Sixty Attend Tibetan Buddhist Path Video Class

I'm just back from the Halifax Shambhala Center, where we had the first of 11 classes presenting DVDs of THE TIBETAN BUDDHIST PATH course taught by Chogyam Trungpa at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado in June 1974. He got an audience of around 1,500. Tonight at the center there were around 60, and that felt like a BIG group. The DVDs have been lovingly and painstakingly remastered by Gordon Kidd, the Technical Director of the Shambhala Archives and Kalapa Recordings. Gordon found additional footage from a second camera of the first talk and used that to provide some terrific close-ups of the Vidyadhara. The soundtrack also had to be replaced -- and now there's very little buzz and a lot more clarity. All the work we've been doing in the Archives to digitize sound recordings for the Audio Recovery Project has certainly paid off in helping us to improve the sound on these early videos.

Talk One, which we saw tonight, is a hard hitting exposition of spiritual materialism, something CT is famous for exposing. Most of the audience at the Shambhala Center tonight were fairly new practitioners. Some old dogs, but a lot of new people. We played the talk, without the questions and answers, and then broke up into three discussion groups. Then we came back together for the Q and A on the tape. It was interesting to hear the current audience and their concerns, versus the questions asked in 1974 of the Vidyadhara. Spiritual materialism seems to be applicable as much now as then, and there was considerable discussion in our group of how it applies to one's experience whether beginning practice or continuing to practice for many years. Two women newly back from India spoke about their gratitude to Chogyam Trungpa for not making us into an overly religious community. Well, highly spiritual but not prone to religiosity, perhaps they would say.

The syllabus for the whole TIBETAN BUDDHIST PATH course is available online at shambhalashop.com. You click on Recordings/ then on VCTR Video/ then on Tibetan Buddhist Path and FINALLY you get to an order form for the DVDs, where you can click on the study guide or syllabus and it opens an abode file. So check it out.

More than 75 Shambhala Centers have ordered the DVDs to play. This being the 20th anniversary of the Vidyadhara's death, there seems to be considerable interest in studying his teachings. Getting to see him teach: that's a treat.