Announcements Issue

Volume 13, Number 2 / April 2013

A Letter from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

To the Cyber-Sangha!

Dear International Cyber-Sangha,

For a long time, my dream has been to be able to provide teachings without being so restricted by the boundaries of time and space, without the need to travel from place to place. And I feel that the Internet provides just such a means. We began years ago by putting many teachings up on YouTube. Our goal is to eventually have hundreds of hours of the teachings available on the web, not only of my own, but also other Bon lamas and Buddhist teachers. It has been my dream to do that.

One of the ways we’ve continued using the Internet to make these teachings more available is through live webcasts. And on March 23 we had our first all-day cyber-retreat, a wonderful experience. It was a first—with nine live translators and participants from 28 countries with estimates of 1500 or more people tuned in, from one or two of people at a single computer to as many as 50 people gathered to listen to the teachings. Wonderful! In the future, we hope to add more languages, such as Chinese, Finnish and Danish, and others as well.

There are a lot of people that I want to thank, without whose help this cyber-retreat would not have been possible. I very much want to thank all of the International coordinators of Ligmincha worldwide. I also want to thank all of my translators who are doing a great job on a volunteer basis. I am also grateful to all those on the team who were working with me on a technical basis to assure that the webcast ran smoothly. Thank you, too, to all of the people out there who have appreciated my teachings, and who have spread the word about them and expressed their gratitude to me. And great thanks to those who have done their part using social networking such as Facebook, sending out and sharing their messages, letting other people know.

I wanted you all to know that this is one of my main projects for the future. And in the process of doing this work more and more efficiently and effectively, I will be needing more help. I will need the help of technicians, people who can do video, photography, art, editing, web design, and then more translators. Maybe eventually some help with funding, too, because occasionally there are some costs involved in organizing these webcasts. I’m inviting anyone who can help.

I’m happy to share with you, too, that we will have a special website dedicated solely to web teachings for the cyber-sangha. All of the video teachings will be located there in one place. And my goal is to eventually have hundreds of hours of teachings uploaded to the site, organized by categories such as teacher and language.

My Best Wishes,

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

(Editors’ Note: Please see the announcements below about the upcoming webcasts on April 9 and April 13, and the next daylong cyber-retreat on July 6.)