Naked Seeing: The Great Perfection, the Wheel of Time, and by Christopher Hatchell PDF

Eastern

By Christopher Hatchell

ISBN-10: 0199982910

ISBN-13: 9780199982912

Buddhism is in lots of methods a visible culture, with its recognized practices of visualization, its visible arts, its epistemological writings that debate the act of seeing, and its literature jam-packed with pictures and metaphors of sunshine. a few Buddhist traditions also are visionary, advocating practices in which meditators search visions that come up sooner than their eyes. Naked Seeing investigates such practices within the context of 2 significant esoteric traditions, the Wheel of Time (Kalacakra) and the nice Perfection (Dzogchen). either one of those experimented with sensory deprivation, and constructed yogas concerning lengthy sessions of living in darkish rooms or observing on the open sky. those produced strange studies of seeing, which have been used to pursue many of the vintage Buddhist questions about appearances, vacancy, and the character of fact. alongside the best way, those practices gave upward push to provocative rules and instructed that, instead of being apprehended via inner perception, non secular truths may additionally be obvious within the external world-realized during the gateway of the eyes. Christopher Hatchell offers the highbrow and literary histories of those practices, and likewise explores the meditative options and body structure that underlie their targeted visionary experiences.
The ebook additionally deals for the 1st time whole English translations of 3 significant Tibetan texts on visionary perform: a Kalacakra treatise by way of Yumo Mikyo Dorjé, The Lamp Illuminating Emptiness, a Nyingma nice Perfection paintings known as The Tantra of the Blazing Lamps, and a Bön nice Perfection paintings known as Advice at the Six Lamps, in addition to a close observation in this by way of Drugom Gyalwa Yungdrung.

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Additional info for Naked Seeing: The Great Perfection, the Wheel of Time, and Visionary Buddhism in Renaissance Tibet

Sample text

This ordinary self-perception is then deliberately replaced with the “divine pride” of being a buddha who is capable of performing enlightened deeds. This feeling of pride is reinforced by imagining or maintaining the “clear appearance” of dwelling in a divine environment. The core generation stage practice thus involves following a scripted sequence of visualizations that create a detailed visualized world, in which one imagines oneself as an elaborately ornamented buddha dwelling in a richly decorated, multistoried palace, surrounded by a divine retinue.

The Advice here thus evokes how sky-gazing can take us to the edge of our visual world: the margins where we might overturn our ordinary assump­ tions about seeing and discover how objects’ deepest nature is not in the dark spaces beyond our view or in ordinary appearances but in the inter­ section of the two. The tendency seen here—using the practical as a starting point for the theoretical—is quite common in late Vajrayana writing and points to how Buddhists use their esoteric traditions as places for revisiting and rein­ venting Buddhist philosophical issues.

A key metaphor here is the “iron mountains,” which in Buddhist writing often refers to the circle of mountains that surround a mandala, and that represent the outermost barrier of a world system. The Advice here thus evokes how sky-gazing can take us to the edge of our visual world: the margins where we might overturn our ordinary assump­ tions about seeing and discover how objects’ deepest nature is not in the dark spaces beyond our view or in ordinary appearances but in the inter­ section of the two.

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Naked Seeing: The Great Perfection, the Wheel of Time, and Visionary Buddhism in Renaissance Tibet by Christopher Hatchell


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