SPIRITUAL: Special Event Puja

Kadampa Center will hold a Medicine Buddha Puja for Lama Zopa Rinpche's swift return, on Sunday, May 14, at 10:30 am. The puja will include extensive offerings - 100 sets - across the altar. It will be chanted in both English and Tibetan. Both Geshe Gelek and Geshe Sangpo will attend. We will serve a light lunch after the puja. All are welcome to come and join in!

This puja is possible because of the generous outpouring of support to sponsor a puja at Kopan for Rinpoche's swift return. Our community's dedication to Rinpoche resulted in raising far more than was needed for the puja at Kopan, so at Geshe Gelek's advice, we will also offer this puja in our gompa.

Please come also on Saturday, May 13 at 2 pm to help set up the gompa and all the offerings, with guidance from Geshe Sangpo.

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Medicine Buddha Puja is a beautiful prayer service that includes lyrical praises to the seven Medicine Buddhas, requests for their help and aspirations for our own spiritual attainments. It is beneficial for mental and physical healing and world peace, and is especially beneficial for those who are experiencing physical or mental illness or those who have recently passed away.

Imagine knowing not just one, but seven doctors we can call upon to heal all physical and mental illness! We have those doctors – the Medicine Buddhas – and in this prayer service we celebrate their compassion and call upon them for help.  

The puja will be offered on YouTube and Zoom. We will use the usual Sunday Dharma Connections Zoom registration; if you already have a link, no need to register again!  Register on Zoom.

Praises to the 21 Taras Sunday April 16th, 10:30-11:30am All are invited to join together this Sunday April 16 to offer prayers for our holy and precious guru, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who showed the aspect of passing away on April 13 and now sits in clear light meditation at Kopan Monastery. Everyone is invited to bring a candle offering for the altar.  Flower offerings are always appreciated as well. PLEASE NOTE: "Praises to the 21 Taras" will replace our regularly scheduled Sunday Dharma teaching with Geshe Gelek. All are welcome and encouraged to attend either in person at Kadampa Center or online via Zoom or YouTube live stream.

Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche

Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, FPMT's Spiritual Director, is the reincarnation of the Sherpa Nyingma yogi Kunsang Yeshe, the Lawudo Lama. Rinpoche was born in 1946 in Thami, not far from the cave Lawudo, in the Mount Everest region of Nepal, where his predecessor meditated for the last twenty years of his life. He began teaching courses on Buddhism to Westerners in 1965, along with Lama Yeshe. They founded several centers that eventually became the building blocks of the FPMT. As of December 2001, there are 132 FPMT centers and projects worldwide.

By regularly visiting the FPMT Updates Regarding Lama Zopa Rinpoche page you can find all updates related to Rinpoche's passing, including prayer and practice advice received by the FPMT International Office.  At this time, students are advised to practice bodhichitta and impermanence.

Visit the Official Homepage for Lama Zopa Rinpoche to learn more about our dear spiritual teacher.

Praises to the 21 Taras

Tara, a female buddha, represents enlightened activities that address a multitude of our spiritual and temporal needs. These are represented by the 21 Taras, each an aspect of her buddha nature and wisdom.  Each verse of the Praises to the 21 Taras is a praise to one of the 21 aspects of the Buddha Tara.

All are welcome and encouraged to attend ~ no experience necessary!

There will be a private event in the gompa from 1-5 pm. 

HOW TO PARTICIPATE:

• Please click HERE for very important & detailed information about traveling to and participating in the Vajrayogini Fire Puja.
• Once you open the link:
  • indicate your interest in carpooling (or not)
  • indicate the number of people in your party who plan to attend 
  • and please read all of the information at the bottom of the form

MORE ABOUT THE VAJRAYOGINI RETREAT AND FIRE PUJA:

Geshe Gelek says the retreat is "a huge achievement" for Kadampa Center,  the first time in our history that we have organized a highest yoga tantra retreat.
It is amazing that we had the karma for all the necessary conditions to come together for this retreat - the initiation from a qualified master, a teacher to explain the practice, a teacher to lead the retreat, a place to hold it, and students who are able to devote three weeks of their lives to this.

There are many other center members who are creating great merit by supporting the retreat, either through volunteer efforts or financial sponsorships.

There is also great merit in attending the fire puja, an elaborate, colorful ritual that involves offering more than a dozen substances to be burned in the fire.  Everyone is encouraged to attend!

Since Boone is about a three-hour drive away, we want to facilitate forming carpools so everyone who wants to can attend.  Please click on the link in the "HOW TO PARTICIPATE" section above for very important carpool, travel, and parking information.

Geshe Sangpo's precious mother, Tashi Drolma, passed away on September 29, 2021. We offer this Guru Puja for her benefit. Geshe Sangpo will lead the prayers in Tibetan.  Geshe Sangpo and Geshe Gelek invite anyone who has suffered a loss in the past year - family, friends, pets - to come and share in this beautiful prayer service. Following the puja we will have a light, home-made dinner with bread, potatoes and tea, hosted by our Geshes.  There is no need to follow along with the puja; one can simply say mantras or meditate. We will have books with the puja for those who do wish to follow along.

If you come, please try to bring:

• Battery-operated candle(s) to offer at the stupa. We will do the Lama Atisha light offering prayer together
• Flowers to offer at the altar 

The puja will be offered online on YouTube only (no Zoom). 

Guru Puja is a practice consisting of making offerings to and requesting inspiration from the Spiritual Master. In this practice, we unite our minds with the holy mind of the Spiritual Master, who is considered the root and life-force of the spiritual path in order to receive blessings and generate realizations on the path to enlightenment. We need merit, or positive energy, for our enlightened potential to grow and become perfect and one of the best ways to do that is to make beautiful offering and prayers to the Three Jewels and to our Spiritual Teachers. This is what happens in the Guru Puja. 

FPMT's Spiritual Director Lama Zopa Rinpoche, says:

This practice of Guru Puja is very profound, with many extra benefits, and is very quick to bring enlightenment. The lam-rim prayer, the prayer of the steps of the path to enlightenment, in Guru Puja has lam-rim and also lo-jong, or thought transformation. Generally, the whole of the lam-rim, from guru devotion up to enlightenment, is thought transformation. If your mind is not transformed into the path, how can you have realizations of the path? There’s no way, without transforming your mind.

"This practice of Guru Puja is very profound, with many extra benefits, and is very quick to bring enlightenment. The lam-rim prayer, the prayer of the steps of the path to enlightenment, in Guru Puja has lam-rim and also lo-jong, or thought transformation. Generally, the whole of the lam-rim, from guru devotion up to enlightenment, is thought transformation. If your mind is not transformed into the path, how can you have realizations of the path? There’s no way, without transforming your mind."

As part of the puja, we perform a special practice called tsog which has extensive offerings. According to the Liberation Prison Project Tibetan calendar, on the 10th and 25th of every Tibetan (lunar) month, Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, “Those who have received an initiation into Highest Yoga Tantra have a commitment to perform tsog” on these days. Kadampa Center holds pujas with tsog on these dates (when they don't conflict with other programs).

Anyone is welcome to attend pujas, even if you are unfamiliar with the practice. This puja is partly recited in English and partly chanted in Tibetan. (It is possible to read the English translations of the whole puja, and there is optional sheet music available to help learn the Tibetan tunes.) Traditionally the offerings for the sangha and puja are sponsored by Dharma students, especially if they want to dedicate the puja to their spiritual teachers or loved ones in need of support and prayers.

Sponsoring a puja is a great way to create merit, and it's especially auspicious to do so on a holy day for a puja dedicated to one of our teachers. Sponsorship of this puja is $75, and sponsors can include a dedication that we will read at the puja so everyone can join in the sponsor's intentions. 

Sponsor Here

This powerful Mahayana purification practice lets us start the new year with a clean slate. In this fire puja, we burn black sesame seeds symbolizing our past negative actions. It’s a potent experience to watch our negative karma go up in smoke! Dorje Khadro is a deity who purifies our negative karma by consuming it in the form of black sesame seeds.

We are bringing this practice back in person to Kadampa Center. Because of the pandemic, we will do the entire practice outdoors. 

Here’s the mantra we’ll say while burning the seeds:

OM VAJRA DAKA KHA KHA KHAHI KHAHI SARWA PAPAM DAHANA BAKMI KURU SOHA

For an example of the practice and commentary by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, visit this page on Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, circumambulation is CANCELLED for Saturday, October 23, 2021.

Come join us next month!