Since ancient times, the path of the enlightened warrior has been a powerful and inspiring ideal, showing us how we can master the challenges of life and draw power not from violence or aggression but through the cultivation of gentleness, courage, and self-knowledge. Trungpa's classic work has been presenting these ideals to a wide and appreciative audience for more than twenty years.

In this modern spiritual classic, the Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa highlights the commonest pitfall to which every aspirant on the spiritual path falls prey: what he calls spiritual materialism. The universal human tendancy, he shows, is to see spirituality as a process of self-improvement-the impulse to develop and refine the ego when the ego is, by nature, essentially empty.