November 15 · 2:00 PM UTC

For our November Text of the Month, KVP translator Lopön Sonam Jamtsho will teach on Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo’s Stairway to Liberation: A Spontaneous Vajra Song Summarizing How to Practice.

We chose this text to commemorate the auspicious month in which Lhabab Düchen falls, the day that marks the Buddha’s return from the god realms by a stairway the gods had built for his descent. Khyentse Wangpo’s vajra song offers practitioners a stairway of their own, rising in a few short verses from the preliminaries to the generation and completion stages. The text contains practice instructions for daily activities, including falling asleep, dreaming, waking, and offering food and drinks as a feast.

Originally from Bhutan, Sonam completed nine years of study at Dzongsar Shedra before turning to Indology and Tibetology at the University of Hamburg, where he recently finished a doctoral dissertation on Tibetan Buddhist epistemology and now serves as a Research Associate. Alongside his work as one of our in-house translators, he acts as an expert traditional scholar, advising the team on source texts, difficult translation points, and Buddhist philosophy. He also interprets for lamas and khenpos and teaches the shedra curriculum at Dharma centers in Germany.

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