Advice from a Yogi

This new translation of Padampa Sangye's One Hundred Verses, beautifully rendered into English, provides timely guidance for people trying to practice the Buddhist path in the workaday world.

This commentary on Padampa Sangye's classic verses of advice to Tibetan villagers of Dingri by the renowned and beloved meditation master Khenchen Thrangu offers guidance for people trying to practice the Buddhist path in the midst of a busy life. These hundred verses, studied for centuries by Tibetans and students of Buddhism, contain all the elements of the Tibetan Buddhist path. Khenchen Thrangu's lively explication of each stanza brings to light their subtleties and amplifies their relevance to our lives. These two venerable teachers show us that being mindful of the truth of impermanence and the inescapability of death is the key to working with everyday difficulties such as loneliness, craving, family squabbles, competition in business, disagreements with neighbors, and betrayal by friends—as challenging to us now as they have been to meditators for centuries.

About the Authors

Padampa Sangye was an eleventh-century Indian yogi and spiritual master (also known as Kamalashila) who traveled widely throughout his life and brought Indian Buddhist teachings to China and Tibet. Best known as Machig Labdron's teacher, he is counted as a lineage guru by all schools of Tibetan Buddhism and is even asserted in the Tibetan tradition to have been the legendary Bodhidharma.

Khenchen Thrangu was born in Tibet in 1933. He founded numerous monasteries and nunneries, schools for Tibetan children, and medical clinics. He has taught extensively throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States and is the abbot of Gampo Abbey. He was appointed by the Dalai Lama to be the personal tutor for the Seventeenth Karmapa.