About the Author
B. Alan Wallace is president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. He trained for many years as a monk in Buddhist monasteries in India and Switzerland. He has taught Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and America since 1976 and has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars and contemplatives, including H. H. the Dalai Lama. After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he studied physics and the philosophy of science, he earned his MA and PhD in religious studies at Stanford University. He has edited, translated, authored, and contributed to more than forty books on Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, language, and culture, and the interface between science and religion. Alan is also the founder of the Center for Contemplative Research (CCR), which has retreat center locations in Crestone, Colorado and Castellina Marittima, Italy and a center in New Zealand slated to open soon. The CCR is dedicated to researching the role and methods of the ancient contemplative practices of shamatha and vipashyana, and their involvement in mental health and wellbeing, as well as their role in fathoming the nature and origins of human consciousness.
Eva Natanya is a scholar of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, Christian theology, and comparative religion, and has served in many capacities as a spiritual teacher, translator of Tibetan texts, author, and retreat leader. Following a nine-year career as a professional ballet dancer with both the New York City Ballet and the Royal Ballet of England, she earned an MA in Christian Systematic Theology at the Graduate Theological Union, and a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. Her dissertation examined the complex interactions of Madhyamaka, Yogacara, and Abhidharma teachings as they underlie the Vajrayana philosophy of Je Tsongkhapa. She has spent more than four years in solitary meditation retreat, is the co-founder of the Center for Contemplative Research, and currently serves as resident teacher at the CCR’s Miyo Samten Ling Hermitage in Crestone, Colorado, while continuing her solitary retreat practice.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On the afternoon of July 20, 2023, when I was meditating in my solitary retreat above our hermitage, Miyo Samten Ling, in Crestone, Colorado, just as dawn was breaking in India on the day commemorating the Buddha’s first turning of the wheel of Dharma, it occurred to me that I had in my possession a number of unpublished translations that I have made over the past forty years, containing precious teachings by some of the greatest Buddhist masters in history. I have offered oral teachings on many of these texts, but since each one is relatively brief, I had not yet found the right context in which to publish each one of them. With a burst of inspiration, I spent several hours compiling those translations, like a garland of pearls, into a sequence of pith instructions on the core meditations of samatha and vipasyana to share with others in the hope that they would cherish and benefit from them as I have. Over the course of many months, Eva Natanya and I have added to and embellished this garland to form the present anthology.
The garland begins with two conversations between Atisa—viewed as a speech emanation of Guru Rinpoche, or Padmasambhava, and also a previous incarnation of the Panchen Lama—and his foremost disciple, Dromtonpa—recognized as an emanation of Avalokitesvara and a previous incarnation of the Dalai Lama. When I first encountered these two conversations, I felt I had slipped into a time machine and was there with them in person, reveling in the profound wisdom and humor that this noble guru and his beloved disciple shared together.
In this anthology, I have then added Atisa’s seminal text on the nature of the two realities—obscurative and ultimate—followed by a commentary by his Indian disciple Prajnamoksa on Atisa’s Pith Instructions on the Middle Way.
The next jewel I plucked from my satchel of translations was The Eight-Verse Mind Training by Geshe Langri Thangpa, one of the great masters of the Kadam tradition founded by Atisa and Dromtonpa. This was the text His Holiness the Dalai Lama chose for his first public teaching in the West, in the summer of 1979 in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland, for which I had the tremendous honor of serving as his interpreter.
