Building a New Gompa After a Fire

Dear Geshe-la and Sangha, who are looking for virtue and liberation, who are learning Dharma to help yourself and others, dear Laura and all my dear Dharma brothers and sisters,

When we invited His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the land in Bodhgaya for the Maitreya statue, to participate in the puja for 1,000 offerings to Maitreya, His Holiness at that time said that we would succeed in building the statue. After the puja, when everyone had left the land, the huge thangka of Maitreya and the altar with thangkas around it caught on fire and everything was burned and destroyed completely. All that was left was an image of Guru Shakyamuni Buddha. Immediately on hearing this, His Holiness’s ritual attendant said that everyone had taken it as an auspicious sign. Ribur Rinpoche also said that it was an auspicious sign.

I think what has happened at Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa, with the blazing fire destroying the gompa, is an auspicious sign that you have overcome all the problems through this blazing fire. Anyway, I thought Lama Tzong Khapa gompa was strange, even though it was blessed by so many high lamas, such as His Holiness Ling Rinpoche and Zong Rinpoche, and so much work and effort was made for this gompa.

The fire gives us the opportunity to build an enlightened and encouraging gompa, not a place to eat pizza and mozzarella. We definitely need a very beautiful gompa that becomes an encouragement to everyone, to depressed people, to people who believe they are helpless, something which brings the greatest joy and fulfillment to the heart for everyone.

It is also a teaching on impermanence. Do not hold onto things which are impermanent, which are a dependent arising, like a butter lamp, which depends on causes and conditions, like lightning, like a water bubble, like clouds, also like a star in the daytime, like the defective view of the senses … an illusion, a dream. All this was said by Buddha. We recite these lines every day. We should realize that the gompa was a causative phenomena, something that was but is not now.

Thank you very much and big love to everyone. I am waiting to see the wonderful beautiful nice new gompa. Thank you very much. Grazi. I am going to try to come and see you soon. When the new gompa is complete we will invite His Holiness to teach in it. Maybe we can invite Geshe Jampa Gyatso’s incarnation.

Much love and prayer...