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37 practices: infrastructure

A recording of each class (except the first one) is linked at the bottom of each post, and also via the 37 practices link in the blogroll (right column of this page). I sometimes forget I’m being recorded.  🙂 Any errors are all mine. The classes are taught by Zoom so there may be imperfections in some recordings due to technical glitches or temporary noise from a participant’s surroundings. Just like life.

Overall structure of the 37 practices: I mentioned in the prelude that the 37 practices both serve as a lam rim (step-by-step guide to the path) and fall within the traditional class of instructions known as mind training (lo jong). The root text, by Gyalse Ngulchu Togme Zangpo, is very concise: 37 verses with a couple of extras at the beginning and end, fitting entirely within 11 pages in Dilgo Khyentse‘s commentary, The Heart of Compassion. (The rest of the book consists of Dilgo Khyentse’s commentary on each verse plus some introductory chapters and quite useful appendices, notes, and index.)

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37 practices: prelude

Interspersed with other topics, you will now find, in progress, starting in June 2017, a study guide for a class I’m teaching on the classic text 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva by Gyalse Ngulchu Togme Zangpo. I’m posting materials here for those who miss a class and for anyone else who is interested.

Why study a text written centuries ago in a culture that had very little in common with the sophisticated, technologically-oriented lifestyle of 21st-century Westerners? 1) Frankly, human nature doesn’t seem to have evolved all that much, if any. We still face all the same problems Togme Zangpo did. 2) This very concise root text is a complete guide to the step-by-step path of awakening to our full potential as human beings, aka a lamrim, like The Jewel Ornament of Liberation; PLUS a mind training text like the Seven Points of Mind Training (see Jamgon Kongtrul’s Great Path of Awakening) and Shantideva’s A Bodhisattva’s Way of Life–ALL THIS in just 37 short verses plus a couple of extras at the beginning and end. But wait–there’s more!

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Location, location, location

I’ve been spending a lot of time in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, for the last couple of years to help care for my mother, who has Alzheimer’s. She was diagnosed in the last year of my three-year retreat, and I had to move her to assisted living a few months after retreat graduation in 2011. Since then, I’ve been back and forth periodically, and right now I’m in Richmond again, helping her adjust to a recent move to an all-dementia facility, and overseeing major repairs to her house.

Spending time with my mom and other people in her facility, I feel I’ve gained some insight into how to prepare for my own old age and the possibility of dementia. In a nutshell: practice as much as possible, learn to rest my mind wherever I am, and cultivate contentment with whatever is happening. (Corollary: Eat everything. Including parsnips if needed.)

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All sound is the sound of mantra: Locust Grove cascade and PTC cicadas

Since the local 17-year cicadas are mostly hidden in the obviously teeming woods around the PTC perimeter, I decided to stop in today at Locust Grove, the Samuel Morse estate on the Hudson River about 15 minutes up Route 9. Not a single cicada to be seen or heard. OK, so maybe it’s named after the trees.

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Tai Situ Rinpoche’s streaming body of light

A few weekends ago, during a broadcast of Chamgon Tai Situ Rinpoche’s live-streamed seminars from India on The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, as I watched Rinpoche teach from the wide screen atop his throne, I was struck by two things: 1) how much it felt like being in the same room with him–in his warm, engaging, awe-inspiring presence–as many of us have been many times; and 2) that in this case, he was teaching in the PTC shrine room in a veritable body of light–directly from his seat in India, yet unmistakably with us in every way except the physical. I wonder if this is what it is like to see the Samboghakaya?

TSR OPL April 2013

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