Keith Dowman - 2010 - Maya Yoga - Longchenpa's Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment (106p).pdf

Keith Dowman - 2010 - Maya Yoga - Longchenpa's Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment (106p).pdf

Paperback: 110 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (August 16, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1500741264
ISBN-13: 978-1500741266

Maya Yoga is the title of Keith Dowman’s translation of Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment composed by the inimitable Longchen Rabjampa. In the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism this text is considered second to none in its power to evoke the nature of the nondual reality of the Dzogchen view. With poetic mastery Longchenpa provides the precepts that can instantly illuminate the buddha-reality that is our ordinary everyday experience. He asserts that we are presently under the spell of magical illusion and that by recognizing it, we are instantaneously released from a conceptual cage into an enchanting reality which is pure pleasure itself. That reality is maya, apparent yet absent, and the recognition of it in the state of natural relaxation is maya yoga. In this renowned atiyoga manual, we find the key to the natural mystical state that Dzogchen, the Great Perfection, constantly evokes. This is the 2014 American Edition, comprising a improved second edition of the work. Longchen Rabjampa (1308-1363) was the greatest of Tibet’s celebrated mystical poets and sages. The Trilogy of Finding Comfort and Ease is his most renowned work. Keith Dowman is a peripatetic scholar, translator, teacher and yogi in the Dzogchen tradition.

Another slender text by Keith Dowman in which size belays significance. Maya, translated as illusion, comes in eight forms in this elaboration of a Longchenpa text. The author says he makes no apology for it, and indeed he should not. In our materialist realm it’s great to find a writing that loosens thinking about the reality we confuse as solid form. The text has a fine introduction and then goes through Longchenpa’s analogies of illusions with his meditation on each. As a bonus Keith Dowman has added an appendix with two new analogies he feels are applicable for the 21st century. They are. Don’t hesitate to add this slim volume to your Dzogchen collection and refer back to it whenever you start to believe what you see is real.

About the Author
Keith Dowman (born 1945) is an English Dzogchen teacher and translator of Tibetan Buddhist texts.

Dowman travelled to India and Nepal in 1966 where he practiced Sanatam Dharm with Ganesh Baba (Shri Mahant Ganesh Giriji Maharaj) and Vipassana meditation with the Indian Theravadin teacher Anagarika Munindra. After connecting with Tibetan Buddhism he met and trained under many Tibetan masters, including his root Gurus Dudjom Rinpoche Jigdral Yeshe Dorje and Kanjur Rinpoche Longchen Yeshe Dorje. He lived near these masters in Darjeeling, West Bengal, for many years. He studied the Tibetan language at Queens College, Sanskrit University, in Varanasi, India, under Lama Jamspal. In 1973, at the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California, his translations were first published under the auspices of Tarthang Tulku, while he taught on Tibetan language at Sonoma State College. Dowman has written books and translations focusing on various aspects of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan culture including travel literature in particular on Buddhist Tantra and Dzogchen. In his later writings he has focused increasingly on Dzogchen and in particular on the works of the 14th Century Nyingma master scholar Longchenpa.