Mahayana and Tantric Buddhism has been the primary reading for a while. Sprinkled in have been a few other subjects. Here are some highlights as possibilities for your summer reading.
The Buddha’s Ancient Path. Clean, clear. A call to the unadorned truth that can be ascertained by anyone through meditation, examination, and understanding of cause and flawless result. The words of the Buddha are given with Theravada clarity. Each sentence was a gem.
Penetrating Wisdom and Wild Awakening. Two books by Ponlop Rinpoche. Pentrating Wisdom uses the Aspiration of Samantabhadra as the ground of understanding and practice of Dzogchen. Due to this book, I took up recitation of the Aspiration immediately and have used it and given it out in meditation retreats. Why? Because of the loop of cause and result mentioned above. The Buddha came to understand the flawless, irrefutable nature of causes and their resultant conditions or and circumstances. Understanding this, through any method of discovery, a person is well served and will generate beneficial actions into the world. Wild Awakening takes up the subject of Mahamudra as a meditative practice and as the condition of Awareness and all in manifestation. Wild Awakenings was read and then became the subject for a discussion group of more than a year. Penetrating Wisdom did the same after WA.
Self Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness. Maybe a tantric practice or knowledge helped but … the transmission of energy and Naked Awareness was palpable from this book. Dzogchen, again, offered through a terma verse that undoes the grasping mind.
Going back to previously read
Pythagorean Source Book. The roots of the mystical and analytical unified mind were fostered by Pythagoras long ago. I remember my parents (back then) being direct students of his. I was not, but lived according to the ethos and teachings that he was teaching them. So, when I read (or re-read) things about Pythagoras or his gifts to the world, they go through a sort of memory filter. This book was valuable and pertinent almost 20 years ago when I first read it and is now as well.
Fingerprints of the Gods. Connections, what connects us, and how are we anciently connected? Credit must be given to the mavericks like Graham Hancock (or John Anthony West, or the scientists at the Thunderbolt Project for example) who put hard evidence before the established and largely conjected models. These pioneers ask us to think, not to agree with them, but to think. (Reminds me of the Buddha again.)
One I will read this summer
1491. The Americas before conquest and annihilation. A history of the Meso-American people, their culture, height of achievements, and contributions to the world.
