rinpoche's monastery, Surmang is mentioned, but I still don't; have a clear understanding of how it was set up. So was the Eleventh Tai Situ Rinpoche and the First Bardor Tulku. There seems to be a lot of cross-over between the different lineages: Kagyus, Sakyas, and Nyingmas studying with each other. In short, this book is one of the few realistic first person accounts of what monastic life was like in Tibet before the Communist takeover. It's certainly the most detailed one I'm aware of. If such things interest you, the stories told are short and memorable and the book is well worth its price.
