Roger R. Jackson, "Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness" (Shambhala, 2024)

New Books in Indian Religions

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: Poet of Blissful Awareness (Shambhala, 2024) 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 attributed to him in Indic and Tibetan text collections; a consideration of the various guises in which Saraha appears in his writings (as poet, social and religious critic, radical gnostic thinker, and more); an overview of Saraha’s poetic and religious legacy in South Asia and beyond; and complete or partial translations, from Tibetan, of over two dozen works attributed to Saraha. These include nearly all his spiritual songs, from his well-known Dohā Trilogy to obscure but important expositions of mahāmudrā, as well as several previously untranslated works.

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