March-April 2000

By Ven. Marcel Bertels

Thousands of people, inspired by nine days of teachings from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, gathered at the holy stupa in Bodhgaya on New Year’s Eve 1999 to participate in a session of The Chenrezig Practice Purifying the Six Realms, The Seventy Stanzas and a recitation of The King of Prayers.

The next part of the program started at 10 p.m. with about 1,000 Westerners and Chinese, and many Tibetans, almost all of whom stayed until 2 or 3 in the morning.  We had originally planned a program of pujas between 10 and 4:30 a.m., but we had to cancel because we were requested not to use any loudspeakers.

A few hundred people made it all the way through the night and were awake as people started arriving again for the interfaith prayer meeting that began at 4:30 on the morning of January 1.  After the meeting, 1,500 people took the Eight Mahayana Precepts from Denma Lochö Rinpoche, and we concluded the entire program with the Guru Shakyamuni Buddha puja.

On January 2, 2,000 people came for Rinpoche’s Maitreya and Vajrasattva jenangs (permission to practice) at the Maitreya Project land and 1,200 people attended his teachings on single-pointed concentration in the afternoon.

It was a grand success and I think people were genuinely delighted to spend the change of the millennium in such a meaningful and beneficial way.

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