Excerpts > Preliminaries

True prostration

Thrangu Sekhar Retreat Centre, Nepal, March 2022

Prostration in its true sense is the physical, verbal or mental expression that naturally emerges when we are captivated in awe of the qualities of the Lama or Three Jewels.

Mahamudra Please

Thrangu Sekhar Retreat Centre, Nepal, November 2022

A reply to a student’s request for advanced meditation instruction. I sincerely wish for you to know Mahamudra. Perhaps I feel a greater sense of urgency about it than even you do yourself. You may wonder why I teach meditation when I travel abroad, but not to you here in the retreat centre. Well, truth […]

A Nameless Face

Thrangu Sekhar Retreat Centre, Nepal, 3rd June 2021

A few years ago a middle-aged Tibetan man, a shopkeeper in Boudha, Nepal, came to see me to receive transmission and instruction for a practice he wanted to do. We had a chat and he said something that made me feel he had a better understanding of the teachings on the preciousness of human life, […]

Offering up our delusion

Thrangu Sekhar Retreat Centre, Nepal, 2nd September 2020

Why is the mandala practice so meritorious? One reason is that most of our suffering is our own creation. We fabricate ideas about ourselves and the world, cling to them as real, and suffer as a consequence. So our practice, whatever it is must reduce our clinging if we are going to overcome suffering. In […]

First Instruction

9 February 2020, instructions given in the first practice session of the new six-year retreat cycle at Thrangu Sekhar Retreat Center, Nepal

If we totally exhaust ourselves during prostrations, pushing ourselves against our will, our mind will resist what we are doing; we’ll get fed up and become averse to doing prostrations. We shouldn’t do that. If that happens, there’s no merit in what we are doing. Our body will be going through the motions and we […]

It’s There in the Name – The ‘Preliminaries’ Must Come First

2015 Hwayue Foundation, Taipei, Taiwan

Buddhism encourages us to examine our life and situation carefully so that we can see things as they are. When we see the nature of our cyclic existence, we see that it is characterised by suffering and dissatisfaction, and we begin to long for freedom and the peace of transcendence. This insight and subsequent feeling […]