Living in the Path Online
Taking the Essence: Offering Food and Drink

Overview

Living in the Path is an online program taught exclusively by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, the spiritual director of the FPMT. Many of the modules are extracted from Rinpoche’s explanations of the topics of the lamrim – the teachings on the stages of the path to enlightenment according to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Lama Tsongkhapa (Gelug). Other modules cover specific practices intended to help us purify our negative karma and create the merit necessary to actualize the lamrim topics.

Prerequisites

Living in the Path is ideal for anyone who wishes to deepen their personal practice and develop the realizations of the path to enlightenment by relying on Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s heart advice and teachings. However, as Rinpoche’s teachings often assume familiarity with the topics of the lamrim, it is advisable to have done some prior study of the lamrim, such as by having completed some or all of the modules of Discovering Buddhism.

Course Contents

In this module of Living in the Path, Lama Zopa Rinpoche gives an extensive teaching showing how he himself likes to makes offerings. Rinpoche encourages us to do the same and take the essence of our perfect human life by making offerings of whatever food and drink we consume.

I must free [the numberless sentient beings] from suffering and bring them to enlightenment by myself alone. Therefore, I am going to practice the yoga of eating and make charity to all the sentient beings and offerings to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. (Lama Zopa Rinpoche)

Course Materials

The course materials consist of 18 pages of lightly edited transcripts accompanied by six corresponding videos of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings during a picnic in Denmark, July 2015, attended by the representatives of FPMT centers located in the northern Baltic countries.

Practice Texts:

Extensive Yoga of Eating Food
Middling-Length Yoga of Offering Food

Chapters:

1. How I Offer Food: The Motivation

2. How I Offer Food: The Actual Practice

Videos:

Video 1: How I Offer Food – The Motivation, Part 1

Video 2: How I Offer Food – The Motivation, Part 2

Video 3: How I Offer Food – The Motivation, Part 3

Video 4: How I Offer Food – The Actual Practice, Part 1

Video 5: How I Offer Food – The Actual Practice, Part 2

Video 6: How I Offer Food – The Actual Practice, Part 3

Important information about your order of online materials: Following your order, you will receive an email with a link to a webpage to download a PDF document which will contain the enrollment key for the course and instructions on how to access the course on the FPMT Online Learning Center.