(TibetanReview.net, Jun07, 2017) – Some 8,200 devotees, including school, college and university Tibetan students, are attending three days of introductory Buddhism teachings being given by Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, from Jun 5 to 7 at the Tsuglakhang, the main Buddhist temple at Mcleod Ganj, Dharamshala, India. This is the 11th year the Dalai Lama is giving this series of annual teachings organized by a group called Buddhism Introductory Committee of Dharamshala since 2007.
The teachings this year are on Nagarjuna’s “Commentary on Bodhichitta” and Gyalsey Thokme Sangpo’s “Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva”.
The event is aimed at promoting awareness of and training in Tibetan Buddhism among the youth. Almost 700 of the devotees are college and university students while 2,800 are school students, with the rest being monks and nuns and the lay public, including 1500 foreigners from 71 countries. A group of 60 monks from Thailand, with their abbot, are attending the teachings and will later to take out a peace march.
On the first day, the Dalai Lama mentioned the Buddha’s advice to his disciples not to take what he had taught on faith or at face value but to analyze it, like the goldsmith’s approach for determining the genuineness of a piece of metal as gold. He praised this skeptical approach and explained how valuable it had been in his discussions with scientists over the last 30 years or so.
He also stressed that the Buddhist advice that things did not exist the way they appeared was useful because it helped to counter misconceptions about reality, as was the advice to tackle self-cherishing attitudes and to cultivate altruism.