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?
PTC Monastery is extremely fortunate to be able to offer monthly live streaming of Tai Situ Rinpoche’s two-year course on The Jewel Ornament of Liberation by the 12th-century master Lord Gampopa, one of the most fundamental and important books ever written in our lineage, and which he says should be properly translated as The Ornament of Precious Liberation. The course began in February and is scheduled to continue through December 2014. Rinpoche teaches in Tibetan to an international audience, with English translation provided by the very skillful Richard Barron, formerly known as Chokyi Nyima.
Since Rinpoche is teaching from his monastery, Sherab Ling, in India, the live streaming is quite late at night for us, beginning about 10:00pm EDT and ending after 1:00am one Friday and Saturday night a month. Few of us monastics at PTC, as devoted as we are to Tai Situ Rinpoche, are able to stay up that late and still maintain our early morning schedule.
While continuing to offer the live streaming, in order to make these wonderful teachings available to a wider audience, we are now also offering a second viewing of each set of teachings as a weekend seminar during regular daytime hours. The schedule for all this is available on the PTC website special events page. Due to the way the transmission is set up, both the live streaming and the second viewing are available only on-site at PTC Monastery. They cannot be accessed by individuals on personal computers. It’s a great incentive to visit!!
Each of these weekends offers six hours or more of teaching, in such compelling detail that after three weekends, Rinpoche has not yet begun the text! So far we are happily exploring the life of Gampopa, The Jewel Ornament‘s 12th-century author. Rinpoche explains that if we don’t have a good understanding of what an extraordinary being Gampopa was, we won’t be able to study the text with the reverence it deserves.
We encourage everyone to join us for all or some of these extraordinary teachings. The next live streaming weekend (the fifth of the series) is June 14-15, starting at 10:00pm on Friday and Saturday nights; and the next seminar-schedule weekend (featuring an earlier set, the third in the series) is the very same weekend: June 15-16, Saturday and Sunday.
Even if you can’t come for the entire course, it is well worth the trip any time to enjoy a few hours in the illuminating presence of Tai Situ Rinpoche’s streaming body of light.