The Meridian Trust is a charity dedicated to preserving Buddhist culture on film and video. The archive holds over 2,500 hours of footage, focusing primarily on the endangered traditions of Tibet. Our archival footage is available to film and documentary makers, as well as Buddhist students and other interested people. Meridian Trust produces and makes available DVD and video programmes of all the major Buddhist traditions through our worldwide distribution network. Mainly focusing on teachings and public talks given by leading Buddhist teachers, especially the Dalai Lama, our patron, we also distribute documentaries and feature films concerned with Buddhist issues.
In the 1980s, at the request of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Meridian Trust began to film many of the old teachers who came out of Tibet, before they passed away. This original filming initiative came to be known as the Lama Project; a total of 600 hours of unique footage was recorded.
This programme is approximately 165 minutes in length and during its course H.H. The Dalai Lama gives a profound teaching on dependent origination and emptiness with great clarity and insight. He includes a discussion on the nature of time and how it is a mere convention: time does not exist beyond the relationship between past, present and future. Nothing happens without the aggregation of causes and conditions, and His Holiness describes how Buddhahood comes about in this way. The greater our suffering, the greater effort we must put into remedying the causes and effects; likewise for happiness we must strive hard to develop the causes and conditions for happiness. His Holiness continues by talking about the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination and how ignorance leads to action or karma. Ignorance can be dispelled by cultivating insight into the true nature of reality and His Holiness then describes how understanding dependent origination leads us to be able to realise emptiness.
The programme is presented mostly in Tibetan. This DVD is the latest release in a series of ongoing re-issues that bring the work of the Dalai Lama to a wider audience. These films will form part of a unique and groundbreaking series of films that will be welcomed the world over not only by those interested in Buddhism but fellow travellers on the road to enlightenment. This DVD is presented in a mixture of Tibetan and English.
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