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…
Build your life on a solid foundation. Ngondro presents the core practices of Buddhist psychology, working with core needs in identity, relationality, forgiveness and repair, resources and the sense of empowerment. Join Pema Khandro and the Buddhist Studies Institute for a journey into Ngondro, the core practice of Buddhist tantra. This module focuses on the purification of speech as the basis for Buddhist tantric practice. It then focuses on generating the refuge field. This is a practice of getting resourced, learning one’s own lineage and understanding the field of support for one’s spiritual journey. This section concludes with a…
Meditation Teacher Training 2025 For Teachers Beholding a Diverse Beautiful World The Meditation Teacher Training supplies the fundamental knowledge and experience necessary to lead meditation classes and one-day meditation intensives. People all over the world have turned to Buddhist meditation as a source of wisdom. Meditation offers a powerful method to access a sense of spaciousness, peace and authentic presence. From a Buddhist point of view, when we know how to meditate, we learn how to work with mind and emotions. We have a practice for unraveling conditioned scripts and unconscious habits. Meditation is a pathway to discovering human…
All are welcome to join Pema Khandro for our annual Tibetan Lunar New Year Celebration This is a free online program; open to the public. Vajrakilaya Dances Performed Losar Address with Pema Khandro Celebration of 21-Day Meditation Marathoners Dedications of Merit Year of the Wood Snake Begins! Donate below any amount to celebrate The Buddhist Studies Institute’s mission to help the Buddhist Teachings flourish.
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 century master, Longchenpa. It refers to the expanse of reality and pure experience of meaningfulness as the revelation…
Encounter the profound instructions of the trilogy of comfort and ease, the exposition on the stages of the journey by one of the great Tibetan philosopher, Longchenpa (1308-1364).
These beautiful teachings consider the fundamental ease available in the depths of being, and how to access those states. It is often difficult to access rigorous engagement with Buddhist intellectual traditions. The Buddhist Studies Institute offers groundbreaking efforts to make that study available. The Dzogchen Retreat online will offer the opportunity to study the core writings of one of the most venerated and brilliant Buddhist philosophers of Tibet, Longchenpa (1308-1364). In classes you will read passages in Tibetan and translated English and enjoy the rich commentary and interpretation byDzogchen scholar, Lama and lineage holder, Dr. Pema Khandro.
This is a continuation of an annual study of this precious text that is central to esoteric Buddhist meditation.
This retreat is led entirely online. Prepare a serene space to watch the classes, and be ready to show up on camera for practice sessions with an international community.
Yoga Classes
Rest your body and mind! Enjoy restorative yoga each morning led by Buddhist Studies Institute faculty, this is an optional class for retreat participants, focused on deep relaxation and support of the body.
Other parts of the retreat include:
Feeling the support of group practice
Enjoying dharma conversations, fostering community through small group discussions
Experiencing Dzogchen guided meditation sessions led by Pema Khandro
Delving into Buddhist philosophy anchored in rigorous engagement with classical Buddhist texts; enjoying daily lectures given by Dr. Khandro
Engaging with Buddhist Philosophy
Remembering the profound teachings that unravel it all at the root
Exploring reality, enjoying question and answer sessions with Dr. Khandro
Sign up for one-to-one meetings at the end of the retreat with the Lama
Bringing the dharma home to you; engaging in in-depth training from your own home, an unprecedented accessibility to traditional Buddhist training
Pema Khandro will lead practices from the 27 Practices for Training for Dzogchen Meditation from the sems nyid ngal gso, Longchenpa’s instructions on Finding Comfort and Ease in the Nature of Mind. A system venerated for its power to awaken the primordial knowing beyond illusions, these practices provide an opening to the authentic nature of innate wakefulness.
Pre-requisites
Recommended prerequisites are: completed Ngondro training, are currently enrolled in Ngondro training or have completed Ngondro in any lineage. Previous meditation experience and a history of meditation practice is necessary to fully appreciate and engage in the practices taught in this retreat, but this class is offered with open enrollment.
“The Great Garuda states:
Abandon desire for bliss, for this harms the mind; rely on resting naturally, free of anything needing to be done regarding samsara or nirvana.
As for the magical display of mind and apparent phenomena,
‘This is self,’ ’This is other,” which are the hindrances of mental stirring,
are dispelled along with perceiving, thinking, and fixating, so there is imperturbable rest that defies all attempts at verbal expression.
The implications of whatever manifests
as the miraculous display of ordinary, conceptual mind
can be discerned within the ‘interval,’ free of characterization,
between conceptual mind and the objects that constitute its function.
– Longchenpa, Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding
This is a rare opportunity to study excerpts from the Troma text held within the original Dzogchen tantras known as the seventeen tantras, the Dakini’s Secret Tantra.
About Troma Nagmo Underlying Tibetan Buddhist Chod meditation is the practice of Troma Nagmo, the black, wrathful dakini. In the Dakini’s Secret Tantra, Troma Nagmo’s meaning and practice is explained in terms of the ultimate view of reality. It explores how to cut through limited concepts to experience expansive freedom, but without spiritual bypassing. Thus it explores the line been the vast views of intrinsic wisdom, and the practicality of working with dualistic experience.
Join Lama Pema Khandro, Ph.D. for three days of deep dharma study, Chod meditation, and dharma conversation.
“At the core of what we are is Buddha-nature…Buddha-mind… a wakeful presence already complete, pure, good and fully and completely enlightened.” Pema Khandro
Pema Khandro discusses Buddha-nature and the third of the major Buddhist teachings known as the third turning of the wheel of the dharma.