Tag Archives: Dakpo Tashi Namgyal

Bodhicharya Summer Camp

Bodhicharya Summer Camp

14-20 July 2014

Casa da Torre, Braga, Portugal

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The Camp was hosted for the third year running by Bodhicharya Portugal at Casa da Torre, near Braga, from 14 to 21 July. With around 110 participants from 20 different countries, mainly European, the atmosphere was lively, the discussion animated, a chance to renew old friendships and make new ones.

Ringu Tulku’s teachings continued and concluded the study of Dakpo Tashi Namgyal’s magisterial text, Mahᾱmudrᾱ, The Moonlight: Quintessence of Mind and Meditation, which he had started four years previously in Lusse, France. He made it clear from the outset, however, that study of a text is only the beginning: we must use this study to work on ourselves, which is the main meditation. Ultimately it is our practice and we must integrate the teaching at the level on which we find ourselves. Throughout the week’s teachings, he stressed the Dharma as a living reality, and this somewhat forbidding text was made accessible to us by our knowledge that our teacher had been there himself and was reporting back from the land of realisation for samsaric beings at an earlier stage on the Path. And yet he managed, consistently, but without any diminution of the text’s austere wisdom, to open it up to our understanding.

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A CONVERSATION WITH TATJANA POPOVIC-THURET (TANYA)

 

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We are sitting in the quiet quadrangle of Casa da Torre.  There is the  sound of birds in the distance.  In the centre of the square is a white statue of Saint Mary, mother of Jesus.  The Casa da Torre is situated four miles north of Braga in Portugal and is a Jesuit centre for Spirituality and Culture. We are attending Ringu Tulku’s summer camp and people from many different countries have arrived to listen to the teachings on Mahamudra – The Moonlight by Dakpo Tashi Namgyal.

On the bench beside me is Tanya:  born in Croatia, having been brought up in Bosnia before moving  to Serbia, she speaks to me in perfect English and in a pleasing Eastern European accent, I like to say I’m from Yugoslavia.

I met Ringu Tulku Rinpoche in Boulder, Colorado where I lived for about eight-years or so.  I met him in 1998.  Tanya was there with her husband who wanted to study at Naropa University.  Not being interested in Buddhism at that time, although she was interested in studying dharma while he studied, Tanya worked as a nurse in a hospital.  However, she did meet some of the senior students of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche while she was in Boulder, but because of her lack of English at that time,  her understanding of Buddhism was limited.

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