14: Introduction:“We Are Here,We Are Here”

We begin with this passage from a poem by Judson Innes because it contains a summoning, a calling, similar in tone to the way that Geshe Lhundub Sopa begins his enormous, multi-volume commentary on Tsong-kha-pa’s The great treatise on the stages of the path to enlightenment (2000, 2002, 2004).

At the very beginning of the 1720 pages of three volumes published thus far Geshe Sopa (2004, p. 1) starts thus:

So many teachers and students that we have worked with over many years have done beautiful work that calls out, over and over, “we are here, we are here.” So many have suffered enormously in the confines of schooling and its bluntings, fears, and shams. It is in recognition of these teachers and these students—our teachers, our students—that we undertake this book.