A Kora of Koras

In his latest book,” A Kora of Koras," Peter Malakoff, a writer with vast experience on the spiritual journey and an expansive intellect, has sharpened his gaze to deliver a concise and powerful insight into Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, which is at once illuminating and practical in its application. This is a rare book by a rare human being. - Anthony Bogart

This ePub is a Kora or circling of the different holy places, people, ideas, and images of the world's great religious traditions. Including audio, video, and picture galleries, it is a consideration of what we are always and already going around.

GOING ROUND IN CIRCLES

Tso Pema Lake, Rewalsar

In the foothills of the Himalayas lies a sacred lake called Tso Pema, a jewel sitting in a mountain bowl of hills. Above the lake is a giant,150ft high, golden-gilded, brightly painted statue of Padmasambhava, his eyes wide open, expressing fierceness, compassion, and delight. Beneath his paradoxical gaze walk Tibetans of all ages, moving clockwise round the waters night and day. 

Padmasambhava

I arrived at four in the morning after an overnight bus from Delhi. It was early spring, still cold, dark and quiet. From the Tibetan monasteries and small lanes surrounding the lake, monks and lay people streamed out onto the path that circles the water, many holding a spinning prayer wheel in their right hand or fingering a mala of beads. Most looked straight ahead, absorbed in practice, atoning for past deeds, accumulating merit for the future, reciting a mantra, a prayered description of Reality revealed over a thousand years ago, attuning themselves to its meaning of the always, already Reality of Liberation, sounding its purifying vibration through their bodies and out into the world; they were engaged in a Kora, a circumambulation of a sacred place, they were going round in circles.

Tibetans on a Kora of the lake passing a Mani Stone