Ane Tsondru

Ane Tsondru, who is a buddhist nun at Lerab Ling in the south of France, writes: “I can vividly remember when I first started to read the book that it was a complete revelation. I’d received quite a few teachings by then, but it felt as if before I had lots of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but was missing the picture on the box. It was only after reading the book that I felt as if I now had the picture―and a beautiful one at that!―which enabled me to put the puzzle together for the first time. Actually, by the time I’d finished reading the book it was quite wet as I’d shed a lot of tears over it, but they were tears of gratitude. For the first time in my life, I began to feel the most tremendous sense of optimism about life and death and the possibility for transformation and change―not in some distant future that might never happen but right now, this very moment. I could now see life and death as this wondrous vibrant whole and could also see how I too could become whole. How I could overcome all my own suffering, all fear, and maybe even, in turn, be able to help others to overcome theirs and find wholeness too. To become, to use a term in the book―a servant of peace. A servant of peace in a world with a promising future where, through the power of wisdom and compassion, there would be no cruelty, no horror, no war, no greed―all the things I’d been wishing for since the ‘peace and love’ days of the sixties when I’d been looking outside of myself for a solution.  But what my encounter with Buddhism―and in particular the book’s enlightened vision of life and death―had shown me is that freedom lies within each one of us and we do have the power, the sacred power, to transform ourselves and the world.”

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