Chotrul Duchen and Chenrezig Tsok
Sunday March 16, 2014, 2pm

Amrita will be offering Chenrezig tsok as well as  butter lamps in celebration of this auspicious time.  If you would like to make a tsok or butter lamp offering send your request using our secure online form, or by email.  Empowerment is required for this practice.

Chotrul Duchen (the Butter Lamp Festival) is one of the four major religious holidays on the Buddhist calendar. This festival celebrates the Buddha’s display of miracles for fifteen days in order to bolster the devotion of disciples. In the Buddha’s time non-Buddhist teachers who attained miraculous powers used them as an advertisement to attract the credulous. Such powers arise as the practitioner progresses along the path to wisdom but the Buddha made it emphatically clear that they were merely a side effect of religious striving and he forbade his disciples to make a display of them. However, observing that the non-Buddhist teachers were using this kind of spectacular display to draw the unwise onto a false path, the Buddha’s Great Disciples asked the Lord to give a demonstration of his own boundless power to put the tricks of the lesser teachers into proper perspective.

As Jigmé Lingpa said:
Through the magical power of your miracles in Shravasti,
You rendered speechless the tirthika1 teachers who,
With all their analysis and research, drunk on the wine of indulgence,
had become oppressive in the extreme.
In the final contest they were humbled, their prestige all drained away,
As you triumphed through ‘the four bases of miraculous powers’2.

It is said that karmic actions created during the Chotrul Duchen are magnified 100,000,000 times, an opportunity to create huge positive results for this life and future lives.

1Thirthika is a general term referring to adherent of non-Buddhist philosophies and religions. Whereas a Buddhist takes refuge in the Three Jewels and treads the middle ay between extremes, a Tirthika does not.

2 In terms of the spiritual powers associated with the development of these bases, the “Before” Discourse” states:
“When the four bases of spiritual power have been developed and cultivated in this way, a monk wields the various kinds of spiritual power: having been one, he becomes many; having been many, he becomes one; he appears and vanishes; he goes unhindered through a wall, through a rampart, through a mountain as though through space; he dives in and out of the earth as though it were water; he walks on water without sinking as though it were earth; seated cross-legged, he travels in space like a bird; with his hands he touches and strokes the moon and sun so powerful and mighty; he exercises mastery with the body as far as the Brahm? world.”