The Thirteenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies will be held in Ulaanbaatar Sunday 21 July to Saturday 27 July, 2013.

For more information see their new and developing website: http://www.iats.info/

The Tsadra Foundation Contemplative Scholarships are now entering their third year. Here is some updated information about the scholarship recipients.

For more information on the scholarships and application procedures see the Scholarship Description on our website.

Opening of the Tsadra Kathmandu Office

The new Tsadra Foundation office in Kathmandu is home to our digital publications and Tibetan publications offices. This year Rafael Ortet worked tirelessly to update the house and create an excellent ambiance for Tsadra Foundation’s activity in Nepal. The result is a wonderfully warm space for work and meetings as well as storage for texts. To celebrate, Tsadra Foundation hosted grantees, scholarship recipients, and friends of the Foundation on March 26th for dinner and conversation.

Along with a number of venerable ones, lamas, monks, and nuns from various institutions around Kathmandu, scholarship recipients from Rangjung Yeshe Institute, the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, and friends from Shechen, the International Buddhist Academy, Dharmachakra Translation Committee, and elsewhere all came together for an evening of shared friendship.

The front garden was filled with lively discussion into the evening.

Venerable Lotsawas gathered…

An excellent meal was prepared …

Thanks to everyone for a wonderful evening!

A private screening of a new movie about the great scholar and collector of Tibetan texts, E. Gene Smith, will be shown in Boulder on December 15th, 2011.

You are invited to a special preview of the upcoming documentary,
Digital Dharma, the story of E. Gene Smith, founder of the Tibetan
Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC) and a pioneer in Tibetan Studies who
dedicated his life to finding, preserving and disseminating the rich
literary heritage of Tibet. Next week will mark one year since the
death of E. Gene Smith. An evening of remembrance on December 15th
will include a preview screening of Digital Dharma, the feature-length
HD documentary about Gene’s life’s work. www.digitaldharma.com.

This sneak peek of the film will be hosted for hundreds of worldwide
fans of the film’s central character via the virtual environment
platform of vcopious™, a Philadelphia-based global virtual environment
technology provider. The live event will be streamed from The 8th
Floor, a gallery and screening room in New York City. The local Rocky
Mountain showing will be at:

University of Colorado, Boulder Campus
ATLS 1B31 (on 18th Ave if you’re coming from Broadway)
Thursday December 15, 2011
4-6 pm

Map: http://www.colorado.edu/campusmap/map.html?bldg=ATLSLocal
Contact: Nicole Willock, University of Denver postdoctoral fellow
(nwillock@gmail.com)

Fred Coulson’s blog has a calculator that will convert your Tibetan year into a Western equivalent. Provide the animal, element, and rab byung and you might get something useful: http://phlonx.com/resources/tibetan_calendar/

For more on the Tibetan Calendar: http://www.nitartha.org/calendar_overview.html

The 16th Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies is under way here at Dharma Drum Buddhist College in Jinshan, New Taipei, Taiwan.

Scherrer-Schaub and Huimin Bikshu at the Opening Session_IABS 2011

The opening session of the Congress included a truly fascinating address by Tom Tillemans. Professor Tillemans spoke about looking to Buddhist philosophy, specifically Dharmakīrti, for developing defenses against hard-line materialists who claim that there is no such thing as mind. This was probably one of the better delivered and more interesting talks I’ve heard at the several conferences I have attended this past year and a half (of course I’m partial to philosophical discussions). If there is time I will treat it to its own blog post here.

The opening day saw the nearly 600 scholars from around the world introduced to the bewilderingly large grounds of Dharma Drum Buddhist College and its amazingly dedicated support staff. The army of Taiwanese that greeted the delegates, and have been at every corner to guide us from floor to floor and room to room each day since, are embodying what I can only imagine is an amazing sense of the importance of service cultivated here in Taiwanese Buddhist culture. At times one feels as though herded by shepherds or kindly directed by an aunt who thinks you are her slightly disabled nephew, but the sincerity overpowers the oddity. Dharma Drum Buddhist College is situated on Dharma Drum Mountain, a massive estate with beautiful modern buildings designed to impress. The scale of the place is almost inhuman, and although spending time in each separate area is enjoyable, the architects seem to have forgotten that buildings at an institution should flow together in such a way as to make traversing from one meeting place to another somewhat less than an epic journey across space and time. But I digress… The Dharma Drum Mountain is an excellent place for a congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies as it is a manifestation of modern Buddhism and plays a role in Buddhist studies. Thanks to the kindness of Dr. Bill Magee, one of the organizers of the conference, I am able to attend this gathering of scholars and it has been an honor and a privilege just to be among such amazingly dedicated and accomplished Buddhist scholars and scholars of Buddhism. The conference is very well organized but is so full of amazing panels that it is impossible to attend even half of what I would like. In the next series of blog posts I will endeavor to recount as much as I can about my experiences and the papers presented at this historic event.

Update on Buddhist Studies resources on the web:

There are some new additions to Marcus Bingenheimer’s excellent resource “Glossaries for Buddhist Studies.”

The Advanced Contemplative Scholarship program was launched in 2009 under the direction of Anthony Chapman and the first scholarships were awarded for retreat in 2010. Now in 2011 the second cohort of recipients are in retreat and we can provide some more information about this fascinating and successful scholarship program. The Tsadra Foundation’s Contemplative Program supports the practice of Tibetan Buddhism in the form of long-term retreat, primarily through three-year retreat programs for advanced practitioners. The scholarships discussed here are not for short dharma programs. Instead they are designed to target those people who show a long-term commitment to the development of Tibetan Buddhism in Western culture through the combined study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism, the hallmark of Tsadra Foundation’s activity.

Currently there are 39 people supported in long-term retreat through two programs: the Tsadra Foundation Contemplative Program and the Tsadra Foundation Advanced Contemplative Scholarship (TFACS) Program. The Contemplative Program is at the center of Tsadra Foundation’s mission and was initiated at the very beginning of the Foundation’s existence in the year 2000. The Contemplative Program was not open to unsolicited applications and has been only for the most advanced practitioners who have already completed at least one three-year retreat. The new TFACS program invites applications and is open to those intending to enter retreat in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Spain. One does not need to have completed a three-year retreat previously to apply. There continues to be a rigorous screening process involving assessment of both the individual applicant and the retreat program to which they are committing, but the application is open to those wishing to enter into three-year retreat for the first time in any Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Application information can be found online at www.tsadra.org.

The Tsadra Foundation Contemplative Program currently supports fourteen people in three-year retreat programs and one person in individual retreat. The  TFACS program supports seven people in three-year retreat programs continuing on with their 2010 scholarships and fifteen new people in three-year retreat centers with another two people in special individual retreats. In the first year, the TFACS program had fifteen applications and ten were accepted, eight women and two men from the United States and France. In the second year, 17 applicants were selected from 21 initial applications. This year, the six women and eleven men are from the United States (5), France (1), Spain (4), and the United Kingdom (7).

Tsadra Foundation Contemplative Program Statistics:

Year 11 (2011): 15 retreatants

TFACS: Tsadra Foundation Advanced Contemplative Scholarship Program

Year 2 (2011): 24 retreatants (7 continuing from last year with 17 new recipients)

Total people currently in retreat

2011: 39 retreatants

By Retreat Type

36 in Three-year retreat : 3 in Solitary retreat

By Gender

18 Women : 21 Men

By Region

18 US : 10 FR : 4 Spain : 7 U.K.

For more information please see the scholarship section at www.tsadra.org.

Tsadra Foundation’s Advanced Buddhist Studies Scholarship program was launched in 2009 under the direction of Tsadra Fellow Elizabeth Callahan and the first recipients began study at monastic colleges in India and Nepal in 2010.

Tsadra Foundation’s Advanced Studies Scholarships provide Western Buddhists with an opportunity for in-depth study of Buddhist philosophical literature in the Tibetan language. The foundation offers three-year scholarships to Westerners who wish to study at Tibetan Buddhist institutes in India and Nepal. Scholarships are not limited to specific institutes nor to any specific tradition. However, please note that these scholarships are not available for translator or interpreter training programs.

The Advanced Buddhist Studies Scholarship program accepted 11 students for 2010 and another seven for 2011. These scholarship recipients have committed to three years of intensive study at institutions in India and Nepal and regularly report to the director of the scholarship program about their studies and experiences. This scholarship program is designed for people who are ready to enter into a “shedra” program where classes are taught entirely in Tibetan. This means that applicants already have a good grasp of Tibetan language and Buddhist studies before applying and often have completed many years of study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism.

So far the current scholarship recipients attend six different institutions:

Current statistics for the scholarship recipients:

Self identified lineage associations:

More information and applications can be found online at www.tsadra.org.