CAS Event Report: "Visions and Prophecies in Tibetan Buddhism"
The event, “Visions and prophecies in Tibetan Buddhism,” had quite a large and diverse turnout. There were approximately 65-70 people in the audience (the room was Wolf Law 304, which seats only 51 so there were quite a few people standing). Among the audience members were 鶹Ѱfaculty, 鶹Ѱgraduate students, undergraduates from religious studies, Naropa university faculty, Tibetans translators from and being supported by the Tsadra Foundation, Boulder-Denver area Tibetan community members, people from the Lhasa-Boulder Sister City Project, and even a handful of Khenpo Sodargye’s Chinese-American disciples who flew in for the event from Los Angeles and other parts of the United States. Khenpo Sodargye spoke about the history and practice of “treasure revelation” in Tibetan Buddhism, arguing that despite its close association with the Nyingma school of Buddhism, it is in fact found in other schools as well. He explained various types of treasures, including those physical treasures that reveal themselves to “treasure revealers” in rocks, caves, lakes, and other landscape features, as well as those that reveal themselves in the mind-streams of treasure revealers. He also spoke about the relationship between Buddhist scholarship and Buddhist practice, about the Larung Gar Buddhist academy in Sertar, and about his impressions of traveling to the United States for the first time in twenty years. After the hour-long talk, he took questions from the audience for about half an hour, and many audience members stayed on afterwards to greet him as well as to mingle with each other.