Geshe Dhonam will be visiting Queenstown in February, and we are delighted to announce that he has accepted our invitation to give a teaching at the centre. Geshe Dhonam is the teacher and spiritual director at Trashi Gomang Buddhist Centre in Auckland (see below for a longer biography) and will be teaching as follows:

Wednesday, 8th February, 2023, 6.30-8.00 pm
“The Eight Verses for Training the Mind”
Free entry; donations (dana) for the teacher gratefully accepted.

Out of respect for the teacher, please arrive early so as to be seated and settled before the start time.

“The Eight Verses for Training the Mind” is a famous and popular text on lojong (mind training) by Geshe Langri Thangpa (1054 to 1123 CE). The teaching will be suitable for all, regardless of experience. A translation of the text is available here.

Biography

Geshe Dhonam, a Tibetan monk for over fifty years, is the teacher and spiritual director at Trashi Gomang Centre in Auckland and Trashi Ge Phel Ling in Wellington.

Geshe Dhonam became a monk at Gomang College of Drepung Monastery, India, in 1970 when he was 13 years old. In Tibet, Drepung, Sera and Gaden were the three great Gelukpa monasteries. At one time Drepung was the largest with 10,000 monks. When the communist Chinese invaded Tibet, many monks fled with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and, on the destruction of their monasteries in Tibet, rebuilt them in South India. It was the rebuilt Drepung in South India Geshe Dhonam entered as a boy. Over the 22 years he was at the monastery, he studied and graduated from all the major topics studied by the monks and attained the monastery’s highest qualification, Geshe Lharampa, in 1992.

Immediately after obtaining the qualification, he was asked by the monastery to teach in Buryatia, one of the newly established Russian states. Geshe-la was a resident teacher at a Buddhist Institute in Buryatia for eight years before returning to Drepung where he was then requested to come and teach the Dharma in New Zealand.