The Mind: A Tibetan Buddhist View

Sogyal Rinpoche will speak on the concept of transforming the mind in Tibetan Buddhism at Stanford University.

In Buddhist teachings, mind is understood as the most important factor in determining our happiness or suffering. In fact, the entire teaching of the Buddha can be summed up in the single line: “to transform this mind of ours.” The key to transforming the mind is understanding what the essence or nature of mind really is, beyond the ordinary appearances of our thoughts and emotions. If we can recognize this most subtle and profound nature of our mind, it will have an extraordinary impact on how we relate to ourselves and others and so make an enormous positive contribution to the world at large.

Sogyal Rinpoche is the founder and spiritual director of Rigpa, an international network of Buddhist centres. He has been teaching for over thirty years and continues to travel widely in Europe, America, Australia, and Asia. He is the author of the well-known work The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. More than two million copies have been printed in fifty-six countries and in thirty-one languages.

Born in Kham in Eastern Tibet, Sogyal Rinpoche was recognized at an early age as the incarnation of a great master and visionary saint of the nineteenth century, Tertön Sogyal Lerab Lingpa (1856-1926), a teacher to the thirteenth Dalai Lama. He received the traditional training of a Tibetan lama under the close supervision of Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö, one of the most outstanding spiritual masters of the twentieth century, who raised Rinpoche like his own son.

He went on to study with many other great masters, of all schools of Tibetan Buddhism, especially Kyabjé Dudjom Rinpoche and Kyabjé Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. In 1971, Rinpoche went to England, where he also studied Comparative Religion at Cambridge University.