SPIRITUAL: Special Class

Taking our cue from Valentine's Day, we will focus this morning on love - not just romantic love, but the big, expansive loving kindness of the altruistic attitude. Join us for meditations to expand the heart!

This event will be accessible on YouTube and Zoom (register here for Zoom). 

At the request of Lama Zopa Rinpoche and FPMT, His Holiness the Dalai Lama will give an online teaching on emptiness at 10:30 pm Raleigh time, Sunday, February 7 (Monday morning Feb. 8 India time). For more information, please go to His Holiness' website.

To prepare us for the teaching, Geshe Gelek will offer teachings on Wednesday nights beginning January 20, on the text His Holiness will teach -  Recognizing the Mother: An Experiential  Song of the View by Changkya Rölpai Dorjé.

FPMT has made a translation of the text available here.

In the January 20 class, Geshe Gelek advised becoming familiar with the death dissolution meditation, and focusing on the internal signs. You can find the death dissolution meditation on Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive. Death dissolution is the first meditation on this page. 

These teachings will replace the regular Wednesday Lamrim class for the time being.

Students who have already registered on Zoom for the Lamrim class can continue to use the same registration link to attend the Zoom sessions on this text.

   Students who have not been attending the lamrim class can click here to register.

As always, we will also stream the teaching on YouTube.

We will continue review of teachings on calm abiding at 6:45 pm and Geshe-la will arrive at 7 pm.

Kadampa Center is happy to host Venerable Thubten Chöying online as she shares images, impressions and insights from her new life as a nun at Kopan Nunnery outside Kathmandu, Nepal.  Venerable Chöying (formerly Sarah Brooks, Spiritual Program Coordinator at Kadampa Center in Raleigh, NC, USA and at Mahamudra Centre in Colville, NZ) ordained in January this year with Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Spiritual Director of our mother organization, FPMT. Come for an evening of hearing the joys and trials of immersion into the ordained life.

Kopan Nunnery has two Geshes from the first class of female Tibetan Geshes who were permitted by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to earn the Geshe degree in 2016. Now that the gender barrier has been removed, there is much more motivation for the young nuns to study seriously because they have role models showing how they can return to the Nunnery and benefit future generations of nuns by becoming qualified teachers. This also means that over time there will be more female Geshes who can teach abroad, which is important for representing the Buddha's view that everyone is equally qualified to become enlightened.

The evening will be offered on Zoom and livestreamed on YouTube.  Registration is required to participate via Zoom. Access to the YouTube livestream is available on Kadampa Center's website. There will be opportunities to ask questions.

Generosity is the first perfection of a bodhisattva! Anyone joyfully inspired by the lives of these dedicated women can help support Venerable Chöying and all the nuns at Kopan by making a donation directly to the nunnery. The most urgent need is for food, but all donations will be used well to support the thriving community in the nunnery.

In keeping with our tradition, Kadampa Center offers this program with no fee to participants. 

Of course, we welcome offerings to help support our programs!

In the countryside near Toulouse, France is a modern-day Buddhist monastery, our sister FPMT center Nalanda Monastery.

Nalanda is named for the great Indian monastery that produced highly acclaimed Buddhist scholars, including Lama Atisha, Chandrakirti, Nagarjuna and Shantarakshita, whose works we continue to study today.

Kadampa Center is happy to host an evening with Venerable Tendar, a resident of Nalanda in France, who will speak about the traditions at the monastery.

Besides Dharma studies, the current Nalanda monastery is also famous for its work in creating, and helping others create, holy images through their tsatsa workshop. Tsatsas are plaster statues, cast in molds. The Nalanda workshop creates molds for others to use - and in fact, our own Family Program used molds at this year's Family Dharma Camp, and we also used Nalanda molds to create tsatsa for filling our stupa with sacred objects. So Kadampa Center has a great connection to Nalanda!

Come learn more about this sister center in our FPMT family.

Raise arms to save lives! Every Drop Counts... Be a wish-fulfilling jewel and offer a pint of blood, a gift of life to others! Join our third annual blood drive to celebrate His Holiness' birthday.

Sign up online! Register here.

To celebrate His Holiness’ birthday, Kadampa Center will hold a blood drive on Saturday, July 13, from 2 to 6:30 p.m.

We will send His Holiness a card signed by all our donors and support volunteers, so the more bountiful the number of donations, the better!

Your offering of blood can be the difference between life and death for another, benefiting not only the recipients but everyone in their lives.  Many of us have personal experience with blood transfusions, either for ourselves or for someone we love – our brother,  our mother, our BFF.

We’re working with the pros in blood drives, the American Red Cross, and we have a big goal – 50 pints!  Last year, our members and friends donated 28 units of blood and 11 units of "power red" blood, and more than 50 people participated, as donors or support volunteers. Please invite your family, friends, neighbors and co-workers to join in our blood drive and keep hearts beating throughout our community.

Here’s what you need to know to help create our gift of compassion to others, to offer to His Holiness:

Sign up online! Register here. When you get to the link, click on the red circle with the white arrow, then choose your time and type of donation.

If you can’t donate blood for any reason but want to help create this gift to His Holiness,  you can volunteer here.

Read here about how one precious life was saved by other's kindness. You can make the same difference for someone!

And don’t forget to dedicate your merit, for the benefit of all sentient beings, and for the long, happy, healthy life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama!

"It is our custom to say that someone is "lucky" or "unlucky" if they meet with fortunate or unfortunate circumstances, respectively.  It is however, too simplistic to think in terms of random "luck."  Even from a scientific point of view, this is not a sufficient explanation.  Should something unfortunate happen, we immediately think, "Oh, how unlucky!"  And yet this is not sufficient to explain what happened- there must be a cause.  We seem to call "luck" that factor which overrides external conditions to bring about a positive situation.  But that too is a cause; it is an inner cause, which we call "merit."-- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, from "Answers:  Discussions with Western Buddhists", published by Snow Lion Publications.

Creating merit is an essential part of Buddhist practice.  When we build up our stores of merit, it removes obstacles in our spiritual lives. This makes it easier to understand the teachings and apply the Dharma in our everyday lives. Making merit is also great purification!

On Thursday practice nights, we will do group practices of doing prostrations and offering mandalas.  In these sessions, Geshe Sangpo will briefly explain the purpose and benefits of the practices and teach us how to do them, and then we will all do the practice together.  This is of benefit to everyone who participates, and because we are doing practice as a group in our gompa, it will benefit Kadampa Center as well.

Prostration nights will be easy-going; we will , then recite purification practices "Prostrations to the 35 Confession Buddhas" and the Vajrasattva mantra, then do prostrations together.

The sessions will take place every two weeks beginning  with prostrations on Thursday, April 12, and will run from 7 to 8pm.  The next session in the schedule will be mandala offerings on Thursday, April 26, and so on every two weeks.

On this night, we will do mandala offerings.

No need to have a mandala set on mandala offering nights, but if you have a set, please bring it!  Geshe Sangpo will teach the hand mudra for mandala offerings for those who don't have a set.

Geshe Gelek Chocha		Geshe Palden Sangpo
Venerable Ngawang Lhamo	Venerable Ngawang Khando	Venerable Ngawang Choekyi

Our precious Geshes and nuns contribute so much to our community, and we cherish any opportunity to give back to them!

There are many opportunities to serve them at the Center, from offering a beverage during a teaching to offering a meal during a social event. 

This discussion will be an chance to learn about serving our sangha, and find out when and how to get involved.