Tracing the Untraceable Buddha
The Vipassana Meditator's Journey to Enlightenment
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- 189,00 kr
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- 189,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
The essential teachings of the Buddha for students of vipassana meditation.
Born into a Bengali Buddhist family in 1915 and trained in Buddhist practice by the Burmese master Mahasi Sayadaw, Anagarika Munindra became a beloved and influential meditation teacher who contributed significantly to the dawn of Western Buddhism and the insight (vipassana) meditation movement. He taught many Western students in the 1960s and 1970s, and among them was Uffe Damborg, who lived with Munindra-ji in Bodh Gaya, India, for six years. Here, Damborg distills everything he learned from Munindra-ji and from his subsequent decades of practice and teaching to present the Theravada path of vipassana meditation in modern language.
Damborg unpacks the story of the Buddha’s spiritual journey and his core teachings on non-self, karma, perception, meditation, and the four noble truths—not as ideas to be intellectually understood but as meditative insights to be cultivated as one approaches the Buddhist goal of stream entry, a profound shift in consciousness that orients one’s life toward nibbana, or enlightenment. With reflections on Damborg’s formative years with Munindra-ji, whose teaching style emphasized direct experience over dogma, this uniquely personal work illuminates the path of vipassana meditation for beginners and experienced practitioners alike.
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Psychologist Damborg debuts with a comprehensive introduction to vipassana ("insight") meditation. Buddhism holds that suffering arises from life's inherent "changeability," meaning the self's relationship to its surroundings is constantly shifting "at the mercy of the relativizing conditions of causality and impermanence." According to vipassana, freedom can be found by gaining insight into that instability, allowing practitioners to sever attachment to the ego and reduce suffering. To practice this, readers should approach each fleeting moment as a window through which to contemplate the "profound implications of impermanence for our understanding of ourselves." (For example, practitioners can focus their awareness on the act of walking and accepting "the arising, changing, and cessation of each phase" of movement along with "the senses, thoughts, feelings, and states of mind" they provoke.) Damborg introduces readers to the doctrinal basis for this perspective with glosses on emptiness, karma, desire, and hatred, weaving in insights from psychology and the Buddha's spiritual journey. It makes for a dense but mostly lucid introduction to the tradition, even if some readers might struggle with more esoteric sections on topics like "paranormal memories of past lives," which the author suggests meditative states can sometimes provoke. Still, experienced practitioners will be edified.
