Devotion's Tapestry: Doing, Feeling & Being in Buddhist Practice

This work makes a fresh contribution to contemporary western understandings of devotion. I focus on foundational (sngon ’gro) Tibetan Buddhist practices as presented by the Third Dodrupchen Jigme Tenpa’i Nyima (rdo grub chen 03 ’jigs med bstan pa’i nyi ma, 1865 – 1926) in his The Excellent Way: How Guru Yoga Bestows Highest Wisdom, for which I provide both historical textual clarification and, for the first time, exciting ethnographic reports detailing the actual lived impact of these practices. <br/><br/>Devotion in Tibetan tantric Buddhism is a constellation of many elements such as doing, feeling, seeing, and being. Devotion is a performative, felt-sense embodied state that also incorporates rational critical analysis. Guru yoga texts and practices herald devotion as the key to realization. My work is the first to investigate closely how this occurs, and to embed it in methodological sources of embodiment and epistemology that emphasize the felt-sense or “a bodily awareness made of many interwoven strands, but felt as one” (Gendlin, 2007: 84). I conclude that the devotion cultivated in tantric contemplative practices plays a crucial role in the soteriological framework of Dzogchen articulated by the Third Dodrupchen and most Nyingma Tibetan Buddhist masters.