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Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga Retreat at Chenrezig Institute, Eudlo, Queensland, Australia, April 2019. Photo by Maria Corrales.
Chenrezig Institute, an FPMT center in Eudlo, Queensland, Australia, organized their third annual five-day Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga Retreat on April 18-22, 2019. Maria Corrales, spiritual program assistant, shares the story.
Lama Tsongkhapa is a name effusively present in the prayers, texts, and teachings of the Gelug tradition. His image can be found in statue, tsa-tsa, or thangka form on virtually every Gelug altar. As the founder of this great lineage, we honor Lama Tsongkhapa’s memory and profound contributions to Tibetan Buddhism, especially on this 600th anniversary of his death.
With the passage of so much time it is easy to begin to think of Lama Tsongkhapa as more of a deity than an historic person. For many of us this is accompanied by a vagueness of attributed good qualities, but indistinction is not fertile ground for inspiration. We must bring Lama Tsongkhapa into sharp focus in our minds so that he may serve as a polestar to guide us on our way.
The Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga practice is one that brings us closer to Lama Tsongkhapa, creating the karma to meet a reliable spiritual friend to guide us and awaken the vast qualities he possessed within ourselves.
This April at Chenrezig Institute, we completed our third annual five-day Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga Retreat. The retreat was led by Australian nun Venerable Thubten Chokyi, an FPMT registered teacher and director of the Liberation Prison Project. Geshe Phuntsok Tsultrim, our FPMT resident geshe, participated in the retreat alongside our students. Throughout the retreat Geshe-la sprinkled gems of insight and guidance to sharpen our focus and energize our aspirations to become like the great Lama Tsongkhapa.
Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga Retreat at Chenrezig Institute, Eudlo, Queensland, Australia, April 2019. Photo by Maria Corrales.
Together we purified, paid homage, and humbly requested that we might quickly become like Lama Tsongkhapa ourselves. With as many as twenty-four students participating in a practice session, we accumulated more than 20,000 Migstema mantras. The merit of these mantras was offered to Geshe Phuntsok Tsultrim that all his Dharma wishes may succeed instantly.
It is reliable teachers like Geshe-la who have carried the lineage of profound lamrim teachings in an unbroken continuum from Lama Tsongkhapa to us six-hundred years down the line. May we be worthy vessels to realize the great wisdom and compassion he embodied and help carry Lama Tsongkhapa’s teachings into the future.
For more information about Chenrezig Institute, visit their website:
https://www.chenrezig.com.au/
To learn more about Lama Tsongkhapa, read “The Mahasiddha Je Tsongkhapa” by Lama Yeshe:
https://fpmt.org/mandala/archives/older/mandala-issues-for-1995/november/the-mahasiddha-je-tsong-khapa/
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