The Perfect Human Rebirth

By Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Lama Zopa Rinpoche's The Perfect Human Rebirth: Freedom and Richness on the Path to Enlightenment, edited by Gordon McDougall, is the third book in our FPMT Lineage Series and is drawn from Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s graduated path to enlightenment (lamrim) teachings given over a four-decade period, starting from the early 1970s.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Lama Yeshe with a mandala applique thangka, Kopan Monastery, 1970.
Publisher's Acknowledgments: PHR

In our previous title, Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s How to Practice Dharma, I explained in detail how the FPMT Lineage Series, of which this book is the third, came about. So I won’t repeat all that here.

In brief, the aim of the series is to publish all of Rinpoche’s lam-rim teachings as a sequence of commentaries on the key points of the path for both a general audience and a more specialized readership—serious lam-rim meditators trying to attain realizations and lam-rim teachers in need of the ultimate resource to enhance their knowledge. Our editor, Gordon McDougall, to whom we’re most grateful, talks more about the process in his preface.

In 1996, Rinpoche asked me to establish the LYWA as a stand-alone FPMT entity. In 2007, thanks to an inexpressibly kind benefactor who offered us a $500,000 matching grant that allowed us to hire the staff we needed to go ahead, we came up with a plan to make this series of commentaries a reality, Publishing the FPMT Lineage (PFL). Gordon has taken the lead in combing through nearly four decades of Rinpoche’s teachings to create the series, building on the previous “basketing” work done by Ven. Trisha Donnelly and Tenzin Namdrol (Miranda Adams). You can see more details of the PFL program on the LYWA website under "Current Projects".

In our previous books and on our website we have also mentioned in detail all the people who have made the Archive possible and continue to do so, so there’s no need to repeat that here either. I would, however, like to thank those who directly supported the editing and printing of The Perfect Human Rebirth—the Hao Ran Foundation, Losang Dragpa Centre, Malaysia, our kind benefactor again, and all the people who have made matching grants to this program. We still have a ways to go to match the entire grant, so if you would like to support the preparation of more of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s peerless lam-rim commentaries, please do so at LamaYeshe.com. Thank you so much.

Dr. Nicholas Ribush 

Next Chapter:

Editor's Preface: PHR »