A unique opportunity to delve deeply into rarely taught meditations on emptiness: Master Kamalashila’s meditations on the Diamond Cutter Sutra, one of the most important teachings on emptiness, have not been widely taught in the last thousand years.
During the first 4 days of the Kamalashila Retreat, students had a morning session with Geshe Michael to learn the day’s meditations, and then spend the rest of the day in the retreat cottages practicing. Those morning sessions are what you’ll find the video and audio for here. For the final 3 days, students the had the opportunity to dive deeper into the meditations on their own.
Here are the audio and images for each of the meditations that were designed to follow the content of Master Kamalashila’s text. There’s also a link to download all those meditation images to your phone or tablet and have them available to do your daily meditations.
There are two famous commentaries to The Diamond Cutter Sutra that were written in Sanskrit in India.
The commentary to the Diamond Cutter Sutra that Geshe Michael is using for the basis of this teaching is by Master Kamalashila. It was written around 750 A.D., the other famous Indian commentary was done by by Master Vasubandhu around 350 A.D.
Here’s what Geshe Michael had to say about the two surviving Sanskrit commentaries:
“We have two left — one by Kamalashila, who lived around 750 C.E., and the other by Vasubandhu, who lived some four hundred years before. Kamalashila’s claim to fame was that he taught King Trisong Detsun of Tibet how to meditate properly.”
“Kamalashila’s commentary is an intense treatise that uses the Sutra to explain some very difficult positions held by one of the five philosophical schools of Buddhism.”
Master Kamalashila was the renowned 8th century Indian scholar and abbot of Nalanda University
who was invited to teach in Tibet, and is probably best known for his classic text about meditation called The Steps of Meditation (Bhavanakrama in Sanskrit, Gompay Rimpa in Tibetan). Many of you know Master Kamalshila because this famous text forms the basis for much of ACI Course 3 on Meditation.
