Calm Abiding and Special Insight: Achieving Spiritual Transformation through Meditation

by Geshe Gedun Lodro, Jeffrey Hopkins (Editor)

Calm Abiding and Special Insight presents an intimate and detailed picture of the intricacies of meditation so vividly that the reader is drawn into a Tibetan worldview of spiritual development. Geshe Gedün Lodrö, one of the foremost scholars of Tibet, reveals methods for overcoming afflictive states and disorders to create a mind which is stable, calm, and alertly clear. This book illustrates the mind's potential for profound transformation.

The dangers of not recognizing states contrary to successful meditation are great, and the possibilities of implementing the wrong antidote, or of overextending an appropriate one until it becomes counterproductive, are many. Through such detail, Geshe Gedün Lodrö makes vividly clear a Tibetan approach to meditative transformation.

This is a completely revised new edition of Walking Through Walls .

Genres: Buddhism

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Kyren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written translation of talks by an accomplished Tibetan Geshe about the Tibetan and Mahayana approaches to calm abiding and special insight. As a practitioner of a Thai Theravada samatha/shamatha- based (calm-abiding) meditation practice, I found it utterly fascinating. As a former scholar in Tibetan studies, I found the explanations (and the English translations) quite readable. This is not a book for beginners, nor is it a practical treatise on how to meditate, but rather an elucidation of these Tibetan approaches to different kinds of calm abiding practices, including descriptions of prerequisites to, and results of, this practice. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed it!