Saraha

The life and works of the mysterious Indian yogin, Saraha, who has inspired Buddhist practitioners for over a thousand years. Saraha, 'the Archer,' was a mysterious but influential tenth-century Indian Buddhist tantric adept who expressed his spiritual realization in mystic songs (dohās) that are enlightening, shocking, and confounding by turns. Saraha's poetic verses made the esoteric ideas and practices of Vajrayāna accessible to a wide audience on the Indian subcontinent and served as a basis for the exposition, in Tibet, of mahāmudrā, the great-seal meditation on the nature of mind that permeates every tradition of Buddhism on the Tibetan plateau. This is the first book to attempt a thorough treatment of the context, life, works, poetics, and teachings of Saraha. It features a search for the 'historical' Saraha through evidence provided by our knowledge of the medieval Indian context in which he likely lived, the biographical legends that grew up around him in Tibet, and the works