Being Human and a Buddha Too: Longchenpa's Seven Trainings for a Sunlit Sky

by Anne Carolyn Klein, Adzom Paylo (Contributor), Longchenpa (Contributor)

In writing that sparkles and inspires, Anne Klein (Lama Rigzin Drolma) shows us how to liberate our buddha nature to be both human and a buddha too.

This first volume in the House of Adzom series centers on Longchenpa’s seven trainings in bodhicitta, our awakened mind, the ultimate purpose of our practice and training. Anne Klein’s original composition masterfully weaves in Adzom Paylo Rinpoche’s commentary and Jigme Lingpa’s five pith practices and commentary on the trainings, in keeping with Longchenpa’s skillful integration of sutra, tantra, and Dzogchen, to resolve our most challenging questions about what awakening involves and how it relates to the truth of our human situation right now. As foundational teachings for Dzogchen practitioners, the seven trainings are framed as contemplations on impermanence, the adventitiousness of happiness and its short duration, the multiple causes of death, the meaninglessness of our worldly activities, reliance on the Buddha’s good qualities, the teacher’s pith instructions, and, ultimately, nonconceptual meditation on bliss and emptiness, clarity and emptiness, and reality itself.

Genres: Buddhism

325 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 15, 2023

About the author

Anne Carolyn Klein, Ph.D. (Religious/Tibetan Studies, University of Virginia; M.A. Buddhist Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison) is Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University, where she was formerly Chair of the Department of Religion. In 2010, she received the title of Dorje Lopon as Lama Rigzin Drolma from her teacher, Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche. She is a co-founder of Dawn Mountain Tibetan Temple in Houston, Texas, where she remains a resident teacher.

Reviews

[Mesoscope · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like to joke that Lama Rigzin Drolma, also known as Anne Klein, brings such an enormous breadth and depth of experience to bear in teaching dharma that one name alone cannot encompass its scope, and I'm only partly kidding. Her academic scholarship is imposing, and includes learned treatises on some of the most difficult philosophical topics of Gelukpa scholasticism. She has also practiced for decades with some of the greatest Nyingma and Bon masters of modern times, such as Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche and Adzom Paylo Rinpoche, and taught at Dawn Mountain for many years.

It is rare to encounter a teacher who embodies such extraordinary resources of both head and heart, and this treasure house is felt on every page. This short work is almost overwhelming in its richness, but it will reward careful study, reflection, and practice.

Even to explain what it is about is not easy. Put briefly, she has translated a short work by Longchenpa, the supreme master of Dzogchen, which mostly deals with preliminary practices such as mindfulness of death and reflection on the law of cause and effect. Longchenpa's text received a longer commentary by Jigme Lingpa, which is extensively discussed in this work, but not translated. Readers of this book will almost certainly want a copy of Cortland Dahl's excellent translation of this text, Steps to the Great Perfection, as it is referred to again and again. In addition to Jigme Lingpa's commentary, the author presents a consideration of the work by Adzom Paylo Rinpoche, and then the bulk of the book includes her own commentary on all of these works.

It should be noted that it requires a certain amount of effort on the part of the reader to coordinate the various texts and commentaries between the two physical books - all the more so, because the commentaries sometimes freely digress from the source material for reasons that are not always obvious. For example, where Longchenpa focuses in the third section of his work on the inevitability of death, Jigme Lingpa uses this as the occasion for considering the suffering in the six realms, and the reason for this diversion is not explained. And, finally, this book of around 200 pages includes more than 300 endnotes, and many of them are quite important - I myself read every one.

For more of a sense of what the translated works are about, see my review of Dahl's commentary, linked above. Here, what I will focus on is Lama Drolma's commentary, which brings these works to life with invaluable additional information for how to put the offered contemplations into actual practice, and with additional context drawn from a variety of resources ranging from many examples drawn from her own practice and life as well as modern findings in psychology which relate to the various topics being discussed.

If this all sounds like a lot, it is. It verges at times on too much, and one wonders if it might have been helpful to space it out a bit, give it a bit more room to breathe, and to ask a bit less of the reader.

But that is a bit churlish, because all of it is valuable. It may simply take a bit more time and care to work through it, and then to come round and work through it again.

Ultimately, I think that is what the heart of the book is about - returning to core contemplations of the tradition, thinking about them in the light of ultimate realization, and bringing them back to life in a variety of new ways. There is so much in any basic teaching of the preliminaries that one could spend their entire life on them - one will never exhaust reflecting on the relationship of compassion and ultimate truth, for example. I think, especially for practitioners for whom these topics are already familiar, this book can be a guide in going through them in a new way, with a new depth of insight.