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Double-Up Dharma! Karma and the Nature of Vows | Dr Alex Berzin
March 28 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
About the series
Double-up Dharma! Incredible teachers. Two sessions each. Profound Buddhist wisdom.
About these sessions
The topic of karma in Buddhism is speaking about the compelling and compulsive aspects of our behaviour, fuelled by ignorance and the disturbing emotions. Each of the four Indian tenet systems has its own distinctive presentation of karma, starting with Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka version. In this system, karma in the context of the actions of mind refer to the mental factor of a compelling urge – a mental impulse propelling the consciousness and other mental factors during the course of thinking about and deciding to commit an action of body or speech. In the context of actions of speech, karma refers to the utterance of words implemented as the method for carrying out the action. In the context of actions of the body, karma refers to the movements of the body implemented as the method for carrying out the action. In addition, it also refers to subtle forms of physical phenomena that continue with the mental continuum after they are acquired. Vows are this type of phenomenon. In every moment after their acquisition, they function to cause the body and speech to refrain from the actions one has promised to abstain from. This series of lectures, spread over two sessions, will discuss in more detail the nature of karma and, in particular, the nature of vows.
About Dr Alexander Berzin
Alexander Berzin (born 1944) grew up in New Jersey, USA. He began his study of Buddhism in 1962 at Rutgers and then Princeton Universities, and received his PhD in 1972 from Harvard University jointly between the Departments of Sanskrit and Indian Studies and Far Eastern Languages (Chinese). Dr. Berzin was resident in India for 29 years, first as a Fulbright Scholar and then with the Translation Bureau, which he helped to found, at the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives in Dharamsala. While in India, he furthered his studies with masters from all four Tibetan Buddhist traditions; however, his main teachers have been His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche, and Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey. Practicing under their supervision, he completed the major meditation retreats of the Gelug tradition.
For nine years, he was the principal interpreter for Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche, accompanying him on his foreign tours and training under him to be a Buddhist teacher in his own right. He has served as occasional interpreter for H.H. the Dalai Lama and has organized several international projects for him. Since 1980, Dr. Berzin has traveled the world, lecturing on Buddhism in universities and Buddhist centers in over 70 countries. A prolific author and translator, Dr. Berzin has published 17 books, including Relating to a Spiritual Teacher, Taking the Kalachakra Initiation, Developing Balanced Sensitivity, and with H.H. the Dalai Lama, The Gelug-Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra.
At the end of 1998, Dr. Berzin returned to the West with about 30,000 pages of unpublished manuscripts of books, articles, and translations he had prepared, transcriptions of teachings of the great masters that he had translated, and notes from all the teachings he had received from these masters. Convinced of the benefit of this material for others and determined that it not be lost, he named it the “Berzin Archives” and settled in Berlin, Germany. There, with the encouragement of H. H. the Dalai Lama, he set out to make this vast material freely available to the world on the Internet, in as many languages as possible.
Thus, the Berzin Archives website (now studybuddhism.com) went online in December 2001. It has expanded to include Dr. Berzin’s ongoing lectures and is now available (in 2015) in 21 languages. For many of them, especially the six Islamic world languages, it is the pioneering work in the field. The present version of the website (in 2021 in 32 languages) is the next step in Dr. Berzin’s lifelong commitment to building a bridge between the traditional Buddhist and modern worlds. By guiding the teachings across the bridge and showing their relevance to modern life, his vision has been that they would help to bring emotional balance to the world.
Schedule
28 March & 04 April 2024 | 18:30 – 20:00
Recordings
Recordings of the sessions will be made available to those who have registered shortly after the event.
How to join
Book your ticket below to receive the Zoom link for both sessions by Dr Alex Berzin.
Speakers in this series
Professor Guy Newland, Venerable Thubten Wangdu, Venerable Robina Courtin, Professor Jan Willis, Kabir Saxena, Dr Alex Berzin, and Venerable Thubten Chodron. View series.
