Review from Shambhala Sun

Tulku Urgyen was a renowned Buddhist teacher who held the highest teachings of two Tibetan lineages and spent more than twenty years in retreat. He was also fundamentally self-effacing, so while there were many extraordinary experiences in his own life that he could have shared before he died in 1996, these memoirs—told to Erik Pema Kunsang, Tulku Urgyen’s longtime translator, and his wife Marcia Schmidt—consist largely of stories of other great twentieth-century Tibetan teachers. Some of the stories are fantastic (for example, miracles of healing and clairvoyance and the recovery of sacred texts, terma, hidden for a thousand years). Many more are compelling for their intimate portraits of some of the great masters of the twentieth century, and because they reveal the inner workings of an intact religious system in pre-1959 Tibet. Blazing Splendor puts you in intimate touch with a world not entirely lost, but vulnerable to passing away. (reviewed by Andrea McQuillin)