Friday
TWENTY YEARS OF RULING AND TEACHING: Part Five – Evolution
Mukpo Institute participants with Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Fall 2006
By Shastri Benoît Côté
When the Sakyong’s second book, Ruling Your World, came out in 2005, few people realized that it signaled a major cultural evolution the Sakyong was finally able to implement in the Shambhala centres all over the world. During this period, a curriculum committee had been set up to propose a new, unified curriculum of study for people entering Shambhala. The Sakyong’s command was very clear. He wanted newcomers to be presented with a series of programs that would introduce the richness of our tradition, showing the relationship between the teaching streams at the basis of the Shambhala lineage. He wanted to move away from putting newcomers into this puzzling choice situation of having to decide whether they were more interested in Buddhism or in Shambhala. On top of that, he asked for “less like school and more like life.”
The resulting curriculum evolved through multiple versions and several pilot experiments. It is still being developed, under the responsibility of Kalapa Acharya Adam Lobel and Executive Director Carolyn Mandelker. The entry program is called “The Way of Shambhala” and brings together weekend programs of Shambhala Training with related classes. The overall idea is to present what comes out as a natural correlation between the four dignities of Shambhala and the three yanas or vehicles of the Buddhist path. The hinayana teachings on karma and samsara are related to the path of tiger. The mahayana teachings on relative and absolute bodhichitta are associated respectively with the paths of lion and garuda. And the vajrayana teachings are obviously at the dragon level. This structure and content in many ways reproduce what is found in the Ruling Your World book. Continue…
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1 response - Posted 02.26.11
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2 responses - Posted 02.24.11
Shastri Benoît Côté marks the transition of the past year in the Sakyong’s reign by offering a history of twenty years of ruling and teaching. This is the first in a series of articles about this journey, based on available documents that mark the various ...continue