Dagger Blessing

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This book is first in several respects: for the first time it describes the cult of the ritual dagger Phurpa. This is a secret Tantric doctrine still alive where Mahayana Buddhists live today. For the first time some original Phurpa texts attributed to the great Buddhist teacher Padmasambhava (8th century A.D.) have been translated into a Western language and, again for the first time, the dagger ritual has also been photographed. Therefore, this book sheds some light on a widely unknown side of Buddhism: not the official doctrine demanding renunciation and promising salvation in a life after death but a powerful teaching aiming at people's happiness here and now.Thomas Marcotty, a German now living in Switzerland, is an author specializing in the field of social change, statistics, and ethnology, who, since more than thirty years, has toured the East to study Asian ways of life. Yet, his new book on the Tibetan ritual dagger is not just a result of his sojourns in the Himalayan countries but rather the outcome of his extended studies together with Tibetan dagger priests now living in Switzerland and in some other European countries.[-back cover text]