A key explanatory work on the primary sources of Buddhist tantra by Tibet’s leading authority, Tsong Khapa’s guide clarifies the cryptic verses of the Esoteric Community Tantra and details the practical implementation of the instructions of its commentary, the Illuminating Lamp.

Tsong Khapa’s Illuminating Lamp Annotational Supercommentary marks a watershed moment in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist history, unlocking with startling clarity the layers of meaning associated with unexcelled yoga tantra practice. On the verge of disappearing, the transmission of the Esoteric Community Tantra was revived dramatically in fifteenth-century Tibet by Tsong Khapa’s precise elucidations of its keys for practice, here illuminated by Chandrakirti’s commentary. With masterful erudition, Tsong Khapa draws on a wealth of related tantras and Indian commentaries, produced over many centuries, to clarify the Buddha’s supreme teachings, the Esoteric Community. Generations of Tibetan scholars had misunderstood these teachings as antinomian utterances about sex and death antithetical to monastic Buddhism. Transmitted within elite circles for centuries, the Esoteric Community’s hermeneutical keys contained within Illuminating Lamp are here presented in the Annotational Supercommentary with great precision, guiding the practitioner through the architecture of the subtle mind and body and explaining how, in exact detail, to transform the death process into the means for complete, fully embodied enlightenment.

Moreover, Tsong Khapa explores the profound semiotic processes by which language and concepts transform ordinary identity to enlightened identity at its insubstantial foundation, thereby showing how unexcelled yoga is the practical application of Centrist (Madhyamaka) philosophy, which preceded the linguistic turn in Western thought by two millennia. In making these connections, Tsong Khapa created out of this secretive guru-disciple transmission lineage of the Esoteric Community Tantra a comprehensive monastic-yogic educational curriculum that transformed the Tibetan into Asia’s premier center for spiritual and intellectual development.