not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. Prior to summarizing Vimalamitra’s namtar, allow me to first present a short quote from the American philosopher/novelist David Foster Wallace (1962–2008), who, before tragically taking his own life, may have been imploring students to save their own during his famous graduation commencement speech at Kenyon College: If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying or miserable. We need to refrain from unthinkingly grafting our own versions of history, biography, time, space, and religious experiences onto an entirely different world. As students of religion, we need to be more careful when attempting to understand Tibetan literature. Samuel’s summary of our struggles with understanding Tibetan history is illuminating in its simplicity: it points out the obvious. They are not part of a world based on such sequences” (1993, 296). ![]() As the anthropologist Geoffrey Samuel (1946–) explains in Civilized Shamans: “Constantly reincarnating do not fit comfortably into a linear historical sequence, but there is no reason why they should. Tibetan Buddhists live in a cosmology and maintain a worldview that cannot be easily fit into the standard Western definitions of scientific materialism.
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