Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness (Lives of the Masters)

The life and works of the mysterious Indian yogin, Saraha, who has inspired Buddhist practitioners for over a thousand years. Saraha, “the Archer,” was a mysterious but influential tenth-century Indian Buddhist tantric adept who expressed his spiritual realization in mystic songs ( dohās ) that are enlightening, shocking, and confounding by turns. Saraha’s poetic verses made the esoteric ideas and practices of Vajrayāna accessible to a wide audience on the Indian subcontinent and served as a basis for the exposition, in Tibet, of mahāmudrā, the great-seal meditation on the nature of mind that permeates every tradition of Buddhism on the Tibetan plateau. This is the first book to attempt a thorough treatment of the context, life, works, poetics, and teachings of Saraha. It features a search for the “historical” Saraha through evidence provided by our knowledge of the medieval Indian context in which he likely...