Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this brief 4.8-minute teaching, Ven Thubten Dondrub concludes remarks on combining Sūtra and Tantra practice, emphasizing that tantric study requires serious, careful approach but integrates powerfully with lamrim meditation. He stresses that tantra alone is incomplete—the three principles of the path, as Lama Zopa Rinpoche teaches, give tantra its special potency. The talk ends with practical information about an upcoming Chenrezig retreat at Easter, to be led by Venerable Margaret at Buddha House. Prospective participants need not have received Chenrezig initiation beforehand, though prior lamrim meditation on compassion will deepen the retreat experience. A short session suited to both newcomers and those already practising Sūtra and Tantra.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 17 Combining Sūtra and Tantra 1998 02 22.mp3
UUID: 96233eac-4b09-4586-b8ce-9dbe8590be77
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: Retreat (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 1998-02-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 4.8 minutes
Words: ~346
And I hope I haven’t been too heavy to put you off in practicing tantra. I’m just saying it is something serious and that that it should be approached more carefully, and but we can practice it. We can do something with it, definitely. And it definitely reinforces the lam rim practice, the two together work really well. But the tantra by itself doesn’t work.
And there are people who kind of do that, and it doesn’t work for them, really, in the long run. Just in conclusion, as Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, what makes tantra special is the three principles of the path. So I have been asked by the director of Buddha House to remind you that there is a Chenrezig retreat going to be conducted by Buddha House at Easter time. It will be led by Venerable Margaret, so this would be a very nice thing to do. You don’t need to have an initiation to do the retreat.
Ideally it’s good to have the initiation, but it will be done in a way that it is not necessary to have the initiation. So if you’d like to join that retreat on Easter, you can sign up for it. And, on the basis of having done some lam rim meditation on developing compassion by meditating on Chenrezig, it can really help that practice. Okay, thank you very much. So we can dedicate the merit that whatever good energy we’ve created today, may become a cause for us to quickly achieve enlightenment, especially through the pure practice of tantra in reliance on a perfect qualified vajrayana master.
And by achieving enlightenment may we be able to continuously joyfully and effortlessly bring benefit and happiness to all suffering mother sentient beings. Maybe it would be nice also if you want to join in to recite the long life prayer of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, who is also the greatest tantric practitioner on this planet perhaps, it’s on page ten, and is the holder of many of the great tantric lineages of the Gelug lineage.