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The Topic for Today: Teaching the means for happiness in your next rebirth (176)
This week Geshe Tenley will start teaching on Day 11 of Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. This day continues the teachings on how to extract the essence from your optimum human rebirth (118). In the past weeks our focus was on developing a yearning for a good rebirth and we now move on to studying the means for happiness in our next rebirth.
The means for happiness are to take refuge in the Three Jewels and to develop faith in the law of cause and effect. This faith is the root of all health and happiness.
Our proper taking of refuge depends on whether we have within our mindstream the proper causes for taking refuge. These causes are discussed in Lozang Choekyi Gyaeltsaen’s “Melodious Laughter of Lozang - Answers to “Questions on the Whitest Altruism lf All”
The true nature of taking refuge:
Taking refuge because one is most afraid
And because one knows the Three Jewels are able to protect.
This is what you meant, omniscient one.
We need both causes: personal fear of samsara and the lower realms, and the belief that, if we are able to put our trust in them, the Three Jewels will have the ability to protect us from these terrors.
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Pabongka Rinpoche's Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand is the seminal lam-rim text of the 20th century. It is a transcription of a 24 day lam rim teaching given in 1921. Offered as a "practical teaching," it is less scholarly than Je Tsongkhapa's Jang chub lam rim chen mo or The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment and as such it is the text from which most modern lamas teach lam rim.
Geshe Ngawang Tenley (Geshela) was born in 1969 into a nomadic family in Eastern Tibet. He made the dangerous journey by foot across the Himalayas in 1988, was ordained as a novice monk in 1990, and began intensive studies and practice at Sera Je Monastery. During this time he received many teachings from His Holiness the Dalai Lama and many other highly qualified masters. In 1998, he received his full ordination monk (Gelong) vows from His Holiness, and in November 2008, after eighteen years of rigorous study and practice, was conferred his geshe degree. He arrived in Boston in early 2004 and began formally teaching in 2009. He was appointed Kurukulla's Resident Teacher by Lama Zopa Rinpoche in 2010 following our beloved Geshe Tsulga la's passing. Geshe Tenley is down-to-earth, wise and kind-hearted. His cheerfulness and humility endears him to everyone he meets.
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