Samantabhadra’s King of Prayers is a practice text composed to help us cultivate the heart qualities of kindness, care, concern, love and compassion. Developing these qualities will help bring us peace of mind, confidence and a heightened sense of purpose, as well as nurturing and strengthening our relationships.
Geshe Tashi returns to Jetsun Drakpa Shedrup to guide us through the material, who in turn references a series of commentaries including one by Nagarjuna in the 2nd century CE.
As always, Geshe Tashi’s emphasis in these teachings is on how we can best experience the material for ourselves. He takes special care to help us build up and strengthen the foundations of our mindfulness and meditation practices.
At the beginning of this class, Geshe la returns to His Holiness’s book of Daily Inspirations. You may remember we had a Podcast series on these called A Buddhist Life with Geshe Tashi Tsering available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and here on GesheTashi.org. This was a really helpful and down to earth series and definitely worth exploring:
https://geshetashi.org/category/geshe-tashis-podcast-a-buddhist-life/
Here Geshe la, referencing Chandrakirti, continues in this super practical vein with a discussion around samsaric things. They always have two sides, he says, the auspicious and the inauspicious, these two come together in samsara. He skilfully takes our mobile phones as an example. He then takes up His Holiness’s baton with a discussion around the dangers of having too much contentment – perhaps not as counter-intuitive as it first might seem.
In our main focus for this series, Geshe la continues his commentary on The King of Prayers, with verses 47, 48 and 49 under the headings:
The Benefits of Making Aspirations
The Thirteen Benefits in Detail.
What are the benefits of our prayers and aspirations, in this life and future lives? This will be our topic in this class and next. As a prelude to answering this question, Geshe Tashi shares a personal story on advice given to him around harmful companions.
You can find details of upcoming classes as well as the text available for download here.
https://foundationsofbuddhistthought.org/live-teachings-with-geshe-tashi-tsering/
https://foundationsofbuddhistthought.org/