Buton’s Kalachakra Statue, Zhalu

At Jonang Foundation, we host pilgrimages to power places in Tibet. These pilgrimages are fundraisers for our educational and preservation initiatives. The summer 2011 journey was the second of its kind and included stops at several of the most significant sites for the practice of the Kalachakra in Tibet. During the 2009 pilgrimage, Tulku Zangpo Rinpoche performed a Jonang Kalachakra empowerment at the base of the Jonang Stupa. The summer 2013 pilgrimage will continue along route to visit these sites and climax at Mount Kailash.

An extension of our sites database and interactive satellite map of Jonang sites, we are happy to announce the launch of our 3D map of the campus of Takten Phuntsok Damcho Ling Monastery in southern Tibet.

This map is the first in a multi-phased project that is visualizing Takten Monastery in an interactive three dimensional space. Takten Monastery was built by Tāranātha and completed in the year 1615. It served as headquarters for the Jonangpa until it was confiscated in 1650. This project utilizes digital architecture technology tools, images and blueprint sketches collected, and Tāranātha's own written descriptions to display a replica of this Buddhist cultural monument in Tibet.

Tsewang Norbu

The one who Hugh Richardson referred to in his 1967 article as “a Tibetan antiquarian” in describing his efforts to jot down stone pillar inscriptions in Lhasa and at Samye that date from the 8th and 9th centuries, the Nyingma master Rigzin Tsewang Norbu was a lover of rare books.^[1] In fact, it seems that he was a bit of a Buddhist bibliophile.

About a hundred years after Tāranātha's death in the spring of 1635, and seventy-five years after the confiscation of Takten Damchö Phuntsok Ling Monastery, the Dzogchen master from Kathog Monastery in Kham, Rigdzin Tsewang Norbu (1698-1755), made a visit to Jonang to print the books that were sealed-up in the printery. Most likely spurred by a conversation with his friend and disciple Situ Panchen Chokyi Jungne (1699/1700-1774), this particular trip was actually Tsewang Norbu's third visit to Takten Ling.^[2]

With her intuitive sense of the text, Vesna Wallace, one of the foremost Kālachakra scholars of our time, has eloquently deciphered and rendered the fourth chapter on the Sādhanā from the Kālachakra Tantra into the English language. Along with her previous publication of the second chapter on the Individual in this same series, this chapter on the Sādhanā or practice manual completes two of the Kālachakra Tantra’s five chapters in English. Both of these translations include the root tantra along with its explanatory commentary, the Vimalaprabhā or Stainless Light.^[1]

The following post is by Connor McCarty, an honors student at the University of Alabama and contributor to Jonang Foundation.^[1]

Interactive Map of Jonang Sites

Working in collaboration with the University of Alabama, we at Jonang Foundation have developed an interactive satellite map of Jonang sites across Tibet. Providing precise geographic locations of key Jonang sites, this map allows users to navigate both historical and active Jonang monasteries, stupas, nunneries, meditation caves, and other relevant landmark sites like never before.

E. Gene Smith

E. Gene Smith, the eminent Tibetologists, founder of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC), and a guiding member of the Executive Board of Jonang Foundation passed away on the afternoon of Thursday December 16, 2010. The following are brief personal reflections:^[1]

A week ago Friday at dawn, after mourning all night, I rolled my legs over the bedside and gazed out the window into the gray-glow skyscape of New York City. “I live in a world without Gene Smith” was my only thought. It’s a qualitatively different world.

The following post is titled, Emptiness of Self-nature and Emptiness of Other by Cyrus Stearns, a contributing author to the Jonangpa blog. It is an excerpt from the reprint of The Buddha from Dolpo (Snow Lion Publications, 2010). Posted here with permission from the author. ^[1]

The key in Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen's approach is to link his view of the absolute as empty only of other relative phenomena (gzhan stong) to the teachings of the Kṛtayuga, as opposed to the teachings of the Tretāyuga and later eons that emphasize even absolute reality is empty of self-nature (rang stong). This he makes clear early in the Fourth Council:

Sky over Tibet

A long time coming, actually a year to the day since my last January 13th posting, The Quintessence of Zhentong from the collection of 108 Quintessential Instructions, I thought to revisit these instructions with a complimentary post.

Each of these instructions was meant to act as a pith directive to the practitioner about how to cultivate a particular outlook on the nature of reality through contemplative experience. These 108 Quintessential Instructions of the Jonang continue to be taught and transmitted within the living tradition, and the range of these instructions is testament to the diversity of Buddhist practices preserved within Tibetan literature.^[1]