Dissertation Reviews features Lama Willa’s work
The website Dissertation Reviews has a feature on Lama Willa’s “Secrets of the Vajra Body”
By Jenny Bright
Published: April 14, 2014
Willa Miller’s dissertation focuses on Yang dgon pa Rgyal mtshan dpal’s (1213-1258) Explanation of the Hidden Vajra Body (Rdo rje lus kyi sbas bshad), and provides Buddhist and Tibetan studies scholars a rare portrait of a tantric soteriology that positions the human body from its coarse to subtle levels as the basis, path, and fruit of Buddhist enlightenment. Buddhist doctrine normally places the mind as the primary basis for cultivation, but in an important move, Miller focuses on the extraordinary and unique emphasis of the body, and its radical inseparability from the mind and speech in Yang dgon pa’s work. To do this, Miller meticulously parses and explores the pivotal and multivalent term, dngos po’i gnas lugs, broadly meaning in Yang dgon pa’s theorizations “the entire situation of human embodiment.”
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