Summary of teachings on the Day of Offerings commemorating Buddha Shakyamuni's performance of miracles in the defeat of opponents at Shravasti and culmination of the Great Prayer Festival - 21 February 2008

 

After participating in the bi-monthly monastic purification and confession ceremony with the assembled monks and nuns in the temple, His Holiness the Dalai Lama descends to the Thekchen Choeling garden. He explains the importance of the three higher trainings, in ethics, meditation and wisdom, to all schools of Buddhism; that ethics provides the foundation for developing meditative concentration and that that is employed to achieve insight into understanding of reality - wisdom. He points out the importance of both compassion and wisdom and the conduct of the six perfections to practice of the great vehicle.

 

Collections of stories of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni's former lives, illustrating his exercise of the qualities of a bodhisattva, are found in all Buddhist traditions. The collection that His Holiness reads from was compiled by Ashvaghosha, who was an accomplished non-Buddhist polemicist early in his career, but was defeated and converted to Buddhism by Aryadeva. He is renowned for his poetry. The story His Holiness reads concerns the Buddha's former life as a leader of fish. When drought threatened to dry up the lake in which the fish lived with his companions, he made a prayer that, by the power of the truth of the fact that he had harmed no other being for countless lives, it should rain and so save the fish. Rain soon fell.

 

For the benefit of those people who have come from Tibet to visit their relatives, but who cannot stay longer, His Holiness conducts the ceremony for generating the aspiring awakening mind. He concludes with a transmission of important mantras.