NEW DHARMA BOOKS

We published five major books last year and would like to bring some of them to your attention.  This newsletter focusses on:

Samantabhadra’s Prayer
with Indian, Tibetan, and Western commentaries

The Prayer of Samantabhadra, also known as “a prayer of excellent conduct” and “a king of prayers”, is one of the five great prayers of the Great Vehicle tradition and one of the most popular prayers in that tradition—for example, it is recited every day without fail by most Tibetans.  Note that it is very important for Mahamudra and Dzogchen practitioners; in Tibet the Great Vehicle prayers are considered to be a very important part of the higher practices.

Samantabhadra’s Prayer is actually the conclusion to an amazing sutra that exposes the mind-blowing, cosmically vast capabilities of the tenth level bodhisatva Samantabhadra.  The author of the book translated the sutra including the prayer and then read over twenty commentaries to the prayer, Indian and Tibetan, in order to unravel the depths of the its meaning.

The outcome was a very large book containing an extensive introduction, the sutra, the prayer, and many commentaries, including a very large commentary by the author himself that gathers together all the information from the many commentaries he studied.  The book was split it into two volumes for convenience and reduction of cost.  Both volumes contain the same introduction and translations of the sutra but each volume contains different commentaries to the prayer.