“This volume is a feast for those interested in the traditional accounts of Sakya history. A clear and elegant translation adds to the joy of reading this work and difficulty to put it aside.”
The Amazing Treasury of the Sakya Lineage
Volume 1
Description
A lucid and landmark translation that offers an intriguing glimpse into Tibetan history, the Mongol Empire, and the spiritual development and remarkable lives of the early luminaries of the Sakya lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.
In this first of two volumes of The Amazing Treasury of the Sakya Lineage, translators Khenpo Kunga Sherab and Matthew W. King capture a truly remarkable period in Buddhist and Asian history. Here, Ameshab Ngakwang Kunga Sonam (1597–1659), a member of the Khon aristocracy and the twenty-seventh throne holder of Sakya Monastery, offers a narrative that recounts the lives of numerous iconic leaders of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism during the transformational period between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. This landmark volume reconstructs that long era of religious and political innovation and upheaval through the rise of the Mongol Empire.
In this book, you'll see how Sakya Buddhist leaders emerged in this early period as translators, adopters, arbiters, and innovators of newly circulating Indian Buddhist scholastic and tantric cultures. In the thirteenth century, when the Mongol Empire forever transformed medieval Eurasia, leaders of the Sakya school became confidants and tutors to some of its most powerful leaders. The biographies of numerous Sakya luminaries are retold here, like Sakya Pandita and Phakpa Lodro Gyaltsen; along with their Mongol contemporaries, Koden Ejen and Qubilai Qayan, these leaders laid the groundwork for forms of patronage, religious and political sovereignty, scholasticism and tantrism, and righteous rule that would endure for the next eight centuries down to today.
Reviews
"As the definitive genealogy of the Khön family from its legendary origins, and as one of the greatest historical masterpieces of the Sakya tradition, Ameshab’s book is a work of remarkable traditional scholarship. This volume is a noteworthy event in the translation into English of the Buddhist historical literature of Tibet.”
