With Pema Khandro, Father Francis Tiso, Lama Lhanang Rinpoche, Chagdud Khadro, Shugen Roshi, Julie Rogers, Jim Tucker, M.D., Koshin Paley Ellison and Dr. William McGrath
Open Dates
Teachings on Death and Dying Facing realities of dying, death, and grief are central to our human experience. This program offers practical instructions for helping others in the process of dying and an overview of essential knowledge on death, bardo, and rebirth. This includes self-paced lectures on dying, loss, grief, and illness from Lamas and scholars of Buddhist Studies. Support the Buddhist Studies Institute by donating for these precious teachings. Your contribution, big and small, helps makes in-depth Buddhist training and education more accessible for all. May the teachings spread and flourish!
With Dr. Nicole Willock, Julie Regan, Ph.D., Pema Khandro, Lama Willa Miller, Amy Langenberg , Dr. Ann Gleig, Dr. Nida Chenagtsang, Lama Rod Owens, Dr. Jim Hopper, Dr. Elizabeth Call and Damchö Diana Finnegan
Open Dates
Join Pema Khandro and a group of esteemed Buddhist Studies scholars for an exploration of the history of Buddhist Sexualities from celibacy, to sacred sexuality in Buddhist Tantra and a simple approach to embodied integration with nature in Dzogchen. Support the Buddhist Studies Institute by donating for these precious teachings. Your contribution, big and small, helps makes in-depth Buddhist training and education more accessible for all. May the teachings spread and flourish!
This course on Buddhist Ethics goes through the Five Buddhist Precepts. The five precepts form the basis of a Buddhist way of life and the vows that Buddhists Seek to follow. The Five Precepts are a discipline of freedom, honor, and precision that cover the potent themes of life from the extraordinary perspective of non-duality. Support the Buddhist Studies Institute by donating for these precious teachings. Your contribution, big and small, helps makes in-depth Buddhist training and education more accessible for all. May the teachings spread and flourish!
With Holly Gayley, Judith Simmer-Brown, Sarah Jacoby, Amy Langenberg , Damchö Diana Finnegan, Venerable Karma Lekshe Tsomo and Pema Khandro
Open Dates
This is the missing history of women in Tantric Buddhism. This course addresses the fascinating story of nuns, mothers, teachers, consorts, prophets, and disciples. Taught by scholar-practitioners whose groundbreaking research on women and Buddhism has changed the way we think of Buddhist history. This course will address the history of women in Buddhism, the history of yoginis and dakinis in India and Tibet, the stories of important Buddhist women, Buddhist philosophy on gender, sex, and sexuality, and the role of the consort in historical Tibet, and contemporary manifestations and so much more. Support the Buddhist Studies Institute by donating for…
January 1st is the kick-off to our 40 day meditation marathon. This is an invitation to practice every single day for 40 days from January 1st to Losar on February 10th. It’s so wonderful to be able to share this commitment with others and we invite you to join us!
With Drupon Rinchen Dorjee Rinpoche and Pema Khandro
May 3 - 5, 2024
Join us for this special event, the Vajrayogini Empowerment, an initiation into the inner tantra practice of generation stage meditation. Vajrayogini is the female buddha embodying radical presence. To practice Vajrayogini meditation is to cut through to innermost wisdom and innate clarity. This special weekend will feature three days of instructions, empowerment and meditations of Vajrayogini. It will be led by Drupon Rinchen Dorjee Rinpoche who will give the empowerment and Tulku Pema Khandro, Ph.D, who will give the explanation and instructions. TRANSLATION We are honored to host the most excellent interpreter, Ina Bieler! The empowerment will be translated into…
THE BLACK DAKINI CHOD TRADITION This is a Tibetan meditation which is a potent, dynamic practice for awakening compassion and facing death. It is a practice of healing through love towards one’s own mind; through releasing the fictive self, the dualism that caused the appearance of “other” dissolves and an expansive intelligence becomes available. Morning large group sessions will focus on the Black Dakini, the profound deity yoga meditation on the black wrathful dakini from the Jeweled Garland of Chod, (the Rinchen Trengwa) that was practiced by the first Pema Khandro and passed down from fourteenth century Tibet. This practice…
ཆོས་དབྱིངས་མཛོད Treasury of Space Khenpo Yeshi and Pema Khandro return for the next chapter of the Choying Dzod. Beyond effort and achievement is the state of natural ease, the basic space of being. How to breakthrough to find this innate expanse is the focus of a profound Buddhist meditation manual known as The Treasury of Basic Space, The Choying Dzod (chos dbyings rin po che’i mdzod). It presents the essence of esoteric Tibetan Buddhism, known as Great Perfection, or Dzogchen (rdzogs chen) in verse form. Venerated as a manifestation of the expanse of reality itself, is the quintessential Dzogchen text by the fourteenth…
Tantra and Dzogchen with their themes of transformation and being exactly we as are can sometimes seem contradictory. Yet they represent two profound paths to contemplative realization that have always been practiced together in some form. And both represent crucial aspects of the path.
This retreat focuses on a rare early Dzogchen text called the Black Wrathful Dakini’s Secret Tantra. In striking contemplative poetry, it unites the themes of Tantra and Dzogchen through contemplations of fierce compassion and primordial knowing. This is an essential text to study for those who follow Chod, the esoteric Tibetan meditations for cutting through fear. It explains and presents the meaning of the Black Wrathful Dakini and explains all aspects of ultimate reality from a non-dual perspective. This important scripture is part of the collection of the seventeen tantras, the early Dzogchen texts that were the major source of the Dzogchen Nyingthig tradition.
This sacred text unites Tantra and Dzogchen in a single stream of contemplative vision of ultimate reality as understood through the Dakini principle.
This three-day retreat focuses on the study of excerpts from the scripture, the practice of the Troma Nagmo cycle from the Rinchen Trengwa three Dakini Chod, meditation, and dharma conversation. This is part one in a series that will explore this profound scripture with Pema Khandro, whose scholarly research focuses on early Dzogchen.
5pm – 7pm San Francisco PDT 8pm – 10pm New York EDT 11am – 1pm Sydney AEDT
Bardo refers to the experience of rupture- of endings and uncertainty – that leaves us suspended in the liminal spaces between what was and what will be. Bardo also refers to dying and post-death periods as well as to states of radical transformation in life. Join Dr. Pema Khandro, scholar and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism and Lama Lhanang Rinpoche for an intensive course focused on the profound wisdom and skillful means presented by the Buddhist philosophy of death, bardo, and rebirth.
“One of the key themes of Buddhist life stories is that our experiences are not only made up of circumstances, but also of our reaction to those circumstances. Whatever happens externally may not be in our control, but we have a choice about the meanings we take from them and where we go from here. This is a Buddhist viewpoint made apparent by the radical story of Gelongma Palmo, who faced extreme hardship, yet is subsequently transformed and liberated through the experience.” ~ Pema Khandro