Finding Unshakeable Certainty
Highlights from the Beacon of Certainty by Mipham Rinpoche
What is our practice actually built on?
Many of us have spent years on the path: meditating, deepening compassion, engaging in Vajrayana practice, receiving profound teachings that have inspired and transformed us. Yet at a certain point, questions like this begin to arise. What are we truly recognizing in meditation? How
do we distinguish genuine understanding from concepts, experiences, or passing states?
The great masters of the Nyingma tradition understood that these questions cannot be answered through faith alone. They require investigation, reflection, and a View that becomes clear through our own experience.
For these teachings, Khenpo Tashi draws on selected highlights from The Beacon of Certainty by Mipham Rinpoche, a profound text of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Structured around essential questions of view and meditation, the text guides practitioners with remarkable precision
through the relationship between appearance and emptiness, analysis and direct experience, understanding and realization.
Deeply grounded in the lineage of Longchenpa and Mipham Rinpoche, Khenpo Tashi has a rare ability to make these teachings feel immediate and alive, revealing how they relate directly to our own path and experience.
These teachings are open to all practitioners with a grounding in meditation and Lojong. Whether you are newer to the philosophical dimension of the Dharma or a long-time practitioner seeking a firmer foundation beneath your practice, they offer something increasingly rare: the opportunity to develop a clear and stable confidence in the View, one that can genuinely support the path in every circumstance.
The retreat will include periods of silence including during tea breaks and some meal times
Location
The retreat will be held in our new Dzogchen Beara Temple. With expansive views across the bay, the temple is a modern example of a traditional Tibetan monastery, a form of architecture designed to be an inspiring symbol of the Buddha’s teachings for our times.
Khenpo Tashi
Khenpo Tashi is one of the most gifted and respected Nyingma khenpos of his generation, trained at Namdroling Monastery under the guidance of is root teacher Penor Rinpoche. For the past fourteen years, at the request of Khenchen Namdrol Rinpoche, he has served as the principal
teacher at the Rigpa Shedra in Pharping, Nepal, offering teachings on both Sutra and Tantra to hundreds of students, from beginners to advanced practitioners. Over the past four years, his online teachings have brought his guidance to an ever-wider audience within the Rigpa community and beyond.
Renowned for the depth of his learning, the precision and clarity of his explanations, and his rare ability to connect with students according to their needs and level of understanding, Khenpo Tashi’s teachings are consistently experienced as both inspiring and transformative.
These teachings will be offered in Tibetan with live English interpretation.
Damien van Effenterre
Damien van Effenterre is a translator and long-term student of Buddhist philosophy. He began practicing the Dharma in 1999 and later left a scientific career as a physicist to commit fully to shedra study and Tibetan language. A former director of Rigpa’s International Shedra Department, he is now the principal interpreter for Khenpo Tashi at the Rigpa Shedra in
Pharping and online, and continues translating classical Tibetan texts. He also teaches and guides study, with a heartfelt wish to support students’ understanding.