"The 37 practices of the Bodhisattvas" is a (very) compact poetic outline of the "Mahayana" ("great vehicle") Buddhist spiritual quest. Like the "Hinayana" ("small vehicle") the Mahayana is about the liberation of the practitioner from the conditionings of ordinary life, but the Mahayana explicitly sees this effort as a means to an end, the end being to achieve ability to help all sentient (human and other) beings to reach liberation. The Mahayana practitioner, or Bodhisattva, will not consider him/herself relieved of his/her obligation to accomplish efforts to work for the good of all beings as long (how many lives this may take is of no importance) as not all of them have achieved liberation from the shackles of conditioned existence.
The "37 practices", composed by a Tibetan Grand Master in the 14th century A.D., is very compact (37 four line stanzas, in addition to a few introductory and concluding ones). The general reader will often have the impression that the Master starts a stanza by stating some premises, and then proceeds to a conclusion without providing much more than rather elusive hints at the intellectual path between the two (which probably did not matter much for him, since, in Buddhism and especially Tibetan Buddhism, "understanding" is more a matter of experiencing reality than of reasoning your way to it). He takes a lot for granted and assumes that his reader understands what he has in mind, which his Tibetan readers at the time probably did, sharing a cultural background that is largely unfamiliar to us. This even translates into syntactic and morphological short-circuits: sentences without a verb, or missing the equivalent of conjunctions and prepositions supposed to indicate relationships between words and phrases... even words denoting two opposite or complementary concepts contracted into one word (say, to give an idea of what might be an equivalent in English: "negsuff" for "negativity and suffering"). Although the trained reader is expected to fill-in all gaps and elucidate all abstruse formulations, well, most of us are not trained readers by the Master's standards.
The "37 practices" are often used as a textbook for beginning students of classical Tibetan (including your reviewer), and you will hardly be surprised to hear that we find it very hard to understand, let alone translate it. Those who do not know any Tibetan at all may settle directly for a translation, and then, since not everything in any translation of such a rich and compact text is ever likely to be perfectly clear, another translation, only to be left wandering whether a few stanzas are really translations of the same text.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who has a long experience of teaching Buddhism to Westerners, takes the reader through this text, stanza after stanza, providing not only explanations, but also telling examples and illustrations. Going beyond the text, he gives clear and synthetic definitions, again with examples and illustrations, of basic general Buddhist and specific Mahayana notions: Karma, Bodhisattvas, refuge, the three jewels and the three roots, and many more, to which the poem often refers in an elliptic way (always assuming that, of course, the reader knows all about that).
Dilgo Khyentse's fluent style, often enlivened by a touch of humour, gives a glimpse of a wise and warm-hearted Master, a hallmark of Tibetan Buddhism. "The Heart of Compassion" is a valuable companion to a most fundamental text of Tibetan Buddhism.
Frédéric Renard
Brussels, Belgium
The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-Seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva
Audible Audiobook
– Unabridged
| Amazon Price | New from | Used from |
|
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial | |
Read & Listen
Switch between reading the Kindle book & listening to the Audible narration with Whispersync for Voice.
Get the Audible audiobook for the reduced price of $7.49 after you buy the Kindle book.
Get the Audible audiobook for the reduced price of $7.49 after you buy the Kindle book.
People who viewed this also viewed
Page 1 of 1Start OverPage 1 of 1
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
Customer reviews
Top reviews from other countries
Frederic Renard
a useful companion to a great classical Buddhist philosophical poem
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 August 2012Verified Purchase
Anna Z
Crucial text for anyone studying Tibetian Buddhism
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 May 2019Verified Purchase
jimmy
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2015Verified Purchase
anon
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 July 2014Verified Purchase
M
Just super.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 April 2017Verified Purchase
