Seeking An Inner Refuge

Dalaï-Lama

Description

This lecture is a part of the book Becoming Buddha which is a compilation of the invaluable teachings of contemporary Buddhist teachers who have sought to illuminate the ways of the Buddha in a manner that is comprehensible to a wide audience. With easy to follow dialogues, and anecdotes from the Buddha's own life as well as the lives of ordinary people, it explains how everyone can attain Buddhahood. The author, Renuka Singh is the director of Tushita Mahayana Meditation Centre, New Delhi.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 18 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351184591
• Langue: English

Extrait

Seeking An Inner Refuge

Wisdom Culture for a Meaningful Life
Edited by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Contents
Dedication
Foreword by Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche
Introduction
Seeking an Inner Refuge
His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Acknowledgements
Footnotes
Introduction
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Dedicated to the long lives of our precious teachers His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Ven. Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche May they have stable lives till samsara ends
Foreword
I should begin by recalling how Tushita Mahayana Meditation Centre started. It was in January 1977 at our Kopan Monastery, near Kathmandu, Nepal, that my late teacher, Lama Yeshe, who was also kinder to me than the Buddhas of the past, present and future, first suggested that we start a centre in Delhi. Lama said that he wanted to repay the kindness of the Indian people.
How had the Indian people been kind? Well, leaving aside the fact that according to the Mahayana teachings all sentient beings have been kind, Tibetans identify several particular kindnesses shown to them by India. The most immediate, of course, was that of giving Tibetan refugees a home in 1959, after the occupation of our country by the communist Chinese, and thereafter allowing us the freedom to preserve our culture and practise our religion completely unfettered. This is an enormous kindness not just to Tibetans but to the entire world as well.
More generally, because India is where Lord Buddha lived and taught and is the source of the Buddha Dharma, Tibetans have always held the Land of the Aryas in high esteem. We have also been extremely grateful to India for facilitating the transmission of the Dharma teachings to Tibet, starting in the year 650 CE , by sending teachers to Tibet, training Tibetan scholars in India, and essentially providing the Tibetan script, which is based on Sanskrit and was developed in order to translate Buddhist scriptures into Tibetan. Although we speak of Tibetan Buddhism, the Buddhism of Tibet is essentially Indian Buddhism, especially that which His Holiness the Dalai Lama calls the Nalanda Tradition. In Tibet, for teachings to be accepted as authentic, they had to be shown to have a pure Indian source. Along with Nalanda, the other great Indian monastic universities of Odantapuri and Vikramshila served as the inspiration for the great monastic universities of Tibet.
Buddhism flourished in the land of its origin for some 1500 years, and around the time it reached its zenith in India, the transmission to Tibet began. As a result, the Buddhism that went to Tibet over a period of some five centuries contained all three vehicles-the Hinayana sutra, the Mahayana sutra ( Paramitayana ) and tantra ( Vajrayana ). In Tibet, as Buddhism declined in India and was essentially destroyed, Dharma flourished for a thousand years, until in Tibet too it was largely destroyed by external forces.
Therefore, the main kindness that Lama Yeshe was wanting to