Meditation Saved My Life: A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind - Softcover

Rinpoche, Phakyab

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1608684628 ISBN 13: 9781608684625

Verlag: New World Library, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In 2003, Tibetan lama Phakyab Rinpoche was admitted to the emergency clinic of the Program for Survivors of Torture at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital. After a dramatic escape from imprisonment in China, at the hands of authorities bent on uprooting Tibet’s traditional religion and culture, his ordeal had left him with life-threatening injuries, including gangrene of the right ankle. American doctors gave Rinpoche a shocking choice: accept leg amputation or risk a slow, painful death. An inner voice, however, prompted him to try an unconventional cure: meditation. He began an intensive spiritual routine that included thousands of hours of meditation over three years in a small Brooklyn studio. Against all scientific logic, his injuries gradually healed. In this vivid, passionate account, Sofia Stril-Rever relates the extraordinary experiences of Phakyab Rinpoche, who reveals the secret of the great healing powers that lie dormant within each of us.

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Phakyab Rinpoche, abbot of Ashi Monastery in Tibet, was recognized as a Reincarnate Lama by the Dalai Lama in 1994. A member of the Gelugpa order of Tibetan Buddhism, Rinpoche teaches spiritual healing throughout the United States, France, and the world.

Sofia Stril-Rever is a spiritual teacher and writer based in Paris, France, dedicated to the promotion of inner healing, peace, and universal responsibility. She has coauthored three books with the Dalai Lama, including his memoir My Spiritual Journey, and released Dakini, a CD of healing mantras.

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Meditation Saved My Life

A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind

By Phakyab Rinpoche, Sofia Stril-Rever, Claire Belden Webster

New World Library

Copyright © 2017 New World Library
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60868-462-5

Contents

Book One: My Remarkable Recovery, 
Part One: When Iron Birds Fly, 
PROLOGUE: My Fate Is Sealed, 
CHAPTER ONE: I Grew Up with Growing Mountains, 
CHAPTER TWO: Ragged Yak, 
CHAPTER THREE: Night of Pain in Tibet, 
Part Two: Surviving, 
CHAPTER FOUR: The Program for Survivors of Torture, 
CHAPTER FIVE: Cutting Is Not Curing: I Refuse Amputation, 
CHAPTER SIX: Balancing My Happiness against the Suffering of Others, 
Part Three: Meditation and Healing, 
CHAPTER SEVEN: Why Do You Seek Healing outside of Yourself?, 
CHAPTER EIGHT: My Meditation Grotto in Brooklyn, 
CHAPTER NINE: The Mind Was Never Born, the Mind Has Never Died, 
Book Two: May Everyone Hear What They Need to Awaken, 
CHAPTER ONE: The Sutra of the Heroic March, 
CHAPTER TWO: An Exceptionally Powerful Healing, 
EPILOGUE: In This Life and in All Lives, 
Chronology of Phakyab Rinpoche's Healing, 
Endnotes, 
Phakyab Rinpoche's Associations, 
Books by Sofia Stril-Rever, 
Books by Dr. Lionel Coudron, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

I Grew Up with Growing Mountains

Flying toward the Unknown

Saturday, April 26, 2003. The Royal Jordanian plane cuts through the veil of heat that shrouds the city of Delhi in the early morning. It gains altitude and, for ten minutes or so, flies along an arch of mountains blocking the distant skyline. Seen from the sky, the rocky barrier seems to recede, but its mountainous landscape stands out against India's open countryside of Haryana. It is as if it has been stretched upward by the power of an extraordinary will. These are the cyclopean boundaries of the Roof of the World — Tibet, my country.

The summits draw a white-inked line, like calligraphy on the ochre soil, slicing through the cloudless sky, forming a stealthy track I can follow through the window. Then I turn my head in vain. The message — if message there was — has vanished behind me, as fast as a flash of lightning. I am unable to decipher it. My heart is heavy with loss. I have thrice risked my life and braved this rocky and icy belt. After much unbelievable difficulty, I have struggled up passes more than sixteen thousand feet high, with no equipment, no shoes, no appropriate clothing. I was compelled to walk by night to escape Chinese patrols so that I might reach the hallowed land of India and receive the transmission of the wisdom that awakens the mind to its true nature. Today, I am flying far away, toward my destiny, toward the unknown.

At the age of thirty-seven, I have spent twenty years studying Buddhist scriptures, along with commentaries by generations of Indian pundits and Tibetan yogis. During lengthy meditations, in the secrecy of solitary caves, I have contemplated the loving and radiant basis of the mind that transmigrates into the cycle of lives. But in geography and biology, I do not even have the elementary knowledge of a middle school pupil. I do not know that the Himalayas are the youngest and highest mountain range on Earth, with some fifty summits exceeding twenty-two thousand feet. Only later will I learn that, in the dawn of time, instead of these mountains, there was an ancient sea that Western geophysicists call the Tethys Ocean, and also that scientists believe, forty million years earlier, continental drift caused a fantastic collision of India against the shield of Central Asia. The junction line between these territories follows the uneven course of the Brahmaputra River, which has its source in Tibet, where it is called the Yarlung Tsangpo River in memory of the kings of our first dynasty.

As if under the action of an awl, the successive pressures of the Indian subcontinent raised the seabed of the Tethys, and from its abysses emerged the Country of Snow. In fact, the series of grandiose Himalayan peaks evokes an ocean of gigantic waves, petrified during the climax of an apocalyptic storm and frozen durably under sheaths of ice. Saltwater lakes were left behind by the receding sea, as well as arborescent corals, pearls, and shells, which were highly valued by nomadic people. A profusion of these can be found on the high plateaus. As children, we delighted in unearthing them for the jewelry and finery my mother used to make.

The upward movement of the Himalayas is ongoing today. Topographical surveys show that this is constant and never ceasing, rising by approximately four inches per year. I have felt this pressure of the earth toward the sky. I felt it in my body as a child. I grew up with growing mountains. The wide-sweeping movements of the tectonic plates can be seen in the landscapes where I used to graze my droves of yaks and my flocks of goats and sheep.

I remember vast, serene expanses stretching out as far as we could see, which suddenly mixed with tangled, rugged mountainous landscapes. I also remember the nearby Nyagchu River racing at the speed of an unbridled horse to meet the Blue River, as it rushed toward the Asian lowlands through jagged-walled abysses. We could cross above these breathtakingly high crevices thanks to bridges whose frail wooden roadways swung over the drops. The deafening racket sounded capable of disintegrating the bodies of anyone foolhardy enough to inadvertently linger over these bottomless abysses. The underground convulsions threatened our lives, since we were vulnerable to landslides and earthquakes, which occurred regularly. To minimize their impacts, our houses were traditionally built around sturdy pillars of whole tree trunks. Nature relentlessly reminded us of the implacable law of impermanence by subjecting us to the fluctuation, and transformation, of the elements.

As I fly away from my native Country of Snow, I recall this teaching of the blessed lord Buddha:

As a star, a hallucination, the flame of a lamp,
An illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble of air,
A dream, a flash of lightning, a cloud,
Consider the world of phenomena.
This life is as fleeting as an autumn cloud.
Observing the birth and the death of beings
Is like watching the movements of a dance.
A life is similar to a flash of lightning in the sky,
It quivers by, and it rushes down,
Like a stream on a steep mountain.

The Mighty Body of the World Coming to Life in My Child's Body

What I remember is that the irresistible rise of the Roof of the World is demanding. It appeals to setting new challenges — in a literal and figurative sense — and to transcendence. It asks us to transform these high plateaus into a mirror of the sky, so that the men living at that altitude can devote themselves, body and soul, to contemplating the divine.

Tibet is a land of myths and legends. I have often noticed how similar popular beliefs are to the invisible reality that today's sophisticated technologies reveal. For example, when I discovered the theory of the primeval sea that once bathed my country in a distant past, it was not really a surprise. My grandmother had told me that the Country of Snow had once been covered by water. Above the water, five pink clouds appeared and hung in the sky before becoming goddesses. They ordered the waves to recede and covered eastern Tibet with thick evergreen forests. To the south, they made abundant harvests ripen, while they draped the north...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: New World Library
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1608684628
• ISBN 13: 9781608684625
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: New World Library; https://www.newworldlibrary.com; ; 14 Pamaron Way; Novato; CA; 94949; USA
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