of the Teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama
with Venerable Gache
November 25 & 26, 2022
4:00pm – 6:00pm (IST)
ONLINE ONLY: Indian Standard Time (IST) – convert to your time zone
- Zoom Meeting Link
Meeting ID: 882 2104 9581
Passcode: 891213
We recognize that for many of you outside of India, this time may not work. It can still be possible to use the recordings of the sessions.
Video recordings of each session will be available on Tushita’s Youtube Channel for those who cannot make the live sessions.
His Holiness’s Teachings
His Holiness will give two days of teachings on Nagarjuna’s The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (uma tsawa sherab) in the mornings at the Main Tibetan Temple at the request of a group of Koreans.
For further information please see www.dalailama.com/live
Tushita’s Review Sessions
Each review session will begin by going through His Holiness’s teaching point by point.
In the time that remains we will discuss how this ancient philosophy is still directly relevant to modern questions of the nature of reality, the relation of body and mind, and most importantly how to be free of suffering and of benefit to the world.
Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Wisdom of The Middle Way
This text, likely composed sometime in the first or second century CE, initiated the Mādhyamaka (Middle Way) school of Buddhist philosophy and became the foundation for all subsequent explanations.
Up until that point, Buddhist philosophers had made variously successful attempts to formulate a philosophical underpinning that would account for the Buddhist worldview in light of advances in Indian thought, but most of them had fallen into extreme and ultimately indefensible positions.
Nāgārjuna, basing his thinking on the Perfection of Wisdom class of sūtras, effectively broke through the logjam that was constricting Buddhist thought and opened up an entirely new approach.
Two thousand years later, most serious Buddhist scholar-practitioners consider his explanations authoritative, and see all later authors as commentators who clarified but never surpassed the master Nāgārjuna’s understanding.
Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, consisting of twenty-seven chapters each examining emptiness from a different perspective, is Nāgārjuna’s seminal and most thorough work.
See Programs > Drop-In Sessions > Review Sessions for more information.