The Wisdom of Arya Nagarjuna Course 2: An Exploration of the Greatest Wisdom from the Ancient Sage (2019, Arizona)

This 10-day retreat is an exploration of Nagarjuna’s Wisdom. We will investigate the deeper meanings of his writings, and how to apply his understanding of reality to our daily lives.

In this program, we will dive deeply into new practices as well as offer new ways of learning and engaging this wisdom for daily living. There will be an intensive training and teaching session in the morning, which is what you’ll find recordings of here, and then for the rest of the day the students were in deep retreat to practice and integrate what was learned in the morning. Students are encouraged to take the material and develop tools to apply the ancient wisdom to their daily lives.

As far as our original sources for this program, we will be using the most famous of all works by Arya Nagarjuna (c. 200AD) which he named simply, Wisdom.

This is considered the mother of all explanations of the crucial idea of emptiness. We will be depending heavily upon A Ship for Crossing the Ocean of Emptiness, a detailed commentary to the work by Choney Lama Drakpa Shedrup (1675-1748).

At times we will also check into his Commentary on the Difficult Points in “Wisdom,” and on occasion we will venture into the deep forest of Je Tsongkapa’s extensive explanation, The Ocean of Emptiness—which as we can tell from the title alone forms the foundation for Choney Lama’s work. We will also be referring to the original Sanskrit version of Wisdom, which is fortunately still available.