The Lotus-Born

How often do you hear the story of a man who was immaculately born from within a lotus flower with a thousand petals, in the middle of a lake, having been sent as a meteor from the heart of the Boudha of Boundless light? Lotus-Born is the fabulous story of the mystic, master scholar, and outrageous yogi, Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born, who grew up an adopted prince, was banished, burned at the stake in a neighboring kingdom, and continued miraculously unscathed, wandering through cemeteries, dancing on corpses, and proceeded to live more than five hundred years. He is regarded by the most sane Tibetans as a real, historical figure, the founder of Buddhism in Tibet where he subjugated demons and taught the Buddha's teachings.

The complete story of how Buddhism was planted in Tibet is available in English for the first time with the publication of this book. Lotus-Born is a translation of a biography of the great master recorded in the ninth century by his foremost Tibetan disciple, the princess Yeshe Tsogyal. Many of these biographies were concealed as terma treasures to protect them against the changes of time.

Autorentext

Author:
Yeshe Tsogyal, Princess of Kharchen, was Padmasambhava's chief disciple. He recorded Padmasabhava's oral teachings in coded language called dakini script and concealed for centuries.

Translator:
Erik Hein Schmidt (also known under his pen name Erik Pema Kunsang) is known as one of the world's most gifted interpreters of Tibetan into English. Traveling to Nepal from his native Denmark at 20, he has studied with or translated for more than 60 Tibetan masters. He is the compiler of a voluminous 3,000-page Tibetan dictionary for spiritual terms (The Rangjung Yeshe Tibetan-English Dictionary of Buddhist Culture), used by other Tibetan translators as an authoritative reference.

He has translated 40 books and six published with Shambhala Publications. For two decades, Erik has traveled the world translating for Tibetan lamas; it was his voice tens of thousands heard. In recent years he has led tours to Tibet for Shambhala Publications, conducted workshops in the U.S. and Europe, and made television and radio appearances in the U.S. and Europe. Erik has been featured in Tricycle: The Buddhist Magazine, as well as in publications in many other countries. Erik works with his wife and editor Marcia, publisher of their own imprint, Rangjung Yeshe Publications (www.rangjung.com).