Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara by Ben Connelly

Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara by Ben Connelly

A practical guide to Vasubandhu's classic work Thirty Verses of Consciousness Only that can transform modern life and change how you see the world.

In this down-to-earth book, Ben Connelly sure-handedly guides us through the intricacies of Yogacara and the richness of the Thirty Verses. Dedicating a chapter of the book to each line of the poem, he lets us thoroughly lose ourselves in its depths. His warm and wise voice unpacks and contextualizes its wisdom, showing us how we can apply its ancient insights to our own modern lives, to create a life of engaged peace, harmony, compassion, and joy.

In fourth-century India one of the great geniuses of Buddhism, Vasubandhu, sought to reconcile the diverse ideas and forms of Buddhism practiced at the time and demonstrate how they could be effectively integrated into a single system. This was the Yogacara movement, and it continues to have great influence in modern Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only, or Trimshika, is the most concise, comprehensive, and accessible work by this revered figure.

Vasubandhu's Thirty Verses lay out a path of practice that integrates the most powerful of Buddhism's psychological and mystical possibilities: Early Buddhism's practices for shedding afflictive emotional habit and the Mahayana emphasis on shedding divisive concepts, the path of individual liberation and the path of freeing all beings, the path to nirvana and the path of enlightenment as the very ground of being right now. Although Yogacara has a reputation for being extremely complex, the Thirty Verses distills the principles of these traditions to their most practical forms, and this book follows that sense of focus; it goes to the heart of the matter--how do we alleviate suffering through shedding our emotional knots and our sense of alienation?

This is a great introduction to a philosophy, a master, and a work whose influence reverberates throughout modern Buddhism.

Ben Connelly is a Soto Zen priest in the Katagiri lineage training with Tim Burkett at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. Connelly began teaching at MZMC in 2006, was ordained in 2009, and was made shuso, or head monk, in 2012. Ben is also a professional musician and developed and leads Mindfulness in the Mountains backpacking/meditation retreats in Northwest Montana. He lives in Minneapolis, MN.

Taigen Dan Leighton (foreword) is a Dharma teacher in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, leads the Ancient Dragon Zen Gate in Chicago, and teaches online at the Berkeley Graduate Theological Union. He's the author of Faces of Compassion: Classic Bodhisattva Archetypes and Their Modern Expression and Zen Questions: Zazen, Dogen, and the Spirit of Creative Inquiry and is the editor and cotranslator of Dogen's Extensive Record.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781614292845
ISBN 10	1614292841
Title	Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara
Author	Ben Connelly
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Wisdom Publications,U.S.
Year published	2016-12-06
Number of pages	248
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.