The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-Seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva

I love searching for esoteric, somewhat rare and texts that hit the truth or the nail on the head. This is one of my favorite books I have found that does that and I have had a library of over 100 hindu and buddhist texts. In my opinion a must buy for someone on this path. Plus listening to the wisdom of a renunciate on this level is a blessing.

This is one of the most classic and complete Dharma works that emerged from the purest Tibetan Buddhism. It is one of my favorite books which I reread every so often rediscovering it with renewed enthusiasm and devotion. Together with the medium Bhavanakrama of Pandit Kamalashila and the Bodhicharyavatara of Shantideva, these are the teachings that every aspiring Bodhisattva must learn and practice every day. The text is a comprehensive manual step-by-step, Gyaltse Thokgme designed it based on the Bodhicharyavatara. Maybe if I could ask something more it would be add a bit of Madhyamaka, but in the final stages the highest vision of the Prajàparamita is implicit.I am eternally grateful to the Bodhisattva Gaylse Thokme as well as Kyabje Dilgo Kyentse Rinpoche for writing such a vibrant and abundant Dharma commentary. May this training keep benefiting people of future generations.

Khyentse Rinpoche's depth of knowledge concerning the Dharma stands out from page one of this book. He quotes a lot from Shantideva's: The Way of the Bodhisattva (the 37 verses he writes on are a summary of this text). The book is full of quotes from other masters like Padmasambava and Patrul Rinpoche--so thick with information that I know I will re-read it again in the future. As I read through this book and saw pictures of this man, I feel that he was a living embodiment of compassion and wisdom. One of my favorite parts of the book was when he explained how people who harm us (physically or mentally) should actually be regarded as precious teachers who show us the way to living more gently and compassionately. These situations can actually be a doorway for us to let go of our own pride and anger. "The lowest seat is the seat of the saints."-Patrul RinpocheI strongly recommend this book to spiritual warriors wanting to live in a more ethical way.

Great Book! I didn't expect this book to have so much Gnosis but it did. And, he said, we are the #1. Beneficiaries of Compassion. Cause & Affect...

This book will really help you define what compassion truly is.

Very sisinct rephrasing of the overall teaching in my limited knowledge and understanding.Read in conjunction with the tibetan book of living and dying, they formed for me a compaion to what my unskilled, but very directed, meditation was leading me to.It was a breath of fresh air after several months of ungroundedness, and worry that i had fully lost my mind, turns out it was all great, i just was drawn down a path with out clear direction, now i have been lead to that part of the knowledge as well and progress is better than ever.

The layout takes the 37 Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattava and creates a learning field with Dilgo Khyentse's commentary. His warmth and wit provides a fertile ground for growth in a Buddhist practitioner's life. I found the teachings to be inspiring and very practical. Rinpoche provides applicable remedies for everyday experiences and situations. His warmth and humor provide inspiration and motivation to apply the practices to our daily lives. The depth and knowledge to be discovered within this text is profound. The Appendices provide more detailed information as well as a helpful Notes section, bibliography and an index.

If you are a Dharma practitioner or would like to begin moving onto that path, this book is an invaluable guide and resource. I've been practicing for over 45 years and I still find the teachings in this book to be powerful, relevant and timely. Khyentse Rinpoche was a highly realized master.

"The 37 practices of the Bodhisattvas" is a (very) compact poetic outline of the "Mahayana" ("great vehicle") Buddhist spiritual quest. Like the "Hinayana" ("small vehicle") the Mahayana is about the liberation of the practitioner from the conditionings of ordinary life, but the Mahayana explicitly sees this effort as a means to an end, the end being to achieve ability to help all sentient (human and other) beings to reach liberation. The Mahayana practitioner, or Bodhisattva, will not consider him/herself relieved of his/her obligation to accomplish efforts to work for the good of all beings as long (how many lives this may take is of no importance) as not all of them have achieved liberation from the shackles of conditioned existence.The "37 practices", composed by a Tibetan Grand Master in the 14th century A.D., is very compact (37 four line stanzas, in addition to a few introductory and concluding ones). The general reader will often have the impression that the Master starts a stanza by stating some premises, and then proceeds to a conclusion without providing much more than rather elusive hints at the intellectual path between the two (which probably did not matter much for him, since, in Buddhism and especially Tibetan Buddhism, "understanding" is more a matter of experiencing reality than of reasoning your way to it). He takes a lot for granted and assumes that his reader understands what he has in mind, which his Tibetan readers at the time probably did, sharing a cultural background that is largely unfamiliar to us. This even translates into syntactic and morphological short-circuits: sentences without a verb, or missing the equivalent of conjunctions and prepositions supposed to indicate relationships between words and phrases... even words denoting two opposite or complementary concepts contracted into one word (say, to give an idea of what might be an equivalent in English: "negsuff" for "negativity and suffering"). Although the trained reader is expected to fill-in all gaps and elucidate all abstruse formulations, well, most of us are not trained readers by the Master's standards.The "37 practices" are often used as a textbook for beginning students of classical Tibetan (including your reviewer), and you will hardly be surprised to hear that we find it very hard to understand, let alone translate it. Those who do not know any Tibetan at all may settle directly for a translation, and then, since not everything in any translation of such a rich and compact text is ever likely to be perfectly clear, another translation, only to be left wandering whether a few stanzas are really translations of the same text.Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who has a long experience of teaching Buddhism to Westerners, takes the reader through this text, stanza after stanza, providing not only explanations, but also telling examples and illustrations. Going beyond the text, he gives clear and synthetic definitions, again with examples and illustrations, of basic general Buddhist and specific Mahayana notions: Karma, Bodhisattvas, refuge, the three jewels and the three roots, and many more, to which the poem often refers in an elliptic way (always assuming that, of course, the reader knows all about that).Dilgo Khyentse's fluent style, often enlivened by a touch of humour, gives a glimpse of a wise and warm-hearted Master, a hallmark of Tibetan Buddhism. "The Heart of Compassion" is a valuable companion to a most fundamental text of Tibetan Buddhism.Frédéric RenardBrussels, Belgium

This book was recommended as part of a course I am studying, it is very easy to follow yet full of extremely important Dharma teaching. I highly recommend if you are seriously wanting to learn the Dharma authentically.

This is an incredibly beautiful book. Dilgo is the man!

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant !!!

This is a bedside table book and can be used ongoing for going that step further. Just super.