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Mandala
Have you received the October-December 2011 issue of Mandala? Please take a photo of yourself (and friends) with the recent magazine next to your favorite spot. We would like to publish your photo in the December 2011 eZine. Help us to really visualize FPMT’s international community. You can post the photo on Facebook or email it to Michael Jolliffe directly.
The April-June 2009 issue of Mandala featured a special tribute to commemorate Lama Yeshe’s life, 25 years after his passing. The article focused on reflections from the early students of FPMT as well as first hand accounts from Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche regarding the beginnings of the organization. This article is now freely available as a PDF. Please enjoy and pass along.
In 2008, Ven. Thubten Gyatso (Adrian Feldmann) completed a three-year retreat at De-Tong Ling Retreat Centre on Kangaroo Island off the South Australian coast. In an interview with Owen Cole, Ven. Gyatso describes the retreat as the most powerful experience in his thirty-three years as a Buddhist monk.
Tubten Pende gives an overview of the various interpretations of the Buddha’s teachings on emptiness in “What’s Real?” from Mandala, July 1995. “These philosophical views are different,” he says. “It’s not that they’re all one and they’re all the same; they’re saying something different.” Who’s right?
Mandala has made available all articles from its April-June 2009 print issue, “25 Years Since Lama’s Passing: Mandala celebrates his life and work through intimate reflections on the early days of FPMT.” You may now access all of the articles from this special issue via PDF from the website.
The long anticipated biography of Lama Yeshe, Big Love, is to published by the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive this year. Meanwhile, we are pleased to publish ongoing excerpts from the work in progress. This excerpt is taken from the chapter chronicling Lama Yeshe’s life after he fled Tibet in 1959 and made his way to Buxa Duar, India – a former prisoner-of-war-camp that became home for hundreds of Tibetan refugees.
Money is a dirty word to some Buddhists. But money from its own side can’t be bad, it is how we use it and the motivation we have for obtaining it that determines the benefit. In What is Socially Responsible Investing, Adrian Dec discusses financial investing as a method for strengthening one’s ethical or moral commitments.
Lama Lhundrup recorded a series of videos for his students beginning in January 2011, when he traveled to Singapore to seek modern medical treatment, through May 2011, when he requested that all FPMT students pray for Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s health and long life after Rinpoche manifested a stroke in April 2011. These videos offer a glimpse into Lama Lhundrup’s extraordinary kindness.
Mandala‘s new October-December 2011 online content is now live. In addition to supplemental articles to this issue’s main stories: Remembering the Kindness of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Courageous People of Tibet, and a Tribute to Khensur Rinpoche Lama Lhundrup; there are several topical articles, including Ven. Thubten Wongmo’s Road to Kopan story, not to be missed!
Jo Hathaway, a palliative care nurse from New Zealand and a student of Khensur Rinpoche Lama Lhundrup, has been staying at Kopan since January 2011 to help take care for his medical needs. She wrote the following reflection on her experiences with Lama Lhundrup in late July 2011.
It is with sadness that we share the news that Khensur Rinpoche Lama Lhundrup Rigsel, former abbot of Kopan Monastery in Nepal, passed away today. The new issue of Mandala that is being mailed presently contains our tribute to this extraordinary being and his incredible forty years of service at Kopan. We’re making our special feature story on Lama Lhundrup available to all as a PDF. We’ve also put together a collection of other Mandala stories and first-person reflections on Lama Lhundrup for you to read. Please take a moment to peruse these pages and remember Lama Lhundrup’s incomparable kindness.
By Ven. Chönyi Taylor
There’s the story of the fisherman hanging on to his capsized boat and asking God for help. He turns away a surfer on his board, a jet ski, another boat and even a helicopter saying, “No, God will save me!” After many hours, the fisherman, feeling destitute, pleads to God, “Where are you?” Eventually God looks down from the clouds and says, “I sent you a surfer, a jet skier, a boat and even a helicopter. What else do you expect me to do?” (more…)