Herbert V Guenther - 1975 - Longchenpa - Kindly Bent to Ease Us - Part 1 - Mind (354p).pdf

Herbert V Guenther - 1975 - Longchenpa - Kindly Bent to Ease Us - Part 1 - Mind (354p).pdf

Paperback: 321 pages
Publisher: Dharma Publishing (January 1, 1975)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0913546402
ISBN-13: 978-0913546406

The first volume in the Trilogy by the thirteenth-century Nyingma master Longchenpa. Clear descriptions of the stages of the Vajrayana Path. Foundation in Mahayana views and practices for anyone interested in Vajrayana and Dzogchen teachings. Used in 25 university courses.

I find this the most broad ranging and comprehensive of the three volumes .

It begins with a phenomenology of perception as the arising of that consciousness which is coincident with perception's essential constitution; that is the rising - or construction - of the determinate from the indeterminate; the reification of the apparent world into things and the way in which those things are informed at their core - in advance or simultaneously - by the very theories through which [or as which] they are seen. Longchen Rabjam, in providing this description, dismantles [with this knowledge as a tool] the placements of division which enshrine essential difference and substantial alterity - to turn apparent objects out again into the open-ness that is the undifferentiated and spacious ground of the experience of being before its obsessive delimitation; the undifferentiated cognitive potential coincident with space. The self of objects and the self of persons is released from artificial confinement. He deconstructs dualistic experience in the inescapability of constructed experience which is its mutual constitution and therefore must be known equally, examining the instantaneity of karma as the immediate feedback of prejudiced visions in projection; incarnating the elaborations we ourselves project. He then pegs out the tent as the ground. This volume is a phenomenology of consciousness as the totality of experience, knowing its undifferentiated self more thoroughly precisely because of [and as] this adumbration. The unsullied, cognitive expanse is the empty body of Samanthabadhra - which Longchenpa's poetry makes warmer than emptiness when characterised as utter non-existence.

This is the handbook and manual, the complete understanding of which is coincident with attainment; as is any complete understanding in its terms.

The handbook offers straightforward meditational advice, meditation as a maintained way of seeing which gradually reformulates the miss-attributions of substantiality that misguided perception makes into a new understanding and way of Being. Longchen offers structures toward the deconstruction of all difference - for those who require adumbrations of the structures which structureless-ness is nothing other than. The volume contains, and releases, poetic exaltations of [and exhortations to] vision through the sustained application of appreciative discrimination. How to do that, as a practice.

Guenther's commentary musters Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, considering the question of the meaning of Being and embodied experience in the structure of perception -- so you are in no danger of staying awake.