With her intuitive sense of the text, Vesna Wallace, one of the foremost Kālachakra scholars of our time, has eloquently deciphered and rendered the fourth chapter on the Sādhanā from the Kālachakra Tantra into the English language. Along with her previous publication of the second chapter on the Individual in this same series, this chapter on the Sādhanā or practice manual completes two of the Kālachakra Tantra’s five chapters in English. Both of these translations include the root tantra along with its explanatory commentary, the Vimalaprabhā or Stainless Light.^[1]

This post is titled, Dolpopa's Elusive Annotations to the Kālachakra Commentary. By Cyrus Stearns, a contributing author to the Jonangpa blog.

Dolpopa's fabled annotations to the Stainless Light commentary on the Kālachakra Tantra remain elusive. An incomplete annotated manuscript of the Stainless Light (missing chapter 5) was reproduced in the Paltseg Kālachakra Commentary Series. This text was mistakenly identified as Dolpopa's annotations, although in the booklet accompanying the collection the publisher does acknowledge the uncertainty of the identification. The manuscript is actually another, somewhat variant, copy of Chogle Namgyal's annotations (also published in vols. 4–5 of the same collection), not those of his teacher Dölpopa. A third computerized edition of Choglé Namgyal’s annotations has also been published as part of the Jonang Publications Series II, using several different manuscripts, one of which concludes with a set of anonymous verses that can be identified as the work of Dolpopa.^[1]

This post is titled, The Transmission of the Tantra and Practices of Tārāyogīni (Sgrol ma rnal 'byor ma): A Little-Known Jonang Specialty. By Thomas Roth, a contributing author to the Jonangpa blog.

Tarayogini

The Jonang tradition was and is well-known for holding and continuing to propagate several unique transmissions, such as various strands of Kālachakra transmissions and various traditions of its six-limbed vajrayoga; the Mahāsṃavāra Kālachakra, the view of emptiness based upon the insights and explications of Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen (1292-1361) known as zhentong (gzhan stong) and others. Among these unique transmissions is one that is almost completely unknown outside of the Jonang tradition, and apparently not very widely practiced within it either, despite the fact that it seemingly was of rather great importance to the great Tāranātha (1575-1635) and that the great 19th century Rimé master Jamgon Kongtrul (1813-1899) regarded it highly, and he wrote about it and practiced it himself.

Jonang Kalachakra Mandala

Lately, I've been thinking about time. Time in the cliché sense of that which "does not stop for anyone." Historical time. Real time. Blinks and breathes and heart-beats. The wax and wane of moons, the expansion of universes, the radiant pulses of quasars. That basic conceptual structure that flows as the space-time continuum... The ticks and nanoticks that sequentially measure the magnitude and momentum of our lives.

More specifically, I've been thinking about how the Jonangpa master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen thought about time. How his concept of time has contributed to a re-visioning of Buddhist history, and from where his concept derived.^[1]

Dolpopa was concerned with framing his realizations in accord with the Kālachakra Tantra, and the lineage of his realizations within the framework of the cosmological schema described by the tantra. In fact, I'd like to suggest that Dolpopa's understanding of time according to the Kālachakra was so central to his realizations that we must seek to understand this concept of time if we are to think seriously about the larger zhentong paradigm.