| List of illustrations | |
| Foreword | |
| ISLT's Acknowledgements | |
| Translators' Acknowledgements | |
| Translators' Introduction | |
| A brief historical introduction to Tibetan Buddhism | |
| Prologue | |
| The Ordinary or External Preliminaries | |
| The difficulty of finding the freedoms and advantages | |
| The Proper Way to Listen to Spiritual Teaching | |
| The Teaching Itself: An Explanation of How Difficult It Is to Find the Freedoms and Advantages | |
| The impermanence of life | |
| The Impermanence of the Outer Universe in Which Beings Live | |
| The Impermanence of Beings Living in the Universe | |
| The Impermanence of Holy Beings | |
| The Impermanence of Those in Positions of Power | |
| Other Examples of Impermanence | |
| The Uncertainty of the Circumstances of Death | |
| Intense Awareness of Impermanence | |
| The defects of samsara | |
| The Sufferings of Samsara in General | |
| The Particular Sufferings Experienced by the Beings of the Six Realms | |
| Actions: the principle of cause and effect | |
| Negative Actions to Be Abandoned | |
| Positive Actions to be Adopted | |
| The All-Determining Quality of Actions | |
| The benefits of liberation | |
| Causes Leading to Liberation | |
| The Result: The Three Levels of Enlightenment | |
| How to follow a spiritual friend | |
| Examining the Teacher | |
| Following the Teacher | |
| Emulating the Teacher's Realization and Actions | |
| The Extraordinary or Internal Preliminaries | |
| Taking refuge, foundation stone of all paths | |
| Approaches to Taking Refuge | |
| How to Take Refuge | |
| Precepts and Benefits of Taking Refuge | |
| Arousing bodhichitta, the root of the Great Vehicle | |
| Training the Mind in the Four Boundless Qualities | |
| Arousing Bodhichitta | |
| Training in Bodhichitta | |
| Meditating on the teacher as Vajrasattva to cleanse all obscurations | |
| How Obscurations Can Be Purified through Confession | |
| The Four Powers | |
| The Actual Meditation on Vajrasattva | |
| Offering the mandala to accumulate merit and wisdom | |
| The Need for the Two Accumulations | |
| The Accomplishment Mandala | |
| The Offering Mandala | |
| The kusali's accumulation: destroying the four demons at a single stroke | |
| The Body as an Offering | |
| The Practice of Offering the Body | |
| The Meaning of Cho | |
| Guru Yoga, entrance-way for blessings, the ultimate way to arouse the wisdom of realization | |
| The Reason for Guru Yoga | |
| How to Practise Guru Yoga | |
| The History of the Advent of the Early Translation Doctrine | |
| Propagation of the Essence-Teaching in Tibet, Land of Snows | |
| The Swift Path of Transference | |
| Transference of consciousness, the instructions for the dying: Buddhahood without meditation | |
| The Five Kinds of Transference | |
| Ordinary Transference Using Three Ideas | |
| Conclusion | |
| Notes | |
| Glossary | |
| Bibliography | |
| Index | |
| Padmakara Translation Group | |
| Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved. |