Stairway to Liberation
Published on November 5, 2026
Our November Text of the Month is Stairway to Liberation: A Spontaneous Vajra Song Summarizing How to Practice—an essential set of instructions on the graduating levels of practice, from the preliminaries to the generation and completion stages, includes guidance on how to cultivate spiritual insight both during and after formal meditation sessions.
As one can infer from the title of this text, A Spontaneous Vajra Song Summarizing How to Practice, Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo here presents a spectrum of the most fundamental aspects of Tibetan Buddhist practice in a condensed form. It is written in a direct and accessible manner without much literary embellishment. It presents an essential set of instructions on the path toward enlightenment, understood by Tibetan Buddhists as including the three vehicles—namely, Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna—with graduating levels of practice.
This text is a vajra song (dorje lu), which is one of the most inspiring literary genres of Tibet’s spiritual legacy, descending from or at least inspired by the dohā tradition of Indian mystics. Not being constrained by the formal rules of poetic composition, vajra songs are differentiated from formal poetic verses by their freestyle expression. They showcase such characteristics as simplicity, directness, and spiritual depth.
Text of the Month with Lopön Sonam Jamtsho
November 15 · 2:00 PM UTC
To teach on this text we invited KVP translator Lopön Sonam Jamtsho. 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.
