The Karmapas and Their Mahamudra Forefathers

With lively, engaging stories and exquisite portraits, this volume is sure to inspire.

“I believe the life a lama lives is the greatest instruction to the students who follow him or her. It is an instruction we can actually see. The lama's deeds display the Dharma in action for us. They can instruct our hearts with the fullness of lived experience. In the lama's actions we can observe how the mind turns to Dharma, and how that Dharma becomes a path. We can watch how the path eliminates confusion, and how confusion arises as wisdom.”
– H.H. the Seventeenth Karmapa

The Karmapas and Their Mahamudra Forefathers collects fascinating accounts of the lives of the Karmapas and of their forefathers in the Mahamudra practice lineage. Each story is accompanied by a beautiful, full-color illustration of its subject in the lineage, as depicted in the traditional style of Eatern Tibet used at the renowned Thrangu Tashi Yangtse Monastery in Nepal. 

Khenpo Sherap Phüntsok met Kyabjé Thrangu Rinpoche as a young boy and became a monk at Thrangu Rinpoche’s monastery. There he studied all aspects of ritual practice at the monastery and became a chant master. At the age of sixteen he entered Thrangu Rinpoche’s monastic college in Namo Buddha, Nepal, where he studied the curriculum of the Kagyü tradition. At the age of twenty-one, he was made an assistant teacher in 2001 by Kyabjé Thrangu Rinpoche and was awarded the title of Khenpo in 2003. In 2005, the Seventeenth Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje appointed Khenpo Sherap junior chant master for the Great Kagyü Mönlam, a position he has kept until now.

Michele Martin has been a Buddhist practitioner for over thirty years. After receiving graduate degrees from Yale, she studied in Japan, India, and Nepal with numerous masters of meditation and Buddhist scholars. While in Asia, she also served as an oral translator and edited many volumes on Buddhism. Her publications include Music in the Sky: The Life, Art, and Teachings of the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje and numerous translations from Tibetan texts on philosophy and meditation. She lives in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York.