What Is on My Shelf

People write and ask what to read. This is an honest attempt.

I will name the books actually on my shelf — the ones I go back to — in a rough order of usefulness for someone beginning. I will note where a book is difficult, where I have failed to finish it, and roughly where I would place it in the sequence.

I will not list everything I own. I will list what I have read enough of to recommend. My teacher’s own published writing is a separate note at the end.

The first book

The Dhammapada.

The Buddha’s own words, gathered as verses. If you have read nothing else, read this first. The Fronsdal translation reads well. Bhikkhu Bodhi is standard. Toporov’s Russian edition is available.

It is short. Read a section over a cup of tea. Come back to it a year later. It was the first book that stayed with me after the Buddhist Leadership Exchange Program in Thailand in 2010, and it is still what I go back to when the ground needs a reset. There is a copy on the console of the boat most nights.

Second

Patrul Rinpoche, The Words of My Perfect Teacher.

A nineteenth-century Nyingma manual of the Longchen Nyingtik preliminaries, written by one of the greatest teachers of the tradition for students in exactly the situation of a Western beginner. Padmakara’s English is the standard. First edition HarperCollins 1994; the widely-available Shambhala reprint came in 1998; Yale republished it in 2010. Any of them is fine. Russian editions exist.

Read slowly. One chapter over a week is not too slow. I have been through it several times and each pass has yielded something I missed.

Third

Śāntideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva (Bodhicaryāvatāra).

An eighth-century Sanskrit text, memorised in every Tibetan tradition, and the classical presentation of bodhicitta, the six perfections, and the emptiness view. This is the text I keep next to the coffee in the morning. Padmakara reads smoothly; Crosby and Skilton at Oxford is more scholarly.

Read the sixth chapter — on patience — and the seventh — on diligence — twice a year. Both continue to do work in me.

Fourth

Gampopa, The Jewel Ornament of Liberation.

A twelfth-century systematic presentation of the whole path — from the ground of practice to the fruit. A Kagyu text, not a Nyingma one, but every serious Tibetan practitioner reads it because the structure is so complete and the writing so lucid. Reads faster than Longchenpa and, in some ways, prepares the reader for him. Konchog Gyaltsen’s translation for Snow Lion (1998) is standard.

Longchenpa

A life-long project rather than a book on a reading list.

Everything Richard Barron has translated from him — The Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding, the Chöying Dzö, others — is worth having. The Way of Abiding is often the entry point; the Chöying Dzö is by some readers considered his philosophical masterpiece. I have both on the shelf and I am not close to finishing either. Come back to Longchenpa slowly, over years. He is not the sort of writer you finish.

Two books for the human texture

Nyoshul Khenpo Jamyang Dorje, A Marvelous Garland of Rare Gems: Masters of Awareness in the Dzogchen Lineage.

Biographies of the masters of the whole Dzogchen lineage — not only Longchen Nyingtik, though the LN holders are prominent. Read for the specific human beings — how they lived, what they practised, how the transmissions actually happened between them. It reframes what the tradition is doing.

Tulku Thondup, Masters of Meditation and Miracles.

A companion biographical volume focused on the Longchen Nyingtik lineage. Tulku Thondup writes carefully. He also has a separate book, Incarnation: The History and Mysticism of the Tulku Tradition of Tibet (Shambhala 2011), the fairest treatment of the tulku institution I have found in English.

For the outside view

Sam van Schaik, Tibet: A History (Yale, 2011).

Because it is useful to read the institutional history of Tibetan Buddhism from someone who is not selling the tradition. Van Schaik is a Tibetologist, not a devotee. His shorter companion, The Spirit of Tibetan Buddhism (Yale, 2016), is a good general introduction to the philosophical shape of the tradition.

For the everyday mind

Bhante Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English.

A Theravada teacher writing plainly about breath meditation and the basic mechanics of mindfulness. Non-sectarian; useful across schools. I read it early on for the same reason I recommend it now — the plainness of the exposition.

About my teacher’s own books

Most of what my teacher has written and taught in book form is in Tibetan and English, with translations into Chinese and other languages as the sanghas need. What is available in English tends to circulate through the sangha’s own channels rather than through commercial publishers. What I have of his sits on my shelf and I read as part of the practice, not as an entry into the tradition for a beginner.

If you develop a relationship with him, you will come into contact with the specific texts he asks his students to work with, when he asks you to work with them. Until then, the reading listed above — the classical texts he himself teaches from — is the correct preparation.

How to read

Slowly. Not strictly in order — the order is a suggestion. Not competitively. Not for the sake of having read them.

I would rather someone spent two years on the Dhammapada or on Patrul Rinpoche and used it in practice than had a bookshelf of everything above and referenced none of it. Reading is not practice. Reading is what makes practice legible when it happens.

If you are drawn to the tradition and do not yet have a teacher, the Dhammapada is where I would begin. Everything else builds from there.

— Оргьен Йентен Дордже