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Buddhist Summer School 2024

19th January – 21st February 2024
collage of Buddhist teachings and moments

TRALEG KYABGON RINPOCHE was born in 1955 in Nangchen, Eastern Tibet. At about the age of two, he was recognized by His Holiness the Sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa as the ninth incarnation of the Traleg Tulkus and enthroned as the Supreme Abbott of Thrangu Monastery.

In 1959 Traleg Rinpoche had to flee his native land. Rinpoche escaped with his party to Bhutan and from there to Rumtek, the headquarters of His Holiness the XVI Gyalwa Karmapa in Sikkim. He subsequently underwent the rigorous training prescribed for tulkus born with the responsibilities as major lineage holders. This included many years of instructions in both Drukpa and Karma Kagyu traditions, five years at the Sanskrit University in Varanasi, India, and several years at Rumtek Monastery in Sikkim, India.

In 1980 Traleg Rinpoche went to Australia where he established the Kagyu E-Vam Buddhist Institute in Melbourne. In 1984 Rinpoche inaugurated the annual Buddhist Summer School, which serves as the forum for many important social and religious issues. Rinpoche is the spiritual director of E-Vam Institute in Melbourne, Australia; Nyima Tashi in Auckland, New Zealand; and other affiliated centers.

It is with great joy that we would like to introduce you to the sublime teachings of the IX Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche. Our focus of interest resting this year on only one presenter, Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche and his influence upon the landscape of integral thought.

A montage of Rinpoche’s s talks will be on offer across three days – available in person in the Gompa at Nyima Tashi and live-streamed on Zoom: The essence of IX Traleg Rinpoche’s unique approach to unfolding the Dharma.

This year, all courses will be run in-person and via Zoom. We look forward to bringing all zoom viewers a quality audio-visual experience of the teachings in 2024.

Online registration and booking payments are available through our website.  It has never been so easy to purchase a ticket to single or multiple sessions in advance. All students joining via Zoom will need to pre-purchase their sessions. Students attending in person can pay by cash or EFTPOS on the day, but we recommend you register in advance to attend in person by emailing nyimatashi.nz@gmail.com.

The full programme is available below.  Please take your time to read through it and savor the offerings for 2024.

The Opening Forum will be on Friday the 19th January at 6.30 pm.  It is a FREE event, but please register to receive the Zoom details or to let us know you will be joining in person.  Email emailing nyimatashi.nz@gmail.com to register.

 

See you at the Summer School!

For more information contact Jangchub at nimatashi.nz@gmail.com

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Program Timetable

Opening Forum: All are welcome.

Sessions on offer

  • Bodhicitta: Relative and absolute Bodhicitta

  • Mindful: Buddhist meditation and the art of applying mindfulness

  • Death: Death, dying and reincarnation

  • Karma

  • Beyond: Beyond Mindfulness: A panoramic view

Event schedule

Open-mindedness
Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche

Peculiar to the Mahayana tradition is the realization that we are, in the strict sense of the word, able to work with others. Concern for others no longer turns into some kind of preoccupation or occupational therapy for us, a neurotic tendency that helps us to forget ourselves through wanting to help others. We are able to do genuine, constructive work, as far as helping others is concerned. The Mahayana is known as the ‘great vehicle’ because we are not only progressing on the path individually, but we are also able to directly or indirectly influence people in our environment. An involvement with other people becomes more important to us than just working with ourselves for the sake of our own wellbeing, which was the concern of the Hinayana practitioner.

A prerequisite for any form of mental pliancy is a sense of open-mindedness. Here, the word ‘liberal’ is stripped of any political implications. It is connected with the Oxford Dictionary definition, which is the ability to incorporate and appreciate other people’s viewpoints; being broad-minded as opposed to having a narrow-minded and dogmatic approach to life and others. Being open- minded is the opposite of any kind of fanaticism or dogmatism. However, at the same time it cannot be defined as the opposite of that, because a supposedly broad-minded person who becomes extremely irritated by dogmatists or fanatics would defeat the whole purpose. The broad-minded person must be open to viewpoints that are a completely anathema to the views he or she upholds. This extremely accommodating, open-minded and liberal attitude is the prerequisite for any kind of Mahayana practice.

Being open-minded does not mean we are open to different things but unable to choose one from another. We are still capable of making moral judgments about what is good and what is bad or what is beneficial and not beneficial. We could take an interest in social issues, but open-mindedness is not particularly a view as far as social structure is concerned. Open-mindedness is the necessary condition for any kind of opinion to be formulated without falling into the extreme of dogmatism or fanaticism. There is a general basis or background for opinions to be formulated properly.

There are two things a Mahayana practitioner has to deal with in terms of not generating conceptual paraphernalia: intolerance and prejudice. Intolerance leads us to defend a particular cause or viewpoint to the extent that we feel we are defending ourselves. This type of intolerance is regarded as anathema to open-mindedness. In other words, an intolerant person cannot practice the Mahayana tradition. It is as simple as that. The other thing a Mahayana practitioner has to deal with is prejudice. Prejudice is also.

anathema to open-mindedness. If a person is prejudicial in attitude, it will lead to all kinds of misunderstandings and to more conceptual paraphernalia. Normally, we know being prejudiced is not good, but it becomes automatic and manifests in all kinds of situations. Prejudice might arise in court, where a person is prosecuted because of their skin color or because the victim is a woman or a member of a minority group. It leads to all kinds of misjudgements where people are unable to make a proper assessment of the whole thing.

We cannot help others if our mind is infiltrated with all kinds of prejudices and vested interests. Some sense of calm and serenity, which are characteristic of open-mindedness, are a necessary condition in the approach to helping others. Calmness, which is attained through the meditation we engage in on the level of the Hinayana, here refers to a lack of emotional disturbances and emotional instabilities. The emotional aspects that hinder our relationship to others are dealt with through meditation. There is a sense of calmness and serenity, but this is not anathema to emotions as such. In the Mahayana, we are not encouraged to uproot all emotion, just the emotions that are particularly disturbing to their own growth. Lack of emotions means lack of interest, and if we do not take an interest in what we are engaged in, the notion of helping others becomes completely meaningless.

Normally, when we talk about someone being calm and collected, we mean the person is detached. We understand the words ‘calm,’ ‘collected’ and ‘detached’ to be synonymous. A very involved person is regarded as a warm person. Probably hot, too. Nonetheless, in the Mahayana definition, involvement and detachment go together. We are detached to the extent our attitude is not influenced by any bias or vested interest, but at the same time we take an interest in the situation in which we are involved a sense of involvement and a sense of detachment go hand-in-hand, rather than there being a situation where we go from one extreme to the other.

It is said that if we begin to uphold any kind of belief system without some open attitude towards it, thinking that particular belief or value system is the best, this will lead to a state of inertia rather than development. Therefore, a critical approach and open-mindedness go together. We normally have a particular belief system that we have uncritically accepted and then begin to work for that cause. After a while, we might realize this belief system is wrong, after discovering all kinds of defects and deficiencies in it, but we cannot acknowledge the fact we have made a mistake because that revelation exhibits too much of our own ignorance. So, we continue to cling to the belief system and try to suppress any doubts and critical attitudes that might arise. All these things become anathema to the Mahayana approach.

In the Mahayana, this sense of open-mindedness is connected with prajna or ‘knowledge.’ As we will discover, prajna is related to dispelling or overcoming conceptual paraphernalia. Conceptual paraphernalia is related to prejudice, vested interest, dogmas, fanaticism and all the rest. A Mahayana practitioner must have open- mindedness. Any moral or value judgment a person might form, due to Buddhism or any other system, is formulated within this background of open-mindedness. Otherwise,

it leads to a state of intellectual inertia where we are unable to move forward because we hang onto something so hard, we cannot appreciate other people’s viewpoints. We cannot even look at our own belief system properly and discover different aspects of it, we just accept some things blindly and then proceed to act without thinking twice about it. That leads to all kinds of disastrous consequences.

You may ask, ‘What has this to do with dealing with emotions?’ From a Mahayana point of view, we develop open-mindedness by dealing with our own emotions while dealing with other people at the same time. We have to have an open attitude to our own emotions without judging them so that we can accept, accommodate and work with them. We will go into how to do that in the coming chapters.

Relative & absolute Bodhicitta
  • Session 1 – Friday 19th January / 7:15 – 8:45 pm

Cost: $22 NZD 
Up close and personal on the big screen

The generation of compassion or loving kindness is something that we have to initiate, we have to make some kind of move. Sometimes we may feel unloved, neglected, we may feel discarded and unnoticed. Sometimes our interactions, in terms of compassion, seem to be based upon some kind of business mentality, some sort of business transaction. We always expect something in return, or we feel swindled, so in practicing compassion we have to be fully open, being open means not playing any tricks, to move away from self-deception and the need to manipulate circumstances so that we can feel better about ourselves.

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Buddhist meditation & the art of applying mindfulness
  • Session 1 – Saturday 20th January / 9:00 – 10:30 am

  • Session 2 – Saturday 20th January /11:00 am – 12:30 pm

  • Session 3 – Saturday 20th January / 1:30 – 3:00 pm

Cost: $20 NZD per session
Up close and personal on the big screen

Over three sessions Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche presents the traditional approach to mindfulness meditation in the Buddhist tradition. He illustrates the kinds of mental habits, preoccupations and negative influences that can distract us, and how developing concentration and insight in meditation can assist us to develop a more panoramic and positive outlook. The aspects of Buddhist psychology are presented including: three mental trainings; five features of the mind and omnipresent mental factors. Rinpoche describes how to apply this outlook within our meditation.

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Death, dying & reincarnation
  • Session 1 – Saturday 20th January / 3.30 – 5 pm

  • Session 2 – Saturday 20th January / 5:30 – 7 pm

  • Session 3 – Sunday 21st January / 9 – 10:30 am

Cost: $20 NZD per session
Up close and personal on the big screen

These series of talks will be presented by Ani Jangchub Lhamo who will read from Traleg Rinpoche’s transcripts, which covers such topics as the fear of death – reincarnation and rebirth – The Tibetan Book of the Dead and meditation on death. The fear of death is all pervasive, it is something that we all will experience sooner or later. Denying it, trying not to think about it, does not make it go away. The reason for contemplating, meditating on death is not to rob us of happiness but to find it. When our time arrives, you do not want to be too nostalgic about life. If there is a fear of death it is better to acknowledge it and engage with it and move through it so that when death arrives, there is no fear.

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Karma
  • Session 1 – Sunday 21st January / 11 am – 12 pm

  • Session 2 – Sunday 21st January / 1 – 2 pm

Cost: $22 NZD per session
Up close and personal on the big screen

The literal meaning of “Karma” is action. In speaking of karma, we are speaking about a philosophy that addresses the meaning of life, or the repercussions of what we do and think about in life. Therefore, karmic theory is far from being simple. Karmic theory is both sophisticated and complex. Understanding karma can have a transformative effect on the way we relate to our thoughts and feelings and to those around us.

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Beyond Mindfulness: A panoramic View
  • Session 1 – Sunday 21st January / 2:30 – 3:30 pm

  • Session 2 – Sunday 21st January / 4 – 5:30 pm

  • Session 3 – Sunday 21st January / 5:30 – 7 pm

Cost: $23 NZD per session
Up close and personal on the big screen

According to Buddhism, as we begin to accumulate different types of experiences and these experiences become ossified or classified then there is not much movement in the mind. Just like a body that is not exercised the suppleness of the mind is gone. The mind becomes very set in its ways; it operates in a very habitual manner. Therefore, many of the mental habits that we have can become self-destructive, they invite frustration and disappointment. It puts us in a situation where we just dwell on past failures, our past experiences of trauma.

We have a tendency to think about the future only with a sense of anxiety, fear and worry. From the Buddhist point of view the expansive nature of mindfulness practice helps us because we begin to see that nothing is fixed, if nothing is fixed then we have the capacity to direct our mind in a totally different direction if we so choose. That means we are not condemned to repeat the same stuff. We are not condemned to have the same old thoughts, same old emotions, same only feelings. According to Buddhism we interact with others in three different ways, physically, verbally, and mentally. What sort of thoughts, emotions, and feelings we have will greatly impact how we relate to life’s many challenges.

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Teachings

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Summer School

More Information

  • This year, we are pleased you will be able to quickly and easily purchase sessions through the Nyima Tashi website. Once we receive notification that you have purchased sessions, we will email you confirmation which will include the Zoom invite to the relevant sessions.

    It’s easy to book and pay online through the “Book Your Place” button below. A credit or debit card is required to book through the website. It will be possible to pay via cash or EFTPOS on the day of a Teaching if you are attending in person – we do recommend you register in advance to attend in person by emailing nyimatashi.nz@gmail.com

    If you prefer to pay via bank-to-bank transfer (NZ only) or stripe, then please get in touch.

    Please note that all session times are based on Auckland, New Zealand time. Auckland may be several hours or possibly a whole day ahead of your local time, so please check session times against your local time zone.

  • All recordings will be available for purchase two weeks after Summer School concludes. These recordings have an expiration date of two weeks from the date of purchase.

  • Nyima Tashi’s new location in Mt Albert does not currently house an on-site cafe. However, the Centre is a brief stroll or drive away from Cafe’s on New North Road and St Lukes Mall. Mt Albert Village has a variety of Noodle and Dumpling restaurants a short drive away. You are also very welcome to bring a picnic lunch or thermos & blanket and relax on the lawn on the Centre grounds in between sessions.

  • Regarding the cancellation of a course, we request that you cancel at least 48 hours before a scheduled session. You may cancel by phone or online here. If you have to cancel either one or all of your suggested courses, we offer you a credit to your account if you cancel before the 48 hours. However, if you do not cancel prior to the 48 hours, you will lose the payment regarding your chosen course.

  • Parking on-site at 717 New North Rd is exclusively reserved for teachers and residents of the centre.  There are several nearby streets that provide ample on-street parking. The nearest is Selkirk Rd which is adjacent to the Centre and accessible from St Luke’s Road. It is possible to park on New North Rd when it is not a clearway – please take note of the signs on the street.

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