Robert Thurman’s Inside Tibetan Buddhism: Rituals and Symbols Revealed (Signs of the Sacred) is a book I stumbled on by pure chance. It’s a great coffee-table book style book which covers the basics of Tibetan Buddhism including a lot of great imagery. The book is a mix of pictures, diagrams, art, and practices which cover many of the basics. It doesn’t tell you why exactly the practice exists, but how the practice itself works.
This book is short, but has a great set of content to go alongside something else. Let’s see what it’s about, what it helps teach, and what it’s missing.
Contents
This book covers the basics of Tibetan Buddhism split into 5 sections. It covers The Turning of the Wheel, Taking Refuge, The Four Foundations, Tantric Empowerment, and The Ritual Calendar. The first chapter covers the basics of Buddhism. The second covers the concept of taking refuge and related practices.
The next section discusses what really separates Tibetan Buddhism from standard Mahayana Buddhism. The Four Foundations covers the preliminary practices which grow into the basics of tantra in the next chapter. Finally, the last chapter covers holidays and their impact on day to day life.
The text covers many key concepts. You won’t be an expert, but it will explain a lot of things which take other books far more paragraphs and pages to even introduce. The content is interesting because it answers so many questions I never knew I had.
This is more of a coffee-table style book so it’s a bit short. If you consolidated all of the text down, you’d probably have a good 20 pages of content at best. What makes this book shine is all of the imagery and how the text puts the imagery in context.
What Is It Good For?
If you read about Tibetan Buddhism, one thing which is common is complex visualizations about very specific deities, Buddhas, mandalas, etc. This book gives you a reference for a lot of these concepts which escape text. You have images of actual practice and rituals to draw on as well as idealized visualizations.
It spans exercises and rituals to general life. The imagery really helps to understand some of the concepts you read about more than any textual description could. Certain things simplify ideas in a way text just can’t. I originally just expected the book to look pretty and to get some visuals from it. It made a lot of things just make sense.
Limitations
This book doesn’t really stand on its own. You need to have some other exposure in order to make the most of this book. It feels like a beginner’s song book when you’re trying to first learn an instrument. Once you hit a certain level, every bit makes sense, but until then, it feels randomly selected.
This book covers the basics, but only at a surface level. Though the content is great for this type of book, it either stabs deep on one concept, or barely cuts the surface. As a whole, you don’t learn much from this book by itself; you learn when you read in conjunction with something else.
This seems like an odd selection for a coffee-table book, but it does make some degree of sense. Most of the content builds interest and excitement for a trivial reader, but it really doesn’t tell you much until you decide to proceed. The exercises are meaningless without an understanding of their implications.
Who Should Read This Book?
This book is good if you need some imagery and want to see certain things in action or if you are just interested in seeing some cool pictures and images and knowing what they mean. If you want to understand Tibetan Buddhism more, this book can flesh out the imagery or explanation for plenty of topics. You won’t get an encyclopedic knowledge, but you will understand the topics.
If you’re genuinely curious at either a cursory or practical level, you’ll get something out of this book. If you want something deep and involved, this probably isn’t the book for you. This book works as a catalyst, but does very little on its own. There is great content as a standalone book, but it doesn’t really make that much sense or mean that much to most people aside from surface level curiosity.
Conclusion
I absolutely love this book. It is meaningful as both a curio and as a more in depth look if you’re interested in Tibetan Buddhism. It doesn’t really stand alone except as a novelty, but it augments many other resources. I read this after An Open Heart and feel that it answered a lot of “what does this actually look like?” type questions I had. I didn’t even really know what to Google for most things though.
This book answers questions you didn’t know you had if you’re learning about Tibetan Buddhism, and overall looks great and is well put together if you just want something that looks cool. It’s out of print, but easy enough to find online. It’s cheap too. This is one of the better additions to my library I’ve stumbled onto.
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