Key Points of a Nyunge Retreat

Hello All,

Although I would love to attend the nynunge retreat in August, we will be awaiting the birth of our two sons so I will not be able to attend. However, I am considering doing some kind of fasting/retreat in the next month and I was wondering if somone could share some of the key points of a nyunge retreat. Thanks and thank you, Duncan, for creating this wonderful blog!! Josh

Article in Rocky Mountain News

There's an article in the Rocky Mountain News about Anyen Rinpoche and sheda.

Hope to see more folks interested in Madhyamaka and Rinpoche talks... :-)

Technorati Tags: colorado, community, dharma

Benefiting the Sick and Dying, with Anyen Rinpoche

When: Saturday, Arpil 19th, Noon to 4:30PM

Where: Denver Zen Center, 3101 W 31st Ave. Denver, CO

Anyen Rinpoche has scheduled a special inter-faith talk called "Benefitting the Sick and Dying" which will be given this April 19 at the Denver Zen Center. The talk is meant to support those who are suffering from an illness, their friends and family, as well as those in the medical or healing professions.

This is the first public talk of this sort that Rinpoche will be giving, and is the flagship for his "healing in America" initiative. We are excited about Rinpoche's plans and others have expressed overwhelming interest in the forth-coming series of teachings. We hope to see all of you there!

Please feel free to email your friends -- and anyone you know who might benefit from hearing the talk -- a link to this blog post or the talk flyer. If you can, post the flyer on bulletin boards in community centers, grocery store, etc.

The suggested donation for the talk is $50 (if you need financial assistance, please email). The talk will take place from 12-4:30 pm, with a break for tea and a chance to meet Anyen Rinpoche about halfway through.

The Denver Zen Center is located at 3101 W. 31st Avenue in the Highlands Neighborhood in North Denver (just behind the Walgreens on 32nd and Federal).

If you need further information, please check the website:
anyenrinpoche.com

PechaPublisher Project Announcement

I am pleased to announce that the PechaPublisher project (AKA "pecha-pub") has been officially started today :-) We have project space and source code repositories on google as well as several mail lists. Be sure to look at all the links on the right side of the PechaPublisher project page.

PechaPublishser's origins lie in the culmination of the following:

• extended usage of PechaMaker
• initial involvement with Vajra Publications just before and after its official creation in the 90's when 100% of their focus was the creation and distribution of pechas
• conversations with various monks and lamas about text production
• discussions with Allison Graboski about text layout, translations, and pecha publishing
• recent discussions with the current maintainer and one of the principal authors of PechaMaker
• software development and the creation of custom libraries for the manipulation of pecha text and PDF files

Most recently (over the past several months), the difficulties we have encountered at Orgyen Khamdroling while preparing a Medicine Buddha text were the impetus to really put some thought into how we could manage our documents more efficiently and create pechas from them without the enormous amount of redundant effort that currently goes into pecha creation using PechaMaker (not PechaMaker's fault; there's no software that currently does what we need). The final excellent push came when having an email conversation with the current maintainer of PechaMaker, and his voiced support for an open source project that could benefit the entire pecha-creating community.

The project page has several links to the wiki pages, but I would like to point out the FrontPage explicitly right now. This page has placeholders for content that will be appearing on the project site. Of particular and immediate interest is the forthcoming content/documentation on PechaPublisher's high-level design. These pages will talk about what PechaPublisher will look like, how users will interact with it, and what basic components will comprise the software. It is very important that future users take a look at what will be written here, since these docs will outline the product they will be using, and their input now can save them pain later!

I look forward to lots of feedback from current and past PechaMaker users in the hopes of making some excellent software that addresses as many of the community's needs as possible while remaining free and open source, for others to use and adapt as they see fit (as long as they accord with the open source MIT license, of course!).

And there's one last thing I'd like to say: not only is this project dedicated to all mother sentient beings, but it was started on the birthday of my own mother, so I specifically dedicate its efforts to her own happiness, to the happiness of all developers' and users' mothers, and of course to all sentient beings.

Technorati Tags: buddhism, community, open source, pechas, programming, software, texts, tibetan, ubuntu

U-med on Mac OS X

Lately, I've been working on u-med text-entry. There are a couple reasons:

1. practice typing Tibetan
2. learn to read u-med scripts
3. aesthetic enjoyment: I count some of the Tibetan u-med scripts among the most beautiful scripts in the world

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I use XenoType's unicode fonts for Tibetan text-entry on Mac OS X, and I thought I would take the opportunity to share some of the prayers I have typed so far :-)









Can anyone guess which prayers they are?

Technorati Tags: buddhism, fonts, practice, tibetan

Madhyamaka Shedra: Day 1

Well, yesterday was the first day of class, and it was awesome. There was a lot of discussion, lots of questions and answers, and all of it covering a very wide range of Madhyamaka -- from introductory concepts to actual debate. Through such a broad and creative introduction to the subject matter, Rinpoche was able to do a little bit of everything for all students of all levels.

Having read about Madhyamaka on and off for a couple years, it was exciting to see how much I will be learning: it's one thing to read about the history and concepts of vector fields, but it's quite another to actually work the problems and integrate over areas, volumes, etc. Yesterday, Anyen Rinpoche gave us that sort of hands-on taste of working logic problems ourselves... while under the direct and immediate scrutiny of a highly accomplished and practiced lama.

I can't begin to properly convey my level of excitement, appreciation, joy, enthusiasm, etc., at being able to attend these classes. This study and in-class (as well as on-line) interaction with other students is going to do wonders for my practice, and it is that aspect more than any other that makes my heart explode with joy. Rinpoche was very clear about this point yesterday, too: the true intent of Madhyamaka studies is to provide the structured, rigorous background necessary for being able to take full advantage of the introduction to the Nature of Mind.

I have friends that are taking this class remotely, so hopefully blogging about it will help them get a taste of what's going on in the room, and how some of us are experiencing that.

Technorati Tags: buddhism, madhyamaka, madhyamika, shedra

Nyungne Followup: Chenrezig Pechas Forth-coming

Today, Allison sent me a working draft of the Chenrezig practice we used for Nyungne in MS Word format. I will be converting this to pecha format... but there no single, good, cross-platform solution for this right now.

In Mac OS X, there are two unicode fonts that I use from XenoType:

• the woodblock u-chen font, and
• their very excellent u-med font

The really great thing about using XenoType's stuff is that the fonts are usable in Mac OS X anywhere unicode is supported (most newer applications). I can type Tibetan in TextEdit, NeoOffice, etc. But here's the best part: the stacking is done using a single key (and it will only stack valid combinations). That and the unicode itself are huge improvements over many other systems I've used in the past.

Sadly, however, there's nothing I could find in the way of pecha editing/creating in Mac OS X. I did create some rudimentary pechas using NeoOffice, but those aren't really good for anything other than personal use.

In Windows, however, there is a longer tradition of pecha software, and thanks to Parallels, I can use them from my Mac :-)

The two pecha tools I have used in Windows are PechaMaker and TibetDoc. TibetDoc is a general Tibetan word processor, but it comes with a powerful "pecha mode." In addition, you can use their electronic Tibetan dictionary (additional $) for spell checking (and general reference, of course) while editing your docs -- very nice.

PechaMaker would be good, because:

• it imports RTF files directly
• all of Allison and Rinpoche's texts are written in Word which can be easily converted to RTF
• their texts use the Dedris fonts (part of the Nitartha-Sambhota package), which PechaMaker recognizes natively

I'm a little torn, because TibetDoc is such a professional setup; it's got:

• extensive options for pecha layout, including lots of traditional defaults
• Tibetan search
• dictionary integration
• image support

For a full list, checkout the page here.

Left to my own devices, I'd probably use TibetDoc for everything new, but then that calls into question the best practice of migrating old stuff when it's the least expensive to do so (time-wise, and that time is now...).

So I will play with both and see what works out the best. If I can get unicode support working in TibetDoc like it does in Mac, I'll probably swing that way...

Stay tuned: in the end, we'll have pechas galore!

Technorati Tags: fonts, pechas, practice, texts, tibetan