Mr. Tshering Penjor, a practitioner of Vipasanā meditation gave a talk to NRC students on Vipasanā meditation.

Mr. Tshering  Penjor, a practitioner of  Vipasanā meditation gave a talk to the students on it. He started with how he came to learn about Vipasanā meditation.

He stressed on the fact that even though he was born a Buddhist, like most Bhutanese, he never really questioned why we prostrate or offer butter lamps to the statues of deities and Buddhas in our altar rooms. According to him this makes us a passive Buddhist even though Buddha always encouraged his disciples to question whatever they felt was not right.

He also touched on the practice of students going to lhakhangs during exams without actually preparing for our exams in schools or colleges, hoping that Buddha would magically make us pass an exam. According to him, even though some students prepare very well for an exam, there are cases when their minds go blank. So in such cases a visit to a Lhakhang might help calm a student down. And Vipasanā meditation is such a practice.

Vipasanā meditation was introduced to the inmates of Tihar jail in India on the recommendation of a woman warden. And one of the most famous Vipasanā meditation practitioners, S.N Goenka was requested to teach the inmates. And surprisingly, inmates who were murders and rapist began to calm down. Some of the inmates came forward to express that it was due to their action that they were sent to jail and not because of anything else.

Therefore, it is your action and the way you think that matters and nothing else. And as the famous bard aptly put it in one of his famous plays, Hamlet, “there is nothing that is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”