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Realizing Emptiness: Madhyamaka Insight Meditation

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This book is the second collaboration between Gelukba scholar and meditator Gen Lamrimpa and B. Alan Wallace. The first, Calming the Mind, remains the single most helpful book on meditation practice that I have read. While that book focused on stablizing meditation called Calm Abiding, this book focuses on the discursive analytic meditation on empiness known as Special Insight. Also included are two very interesting brief essays on the Nyingma tantric meditation technique Dzog Chen.

Realizing Emptiness is a very technical work and will be of particular benefit to those who have some familiarity with Madhyamaka, especially the Gelukba formulation of this philosophy. For those who do this book is an absolute treasure. Realizing Emptiness fills a conspicuous void in the western scholarly discussion of Madhyamaka -- namely, it contains a valuable discussion about how it is that conceptual thought relates to afflictive ignorance. This occupies the first forty pages or so, and the rest of the book goes through the technique and reasonings on emptiness.