Customer Reviews

Glimpses of Abhidharma: From a Seminar on Buddhist Psychology

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I read this book a long time ago. The Abhidharma consists of three "heaps". One is Psychology. Trungpa was at his very best when this book recorded some of his lectures. And it is "greatly" underrated. He covers pieces of the Abhidharma like a wizard. Each lecture is followed by a question and answer period. So it's really great. One question was what people who were really nuts could do for their pain. Trungpa replied that getting anchored in the body, at what he calls "the animal realm", will help greatly. Years after reading this, I was leading a Codependents Anonymous meeting. One lady had just been diagnosed as a manic-depressive (no, this is not "nuts"). When my turn came, I suggested that anybody who is zippering off into outer space would usually benifit by manual labor. Such as doing the laundry or washing the dishes. When her turn came again, she said that was exactly what she was going to do (crosstalk is not allowed). I learned this from Trungpa. He also was very much against labeling people this-or-that. In this book, when he was forced by the audience to speak about insanity, he did so in a way that made it sound like insane people were egomaniacs like the rest of us. But so much so that they "spin off". He describes the two forms in which he believed this happens. I have not looked at this book in 15 years. But it is very good. Perhaps Trungpa's most concise work ever. Please buy it and read it. It really strikes deep into the heart of Buddhist Psychology. Thank you.

In Glimpses Of Abhidharma, Buddhist mediation master and scholar Chogyam Trungpa discusses the development of ego as it is explained in the "Abhidharma", a collection of Buddhist scriptures which investigates the workings of the mind and the states of human consciousness. A provocative interpretation of ego and psychology, Glimpses Of Abhidharma reveals the practice of mediation within the Buddhist tradition to be an effective means of enabling us to see our psychological situation clearly and directly. Glimpses Of Abhidharma is an imposing and highly recommended addition to Buddhist scholarship.

If you want to read a Trungpa book, I would suggest Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism or The Myth of Freedom. This book has a few good tidbits on the skandhas, but that's about it.

The question-and-answer sections at the end of each chapter did nothing for me, Trungpa's style is not up to his usual standard of clarity and straightforwardness, and I got the strong sense that I was being given an extremely dumbed-down, Cliff's-notes version of Abhidharma/Abhidhamma.

Worth borrowing, definitely, but not particularly worth buying.