Palri Pema Od Ling

Austin, Texas

Chaz Litt

History of the Sangha

Palri Pema Od Ling is a Palyul Tibetan Buddhist Temple and Meditation Center located in the greater Austin Area, in Texas. The sangha did not initially begin as a planned community, but began in the 1990’s as a community gathering in a basement of a student of a Palyul teacher. The basement was fully stocked as a meditation area, complete with shrines. In the first years of the 21st century, the land was acquired to build the temple, and it was blessed by the Lama Pema Norbu Rinpoche, the 11th Throneholder of the Palyul Lineage. Effectively the founder of Palri, he was educated beginning at age 4 at the Palyul Monastery in Tibet in the mid 1930’s. Following China’s takeover of Tibet, Pema Norbu Rinpoche relocated to India in 1963. The Dalai Lama gave his endorsement of the Palyul Lineage and the Nyingma School in 1993, only a few years before the foundation of the Palri Pema Od Ling. His Holiness Pema Norbu Rinpoche founded the Palyul Retreat Center in New York, but before that, he began to build the Namdroling Monastery in Karnataka, India. The monastery is home to over 5,000 monks, 3,000 of which are permanent residents, while the rest frequently travel as teachers. He achieved parinirvana in 2009, and his reincarnation was found recently in the young Yangsi Rinpoche, who was throned in 2014.

 In 2003, the shrine received its Buddha statue, which was constructed in and shipped from Nepal. The community, while small, has relied heavily on traveling teachers and meditation experts. Every few years, the temple receives a new resident teacher, and nearly all have been educated in South Indian Monasteries. The current Resident Lama is Loppon Rapjee Wangchuk. A personal attendant of His Holiness Penor Rinpoche, his studies are specialized in mandala construction and Palyul masked ritual dances. He studied with the late Pema Norbu Rinpoche at the New York Retreat center until his appointment to Palri Pema Od Ling this past November, and has studied at the Namdroling Monastery in the past.

The New York Palyul Retreat Center has close ties with Palri Pema Od Ling, as many of the teachers have resided or studied there, and the Namdroling Monastery has educated many of those teachers as well. 

Palyul Lineage

Practices

Palri Pema Od Ling has slowly made its transition back to in-person practices over the past year, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. While many of their services are still available through Zoom, the temple has made a conscious effort to allow in-person meditations and teachings to bring the community closer together. Every Monday is the Guru Yoga and Chod Practice, and every Wednesday there is a Meditation session. Additionally, every morning the temple hosts a Nam Cho Ngondro service, from 7 to 8 AM, for regular practitioners. This Terma is directly from Avalokiteshvra, passed through Guru Rinpoche. It is part of the Great Perfection – Buddha in the Palm of the Hand, and is a Nyingma practice concerning revealing the nature of the mind in order to achieve enlightenment. This involves meditation on the 10 virtues, and the 10 non-virtues, and is part of the first steps to achieving enlightenment in one lifetime. 

Here, the services lined with the Gregorian Calendar largely stop, as the Palri Pema Od Ling temple follows the Tibetan Lunar calendar. The Medicine Buddha Practice only happens on the 8th lunar day of the month. Prayers are offered to Bhaisajya Guru, a Buddha that manifests healing energy. 

Specially scheduled events include the Vajrakilaya, which happens on the 29th day of the lunar month, and is a famous Tibetan practice. It concerns the Heruka Vajrakilaya, a deity who symbolizes both the compassion and wrath of the Buddhas. While a Buddha of wrath may seem like a counterintuitive representation of a being famed for attempting to eliminate emotion, practitioners view the deity as a being that can wipe away mental obstacles that get in the way of enlightenment. The Twenty One Taras is a Tibetan Buddhist practice that involves the devotion to the deity Arya Tara, a Buddhist deity that is worshiped twenty one times during the course of a mantra. 

Recently, the sangha has doen several fish release practices, meant to inspire good action and good karma. Instead of thinking about karama negatively, while taking the life leads to worse endings down the road, helping another being to live longer will generate good consequences. The practice is called fangsheng, and is a traditional Tibetan practice.

The practices are posted online, with Zoom links, and the practices’ requisite papers and informational material are also provided online. Keeping with the tradition in a modern world, the texts are provided in English, Chinese, and other languages. Many of the daily practices, and the monthly holidays, are free to attend and worship.

Teachings

Palri Pema Od Ling is Tibetan, of the Nyingma School, in the Mahayana Tradition of Buddhism. The Nyingma School teaches both kama and terma teachings. The long lineage in the kama teachings are from the Buddha, and are available to many scholars, from all kinds of Mahayana Buddhists, but the termas were passed down to specific masters after being hidden by Guru Rinpoche. Pema Norbu Rinpoche ordained over ten thousand monks and nuns during his tenure on the throne, and he not only received many ancient transmissions, but also transmitted many of the teachings to his disciples, in earnest after his exile from Tibet and into India. He established a now-flourishing monastery with an initial investment of 300 rupees (~$340 in present-day American dollars), and performed much of the physical labor himself. By the early 1990’s, he was traveling abroad and training monks and nuns, transmitting the teachings of the Dharma to as many as possible. By the late 1990’s, he was establishing schools like Kunzang Palyul Choling in Maryland, the Palyul Retreat Center in upstate New York, and blessing the Palri Pema Od Ling in Texas. He brought rare copies of the Nam Cho cycle to India, a key feature in Buddhism. It translates roughly to Sky Dharma, and according to Loppong Rapjee Wangchuk, it is one of the main teachings at Palri. The temple also is a proponent of Dzogchen meditation, which proposes that awakening stems from fundamentally understanding the building blocks of reality, and their emptiness. Most of the basic teachings for meditations, including mantras, are posted on their website. 

If you’d like to view some of these texts in English, click here: https://www.palri.org/english-texts/

If you’d like to view some of these texts in Chinese, click here:https://www.palri.org/chinese-texts/

The Sangha

While Buddhism was brought to Texas in the mid-nineteenth century, this particular sangha formed in the last decade of the twentieth century, and has remained fairly small over the years, but consistent, even through the recent troubles of the pandemic. Lama Loppon Rapjee Wangchuk estimates that there are anywhere between ten and fifteen practitioners each morning, but special events bring in more people. The sangha is a mix of white and non-white members, which is well maintained by the multi-lingual temple. Many of the teachers, including the founding lama and the Resident Lama, are foreign-born, and are not native English speakers. This lends well to the sangha being multicultural, as they give worldly perspectives for the teachings. The location, Austin, Texas, is a multiracial area, mostly white and Latinx, meaning many people who are interested in the temple’s teachings come from those backgrounds. The temple is funded mostly by donations from visitors, and from practitioners, but they also sell tickets for some of the more advanced practices taught to raise money. 

Further Links

Palri Pema Od Ling’s Website: https://www.palri.org/ (Please consider donating!)

Namdroling Monastery’s Website: https://www.namdroling.net/Portal/Home (Also consider donating!)

Citations