Robert Thurman - The Jewel Tree of Tibet: The Enlightenment Engine of Tibetan Buddhism

We held an inspired retreat a few years ago on the Tibetan distillation of the path of enlightenment, which seems, as I am getting older, to be all that I can get excited about continuing to learn myself or teach to others. It is so beautiful, so useful, covering all the important points and practices we need to master in order to make our precious human lives more meaningful, ultimately fruitful, and plain happier. We taped it for the folks at Sounds True, with the kind help of Tami Simon and her wonderful staff. Over the years, I have been pleased at the feedback I have gotten from people of all sorts that they find it inspiring and useful.

I did feel diffident about putting out my version of these teachings, when readers nowadays have access to original discourses on this tradition from His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself and numerous other respected Tibetan mentors. I am keenly aware that I am still learning these principles myself; I do not pretend to myself or to anyone else either to have achieved a real beginners mind or to have achieved the enlightenment of an expert sage.

The version of the stages of the path that I am using as root text here is the Fourth Panchen Lamas Mentor Devotion, a semiesoteric text, which is taught by mentors to advanced students along with initiations of various kinds. My reasons are fivefold: I just love that text, first of all. It highlights the central role that the lama, the spiritual mentor or teacher, plays in making the Tibetan approach to the path powerfully effective, by making the presence of the Three Jewels of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha alive and immediate to the practitioner. His Holiness the Dalai Lama allowed the publication of a brief teaching he gave on the text some years ago, so it is now acceptable to divulge this once guarded practice more generally. My way of explaining the text in the light of elements in Western culture that affect the way Westerners might approach it may provide a different kind of introduction to my fellow practitioners. And, because I have already presented it in tape form and people are finding it helpful, Im encouraged that the text might be helpful as well.

Therefore, when my friend Leslie Meredith suggested we turn the retreat into a book, I agreed with pleasure. I must thank Leslie first of all for her inspiration. My agent, Lynn Nesbit, as always, provided useful advice and practical help. Tami Simon, president of Sounds True, Inc., graciously agreed to participate in the project and coordinate it with the continuing audio publication. My son and colleague at Tibet House US, Ganden Thurman, helped me secure the initial transcription, which was lightly edited by my assistant, Dr. Jensine Andresen. Leslie again did an excellent editing at the next stage, and her assistant, Kit Frick, has been most helpful in the final polishing under the usual pressures. Any errors that remain are mine, of course.

As always, I gratefully thank my wife and inspiring muse, Nena, for her patience and encouragement.

Robert (Tenzin) Thurman

Ganden Dekyi Ling, Woodstock, New York

August 2004

This book began as an intensive retreat with a small group of students. It is a teaching on the steps on the path of enlightenment that is common to all the forms of Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetans have taken teachings from all kinds of Buddhism, especially those preserved and developed in India over fifteen hundred years before they traveled to Tibet. But there in Tibet, Buddhism was made into a systematic method for people to practice and perform in order to become perfectly enlightened in this life, or in a short number of lives, starting from wherever they started.

This is what well aim to practice on this retreat, on this quest for enlightenment in book form. Youll start wherever you are in your life, today. Well retreat into one of the greatest sacred wisdom texts of Tibetan knowledge of the soul, called The Devotion to the Mentor, in which a glorious wish-fulfilling gem tree is used to focus our minds. Were on a quest to contemplate this great text line by line, so that we come to understand its full, rich meaning, the brilliant reflections of its many facets guiding us, lighting up our awareness. And well take this awareness with us, out into the world, into our lives. It is a powerful text, just the reading of which has the capacity to lift you out of your individual self and into a perspective of unity, refreshing your individuality immeasurably. It will help you cultivate the sensitivity and appreciation to love more fully, feel compassion more intensely, and become a fountain of cheerfulness for all you meet and know.

The steps on the path of enlightenment in this text are a distillation of the vast profusion of healing techniques dispensed by the Shakyamuni Buddhathe historical Buddhato his many thousands of disciples, two thousand five hundred years ago. I first encountered The Devotion to the Mentor and the jewel tree, in this life, forty-two years ago, when I met the Very Venerable Geshe Wangyal at his monastery in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, which was in a little pink tract house on East Third Street in Freewood Acres. He read to me a version of this same enlightenment path, the way to a higher quality of being, that had been written by the great south Indian philosopher sage Nagarjuna in the second century C.E. Nagarjuna had written it as Letter from a Spiritual Friend to his friend and disciple the south Indian King Udayibhadra, whose name means King Happily Good.