Loden Sherap Dagyab - Buddhist Symbols in Tibetan Culture : An Investigation of the Nine Best-Known Groups of Symbols

THE DHARMA WHEEL. THE QUEENS EARRINGS.

THE FUR-BEARING FISH. THE ENDLESS KNOT.

TIBETAN BUDDHISM IS FILLED WITH RICH, COLORFUL

SYMBOLS, BUT WHAT DO THEY ALL MEAN?

In this fascinating study, Dagyab Rinpoche not only explains the nine best-known groups of Tibetan Buddhist symbols, but also shows how they serve as bridges between our inner and outer worlds. As such, they can be used to point the way to ultimate reality and to transmit a reservoir of deep knowledge formed over thousands of years.

Symbolism is the language of the human spirit, and this book is the most systematic study of its Tibetan idiom that has yet appeared.

Huston Smith, author of The Illustrated Worlds Religions

This timely book preserves something very valuable symbols as the visible manifestation of the psyche. The author deserves our thanks. Highly recommended. Herbert Guenther, author of The Dawn of Tantra

Fills a long-felt gap in the study of Tibetan art and symbols in English.

The Tibet Journal

As Dagyab Rinpoche defines each symbol, he further illuminates the concepts inherent to Tibetan Buddhism which are, in their earthly manifestations, voluptuously visible. Booklist

Born in Tibet, HIS EMINENCE LODEN SHERAP DAGYAB RINPOCHE immigrated in the 1960s to Germany, where he now lives and teaches Tibetan and Buddhist studies at the University of Bonn.

Table of Contents

Contents

(the Sword, the Hide, the Good House, the Garment, the Garden, the Seat, the Shoes)

(the Unicorn, the Elephants Tusks, the Kings Earrings, the Queens Earrings, the Crossed Gems, the Three-Eyed Gem, the Eight-Branched Coral)

(the Rock of Long Life, the Water of Long Life, the Tree of Long Life, the Man with Long Life, the Birds of Long Life, the Antelope of Long Life)

(the Mirror, the Lute, the Incense Vessel, the Fruit, the Silk)

(the Partridge, the Hare, the Monkey, the Elephant)

(the Eight-legged Lion, the Fur-Bearing Fish, the Makara Crocodile)

Foreword

I am honored and delighted to write a note about this wonderful and useful book on Buddhist symbols by my old friend, the Venerable, I have to say, Dagyab Rinpoche. Though I have known Rinpoche for thirty-one years, in this book I hear for the first time his strong authorial voice. I have kept up with his works, but due to my poor German, I could not hear him as well in that language; he is of course fully proficient in it. Now, thanks to this excellent English translation, I can hear him clear as a bell.

Though he purports to be about the modest business of elucidating common symbols in Tibetan culture the Eight Symbols of Good Fortune and so on, he simply and powerfully puts forward a theory of reality, a vision of life and its real purpose, and then fits his task into this big picture and bold design. He accomplishes these noble tasks with lucidity and sincerity, and with a light touch of ironic humor that leaves the reader in a pleasant space of lightness and ease. I am impressed.

Rinpoche gives a clear picture of the Tibetan scientific description of reality as being empty of intrinsic existence, which means that each thing lacks isolatable essence, existing only as utterly interrelated with every other thing. He evokes for us how different that is from the real-time space and gravity of the Western materialist reality, where each ego and thing stands atomistically as a thing-in-itself. He shows us that acknowledgment of such a reality gives Tibetans, whether consciously or unconsciously, a sense of freedom in their way of being, in the sense that an empty, desubstantialized, thoroughly relativistic reality has room for the various conventional realities of different people. The Tibetan view is thus not nihilistic, but is a profound insight that underlies a rich creativity.

He then introduces an entirely new dimension by employing the Indo-Tibetan concept of ch (Tib. bcud), meaning literally essence, but used untranslated by Rinpoche to convey something like quality, energy, orgone, zest, zing, heart, or even soul. In all my years of working with Tibetan thought, I have not heard this term ch used so creatively by anyone else. It seems utterly appropriate! He perfectly captures the rich, colorful, invigorating flair of Tibetan life with his description of the presence of this essence, quality, soul which saturates it. And he gently reflects to us the utter lack of it in most corners of our drag, humdrum, industrial life-world. In this way he solves the dilemma of how to imagine old Tibet, the civilization that materialists and modernizers describe as backward, feudal, superstitious, religious to a fault, and spiritualists and romanticizers describe as a primitive paradise, Shangrila, spiritually sophisticated, and deeply devout. Old Tibet was a human society, and had its faults, no doubt, yet its people were mostly friendly, cheerful, in touch with the unseen and yet vitally alive and zestfully earthy. The point is, they could cope with hardship, imperfect infrastructure, imperfect people and institutions, and still love their way of life.

They have certainly shown they can cope with the most horrible kind of oppression modernity has frequently dished out homicidal invasion, spiriticidal thought-reform, exocidal exploitation, ethnocidal colonization, and genocidal assimilation. They continue to suffer this kind of treatment to this very day yet they remain, for the most part, nonviolent, hopeful, cheerful, and constructive; they meaning from His Holiness the Dalai Lama or Dagyab Rinpoche in exile down to the simplest peasant woman, driver, nomad child, or beggar in Tibet. They seem to maintain some touch with essence energy. Maos worst efforts at thought-reform, civilizational lobotomy, failed to eradicate the Tibetan heart and soul.

So Tibetans must have something subtle which we generally lack, something good we are attracted to and which perhaps might even be vitally important for us to restore soul-quality to our postmodern lives of not so quiet desperation. Rinpoche suggests this more indirectly than I do here many tribes that are letting the Tibetan holocaust continue in its latest modality. A purpose of our lives is, if not to attain the unlimited wisdom and satisfaction of full enlightenment, at least to recover the essence in life, convince ourselves that it really is worth living, and therefore that we should make the effort to stop the mechanical processes we have unleashed that will definitely soon make life unlivable on this planet for everyone, including other animals with the other humans.

Here fits the purpose of this book on Buddhist symbols. Something about the Tibetan way of imagining their lives is precious. In the ultimate voidness of free reality, Tibetans have long been steeped in the nonconventional tantras or spiritual technologies of creating more enjoyable realms of living. The key tool of this continuous reinvention of viable life-realms is the symbol. In Rinpoches lucid image, it is the catalyst in the holographic component that builds up the positive, the beautiful, the good. So Rinpoche gives us a catalog of these tools, the Eight Symbols, the Eight Bringers of Good Fortune, the Seven Jewels, the Secondary Jewels, and so forth, up to the my favorite, a bit of Tibetan imaginative genetic engineering the Three Symbols of Victory in the Fight against Disharmony (the eight-legged lion, the fur-bearing fish, and the sea-monster conch). He gives us a subtle set of keys to personal good fortune and a more livable society.