
3. Refuge and Bodhicitta
4. Seven Branch Practice
5. Honouring true value
These recordings are now available from the drop down menu under Audio/Video on the menubar.
You can read more about the book and its contents, and find out about dohas here
Below is my review for browsers on Amazon:
‘It’s a heart’s delight to read, speak and resonate with these Songs of Realisation… and to appreciate the integrity of their expression.
It seems to me that translating these songs requires facility in both of the languages used – for accuracy, a poetic appreciation and expression – for flavour and flow, and ideally realisation of the actual for the feeling tone – to reflect most fully the truth which is being gestured towards.
There is no doubt in my mind that the dohas and texts in this book are a clear and true representations of the original expression of the Mahasiddhas… and James Low’s introduction, with its advice on how to approach the contents, is invaluable – a plain-song doha – key to receiving the treasures within.
With this, having left our intellectual glasses at the gate, we are welcomed as though into an exquisite garden where images of great beauty… and variegated blooms of profound truth, shimmering and radiant with clarity… manifest with each turn of the page. Their scent, rare yet pervasive, is of cloyless emptiness…
This book costs about £16, enough for a gorgeous bunch of flowers…which will eventually decay, smell rank, and fade away.
Whereas the blooms in the book open… whenever you open to them…
it’s more than a bargain!’
‘This early Buddhist account of the rise of a demonic dictator helps to illuminate how the will to power can bring misery to many as with the current political situation in the Ukraine’.
This is the introduction on the simply being.co.uk website.
The book compellingly draws us into a portrayal of the originating factors for the resultant mayhem and the arising of buddhas… manifesting as required and as requested, to overcome the destructive power of ignorance.
This is an extraordinary book. Having read the account as given by James in a teaching some twenty years ago and more recently the full translation of the text from the Tibetan – which is found in the book ‘This is it’ – I was unprepared for the impact of this presentation… which takes it to another dimension!
James’ absorbing re-telling powerfully grips the attention and the illustrations by Diana Collins are a perfect counterpart. Ranging from the grotesque to the sublime they give shape to the words and transform the book into an immersive and visceral experience.
The wrathful power of the buddhas is situationally evoked by the escalating horrors perpetrated though a self-serving misunderstanding of profound teaching.
Resting in awareness there is no grasping, but in ignoring awareness and relying on thoughts – which relate to the falsity of ‘me’ as the central referent – there is grasping and no rest…
…and this grasping does not ease the anxious tension which arises with the false position…but exacerbates it!
As with compulsively scratching an itch…eventually inflammation, infection, and poisoning radiate from this… and when systemic – ignorance – the source of this, won’t be cured by easing balms and lotions…
A ‘tour de force’…an expression from the heart of the buddhas!