From the very beginning of the Kagyu school, many practitioners of this tradition preferred intensive meditative practice over developed theoretical studies. This is why the Kagyu school was also called drub gyu. "Gyu" means "lineage", while the word "drub" has several meanings. The most common is: "fulfilment, gaining, realization; application, practicing." Thus, the name drub gyu is usually translated as The Lineage of Practice, or The Lineage of Realisation.
The teachings say that the most favourable conditions for meditation can be found in a secluded place, with limited contact with other people. The benefits of such a meditative retreat are enormous. The Buddha taught in The Moon Lamp Sutra (Candra-pradipa-sutra):
Food, drink, robes, flowers, incense and garlands
are not what best serve and honour the Buddha, the finest being of all.
Whoever, longing for enlightenment and saddened with the evilness of conditioned life,
takes seven paces towards a place of retreat
with the intention of staying there in order to benefit beings
has far greater and better merit than those who make such offerings.
Even a one-day retreat may be very helpful to us. Yet, in accordance with the Vajrayana teachings included in Buddhist tantras, three years and one and a half month (in Tibetan this period is called lo sum chok sum, three years plus three halves of 30-day lunar cycle) is the minimal period necessary to purify all winds of the subtle energies in our body and to transform them into primordial wisdom winds. The tradition of the three year meditative retreat has existed in Tibetan Buddhism for centuries. Some practitioners have accomplished them more than once. In the Kagyu school, the title 'lama' is given to those who completed at least one three-year meditative retreat.
Since the times of the Eight Tai Situpa and the Fourteenth Karmapa, there has been customary practicing of such retreats in small groups of adepts going through the same essential practices of the Kagyu tradition, among them: Yidam meditations (like Dorje Phagmo, Khorlo Demchog and Gyalwa Gyamtso), and the Six Doctrines of Naropa (for example: tummo, the yoga of psychic heat, and milam, the dream yoga). Such an organised system enables the monasteries to educate new lamas who, acquainted with basic practices of the Karma Kagyu school, can keep the unbroken transmission of this tradition. To provide people who wanted to complete the whole cycle of meditations with the best conditions, special centres for the three-year meditative retreat, called drubkhang (drub - practice, khang - house, room) were established.
Since the late 1970s in some Western countries several drubkhangs have also been built, both in the Kagyu, and Nyingma traditions. Many people in the West have already had the opportunity to complete three-year retreats. Among them were some Poles, but, unfortunately, most of them live permanently abroad. |
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