The Esoteric Community Tantra with the Illuminating Lamp

A new presentation of Tantra with its most renowned commentary by one of the foremost translator/scholar teams of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. This volume is a translation of the first twelve chapters of the Great King of Tantras, The Glorious Esoteric Community Tantra (Sri Guhyasamaja Maha-tantra-raja), along with the commentary called The Illuminating Lamp (Pradipoddyotana-nama-tika), a commentary in Sanskrit on this tantra by the Buddhist intellectual and tantric scholar-practitioner Chandrakirti in the second half of the first millennium. Regarded by Indo-Tibetan tradition as the esoteric scripture wherein the Buddha revealed the actual psycho-physical process of his enlightenment, The Esoteric Community Tantra is a preeminent text of the class of scriptures known to late first-millennium Indian Buddhist writers as great yoga tantra (mahayoga-tantra), and later to their Tibetan successors as unexcelled yoga tantra (anuttarayoga-tantra). The Illuminating Lamp presents a system of interpretive guidelines according to which the obscure meanings of the tantra might be extracted in order to engage its ritual and yogic practices taught therein. Applying its interpretive strategies to the text of The Esoteric Community Tantra, The Illuminating Lamp articulates a synthetic, "vajra vehicle" (vajrayana) discourse that locates tantric practices and ideals squarely within the cosmological and institutional frameworks of Mahayana Buddhism.