Asaṅga, Maitreya + Voltaire : Bob Thurman Kālachakra Study + Practice
Channel: Tibet House US Menla Online
Date: 2018-02-07

In this short video Professor Robert AF Thurman explains the story of the Future Buddha Maitreya appearing to Asanga and their connections to the Historical Buddha and the Kalachakra Mandala and practices.

Having been preserved for centuries in the fabled kingdom of Shambhala, the Kālachakra Tantra is an Unexcelled Yoga Tantra system of teachings which is believed to originate directly from Shakyamuni Buddha and which revolves around the concept of cycles (chakra) of time (kāla), from the cycles of the planets and the outer world to the cycles of human breathing and our physical-spiritual development. It teaches the practice of working with the most subtle energies within one’s mind and body on the path to enlightenment, through famously complex deity yoga which helps practitioners with a basic understanding of emptiness dissolve their ordinary sense of self and re-create themselves in the ideal form of the Kālachakra deity pair in union who represent omniscient Buddhahood–the union of great bliss and the wisdom perceiving emptiness. Since Kālachakra is created of time and everything manifest is under the influence of time, Kālachakra Buddha is experiential knowledge of all manifest reality. Vishvamata, his spiritual consort and complement, is aware of all that is timeless, not time-bound, or out of the realm of time. In yab-yum union, they are temporality and a temporality conjoined and represent the full glory of the ultimate nature of reality, compassionately abiding in a vast multidimensional mandala rich with symbolic meaning.

Recorded at the 2017 "Kālachakra Study + Practice Retreat" at Menla in Phoenicia, New York August, 2017.

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