Word: vajrayana
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Dates: during 1997-1997
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...most colorful of the three major Buddhist branches, however, was Vajrayana, the "Diamond Vehicle" adopted in Tibet in the 7th century. Instead of attaining complete enlightenment gradually, Tibetan monks claimed to do so in a single lifetime, an approach compared by Rick Fields, author of the American Buddhist history How the Swans Came to the Lake, to climbing the sheerest face of a Himalayan cliff: demanding and perilous. Unwilling to limit themselves to the standard tools--chanting and meditative breath-control techniques--the Vajrayana Buddhists employ an eclectic mix that includes religious visualizations, philosophical debate, ritual, yoga and the energies...
...Buddhism "out of an enormous sense of shame" over the Vietnam War and its images of monks setting themselves afire in protest. Others were in search of enlightenment that lasted longer than a tab of acid. Their quests seemed to end in Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a brilliant apostle of Vajrayana and part of the Tibetan diaspora. Trungpa's Naropa Institute in Denver, an eclectic colloquium of Eastern spiritual and Western intellectual cultures, constituted one of the great spiritual bazaars of the 1970s. One of its most popular courses, after Trungpa's dialogues with such people as Timothy Leary...
...approach seemed to work: Kornfield's meditation seminars with Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg in Barre, Mass., and at Spirit Rock in California, turned out thousands of graduates. Zendos began spreading to Middle America, and when Chogyam Trungpa died in 1987 at age 47, a contingent of lay American-born Vajrayana Buddhists was able to perform the funeral liturgy along with Tibetans. (Last year Naropa Institute became a fully accredited college for "contemplative studies...
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