The Meaning of Life: From a Buddhist Perspective.

The volume collects a series of lectures the Dalai Lama delivered in London in 1984, several years before he received the Nobel Prize and before his work had reached a wide English-language readership. Taking as its point of departure a traditional Tibetan painting of the Wheel of Life, reproduced in the text in a series of color plates, the Dalai Lama uses the image to expound the doctrine of the twelve links of dependent origination, the Buddhist account of how ignorance, action, and consequence bind beings to cyclic existence, and how that cycle may be understood and ultimately transcended. The lectures were translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, who served as the Dalai Lama's chief English interpreter from 1979 to 1989 and who contributes an introduction situating the teaching within the broader context of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. Reviewers and readers have consistently noted the density of the material relative to the Dalai Lama's later, more popularly oriented books, describing it as one of his more demanding works and, for that reason, one particularly valued by serious students of Buddhist thought. Born in 1935 to a farming family in northeastern Tibet and recognized at the age of two as the reincarnation of his predecessor, Tenzin Gyatso assumed spiritual and political leadership of Tibet as a teenager, only to flee into exile in India in 1959 following the Chinese occupation of Lhasa. From Dharamsala he established the Tibetan government-in-exile and has since traveled the world advocating nonviolence and inter-religious dialogue, becoming, in the decades since this book's publication, one of the most widely recognized religious figures alive.