An essential tantric text on the practice of advanced yoga in tantric Buddhism.

The Lamp for Integrating the Practices (Caryamelapakapradipa) is a systematic and comprehensive exposition of the most advanced yogas of the Esoteric Community Tantra (Guhyasamaja-tantra) as espoused by the Noble (Nagarjuna) tradition, an influential school of interpretation within the Mahayoga traditions of Indian Buddhist mysticism. Equal in authority to Nagarjuna's famous Five Stages (Pañcakrama), Aryadeva’s work is perhaps the earliest prose example of the “stages of the mantra path” genre in Sanskrit. Its systematic path exerted immense influence on later Indian and Tibetan traditions, and it is widely cited by masters from all four major lineages of Tibetan Buddhism.

This volume presents the Lamp in a thoroughly annotated English translation. It includes an introductory study discussing the history of the Guhyasamaja and its exegetical traditions, surveying the scriptural and commentarial sources of the Nagarjuna tradition, and analyzing in detail the contents of the Lamp. The book also features a detailed, trilingual glossary.

Simultaneously presented online for scholars are a version of its Sanskrit original, critically edited from recently identified manuscripts, and a critical edition of the eleventh-century Tibetan translation by Rinchen Zangpo, including notes on readings found in “lost,” alternative translations.

Christian K. Wedemeyer is associate professor of the history of religions at the divinity school of the University of Chicago and associate faculty in South Asian languages and civilizations. He is a historian of religions whose interests comprehend theory and method in the human sciences, the history of modern scholarship on religion and culture, and issues of history, textuality, and ritual in the Buddhist traditions. Within these general domains, much of his research has concerned the esoteric (tantric) Buddhism of India and Tibet. He has written on the modern historiography of tantric Buddhism; antinomianism in the Indian esoteric traditions; canonicity, textual criticism, and strategies of legitimating authority in classical Tibetan scholasticism; and the semiology of esoteric Buddhist ritual.