Foundation Program
Sundays, 4 - 6:30pm
with Buddhist Teacher
David Shea
FP is currently studying:
Eight Steps to Happiness
The Buddhist Way of Loving Kindness
This inspiring book explains how to meditate on eight beautiful verses that comprise one of Buddhism’s best-loved teachings, Eight Verses for Training the Mind. Composed by the great Tibetan Bodhisattva Geshe Langri Tangpa, this short poem shows how we can transform all life’s difficulties into valuable spiritual insights. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso now shares this ancient wisdom with all those seeking meaning and lasting happiness in their modern lives.
The purpose of the Foundation Program is to provide a systematic presentation of particular subjects of Mahayana Buddhism to enable practitioners to deepen their knowledge and experience of Buddhism.
Interested? Send an email to info@meditationinlubbock.org if you would like to join. Students are welcome to attend two classes before registering.
The Benefits of Foundation Program
by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
"How does the Foundation Program fulfill our own wishes? By increasing our wisdom and our experience of Dharma. With wisdom and Dharma experience we can solve all the problems we encounter in daily life and we can protect ourselves from danger in the future. Since beginningless time we have had strong, bad habits that arise from our self-grasping and self-cherishing.
We all want to better ourselves and to be happy and successful in life but our bad habits lead us in the opposite direction. Instead of finding happiness we create the cause of more suffering. None of us wants to suffer and yet, because of our bad habits, we are continually strengthening our deluded minds, which are the cause of all our suffering.
With wisdom and Dharma experience we can bring our deluded minds under control. We can reduce our attachment, anger, jealousy, and so forth, and subdue our self-grasping and self-cherishing. By controlling our deluded minds we will come to experience permanent peace day and night. We will bring about a permanent cessation of human problems in particular and of samsaric problems in general. In this way we will become our own protectors.
With wisdom and Dharma experience we will also become our own doctors. Whether we are young or old, rich or poor, famous or of humble origins, without choice we all have to experience mental pain. Within one day we experience mental pain and discomfort many times, sometimes due to unpleasant circumstances and sometimes due to other people, even our friends. Sometimes for no apparent reason unhappiness, disappointment, dissatisfaction, or pain arise naturally due to the ripening of karmic imprints.
We need a remedy for this pain. No one else can give us medicine that will relieve this type of pain, we have to become our own karma-doctor and cure ourselves through Dharma experience. By increasing our wisdom and Dharma experience we will gradually solve all our problems and eventually we will achieve the ultimate happiness of full enlightenment, the bliss of Buddhahood. This is how the Foundation Program can fulfil our own wishes."
facebook
twitter