General Spiritual Director
German National Festival 2024
Dec 11, 2024
canadians reflect on their festival
What a wonderful Canadian Festival! 5 days; an empowerment, 4 powerful teachings with Gen-la Khyenrab, 2 morning meditations and 7 retreat sessions. From British-Columbia to Montreal, or even England, So many hands helped to make this event possible! Once again we can see how nothing can happen without the kindness of others.
During the last day of the teachings, Gen-la then gave two very profound teachings on the true nature of things; emptiness. He encouraged us to contemplate deeply how the things we normally see – inherently existent things – do not exist.
He explained conventional truths – especially subtle conventional truths, ultimate truth and finished with the union of the two truths, Buddha’s ultimate intention. Skilfully using many practical examples throughout: clouds in the sky, rainbows, blue of the sky, magician, actor, he concluded with making these teachings meaningful to our daily life.
Thank you Gen-la for this great feast of delight!
We concluded the day with a wonderful online community get together where more than 60 people joined to share their best part of the festival! How nice to connect with each other! Read on some of their comments below.
We are now finishing the festival with retreat sessions led by Gen Kelsang Chögyan in order to immediately apply what we have learned and maintain the continuum of blessings of Manjushri.
Thank you Geshe-la for all the opportunities to deepen our practice of dharma through helping put together these events, receiving precious dharma teachings and learning how to receive continuous blessings through our daily life.
what they are saying
Roberta I am so happy to see all of you! There's so many people I haven't seen in soooo long, and I'm just feeling so wonderful to see you. Because being a Kadampa is about being in a community and our community is larger than our own Centre.
Sarah I'm loving it. I'm enjoying the fact that we have access to everything, and not having to travel. It's just fantastic. I'm really trying to remember to identify with my pure body and mind,
Alex I started Kadampa more or less this year and it's been an amazing journey. Just wanted to share an experience I just now had. I took a walk after our last teaching and I looked at everything around as an emanation of emptiness. It's amazing how much more blissful and wonderful and colourful everything looked around me. It's so nice to get these amazing teachings. They say that Festival is a feast - boy is it ever a feast!
Judi I found this last teaching quite profound. I've heard many teachings on emptiness but for some reason I seem to really understand conventional truth. I don't know why; I thought I did before but it seemed to me it just went in a lot deeper - you know, mere name is just imputation - I got that before, I thought, but it seemed to be a much deeper level. I found it very, very moving, particularly this last one.
Sandra Maybe we were thinking having an online Festival would be a little bit easier, you know. For the people who weren't actually involved in putting it together - I don't think there were many who weren't lol - for the ones who weren't it would be really wonderful for you to know that so much work went into putting this Festival together.
So many different people were involved for weeks to make it happen, in a whole bunch of different ways that maybe you can't even imagine. Just transcribing all the teachings, and then translating them, and then putting in the closed captions, and then checking the close captions. There was just so much happening - it was really right down to the wire.
Julia I appreciate what you were saying about putting together the Festival because it's just another example of the causes and conditions required to make anything - and this is a magnificent, produced object.
Gen Delek It's so wonderful to hear teachings on emptiness. How many times have we read these teachings - but to be able to sit and hear and just to listen again - it always just makes a little bit of a difference - it just goes in a different way or deeper - and so I am really appreciating Gen-la's teachings.
Melodie One thing that touched me, at the beginning, when Gen-la just said that he will read again and again the sentences, "The things that I normally see in dreams ..." and just saying that - normally we skip that part because it's in the introduction of the book - and for me it was a good reminder that there's treasure in these parts of the books that we can skip. So I was really happy to memorize that whole sentence.
Rigden When Gen-la was saying 'Imagine being a qualified meditator single-pointedly absorbed in emptiness' and all those qualities we can have; and it was nice to think that I can imagine being that meditator, as opposed to thinking, 'I am not that meditator'. I was inspired.
