In October 2023, Geshe Michael introduced the 30/30/30 Plan, his vision for collaborating with all of us to move Asian Classics Institute forward into the future. His part is to contribute a wonderful range of new teachings and learning aids. Our part is to sign up to contribute $30 a day to ACI, so he can do less fundraising and more translating, writing, and teaching. We think that's a great deal! What's the vision again? If, and only if, ACI can get 1000 donors in 2024 to sign up to give $30/month, by 2030 Geshe Michael will:

Finish Pabongka Rinpoche's Liberation Thrust into the Palm of Your Hand, that he began teaching us in 2010

Teach us the emptiness chapter from Je Tsongkapa's Lam Rim Chen Mo

Create 100 video meditations on Steps on the Path by 2030Give us 100 Steps on the Path images to help 21st-century people understand this material better

And we have an update. At the upcoming Steps on the Path retreat at Diamond Mountain in April, Geshe Michael will give more information on his 30/30/30 Plan ideas!

Angel Chu lives in Taipei, Taiwan. She is an interpreter and has a business helping people with events, meetings and activities. She was introduced to Asian Classics Institute by a friend, who wanted to tell her all about a book he was reading called The Diamond Cutter. He actually gave her a copy and invited her to attend study groups about it. Angel noticed that her friend's life was improving quite a lot. A couple of months later, somehow, Angel Chu found herself at Diamond Mountain Retreat Center, where she met Geshe Michael Roach. Angel's comment on that series of events: "Wow!" Today Angel is working with ACI in Taiwan to help invigorate the teachings locally, attract more certified teachers, and maybe help coordinate the large amounts of money ACI's Taiwanese students have been contributing for years. Welcome, Angel!

In December 2023, 30 years after its founding, ACI hosted a triumphant rejoicing celebration with hundreds of students from around the world who still study the 18 Asian Classics Foundation Courses today. The party was held at the 45th iteration of Geshe Michael's Steps on the Path teachings, The Power to Dream, in Kyoto, Japan, in December 2023. There was an afternoon feast, music and dancing, and participants brainstormed their vision of ACI's next 30 years. A Rejoicing Wall was stickered with people's thoughts and feelings about ACI. Senior teachers like Ven. Jigme, Earle Birney, and John Stilwell shared their stories and their experiences, live and on video, with the attendees. During the teaching, Geshe Michael told us more about ACI's 30/30/30 Plan, his vision for ACI from 2024 to 2030.

Asian Classics Institute has a grand plan to take us forward into the new year and beyond. We're now 30 years old. Geshe Michael has made a series of exciting new promises to take us forward to the year 2030. And we need 1000 donors to contribute $30/month to make these exciting new promises a reality. This is the 30/30/30 Plan. We're at 31% of our goal and we still need a lot of your help. And we have a few details--more will be coming--about the cool stuff Geshe Michael has planned if we can meet our fundraising goal.

Maroke is a time-honored tradition in our lineage. Geshe Michael invented it many years ago to confer a baby geshe degree on people who have completed all 18 Asian Classics Institute Foundation Courses and who go through the maroke process. A maroke involves answering random questions from any one of the ACI 18. You never know what question you will get. Since ACI has begun to spread throughout the world, and teachings have become more decentralized and available in many languages, maroke has become rarer and rarer. Covid 19 made it more difficult than ever to participate in maroke. But Ven. Gyelse and Ven. Jigme rode to the rescue! This January, they led ACI's first-ever live Zoom online maroke, ably assisted by Amie Diller.

Our fantastic volunteer Marina Kazakova has been a mainstay of the Asian Classics Institute technical table for several years now. Every time Geshe Michael sees her during her visits to Sedona, he sings the West Side Story song, I Just Met a Girl Named Maria [sic], to her! Marina is the detail-oriented wizard who makes sure all the translators are present, ready, and able to translate, in all the multiple language channels ACI broadcasts its many courses, events, and activities in almost every day of the week. She also makes sure the teaching materials are organized and available in up to 17 languages.

Buddhist wisdom teaches us that after you have seen emptiness directly, you will have a clear vision of the next 500 years. But how do you make a 500-year plan? By using karmic correlations, of course. The Buddha in his wisdom and compassion left us detailed instructions on how karma causes specific results in the Karma Vibhanga. Asian Classics Institute is going to lead a series of seven workshop, live and in-person, during our 30th anniversary celebration in Kyoto, Japan, December 5-11, based on the wisdom contained in this sutra. We're going to make a 500-year plan. We're going to celebrate Geshe Michael Roach's incredible vision in starting Asian Classics Institute in New York City in 1993. Geshe Michael made amazing efforts to find, organize, and translate the dharma into 18 Foundation Courses, still in widespread and increasing use around the world today. And ACI has made leaps and bounds of progress in adding to the impact these teachings have globally. But to make sure the dharma keeps going and is transmitted to even more people in the 21st century, we invite you to join us in formulating ACI's next 500 years!

"Venerable Jigme has known Geshe Michael Roach very well for many decades. In this recent video interview, she shares with us some wisdom and insights about the upcoming Steps on the Path teaching in Kyoto, Japan--The Power to Dream: Bringing Great Ideas to Life, December 5-11. Her enthusiasm for Kyoto comes through vividly and she gives an update about what will occur there. Ven. Jigme also tells us more generally why attending retreat in person is an optimum experience. She highlights some of the benefits of retreat. And, when asked about ACI's 30th anniversary, Ven. Jigme tells some tantalizing stories about how she came to know about ACI around the time of its founding in 1993, and what greater detail we might be able to expect during ACI's 30th anniversary celebration in Kyoto. Watch and enjoy!

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Time in prison can be a kind of living hell for those who are inside. Asian Classics Institute offers prisoners across the US and in some other countries an opportunity to study Buddhism during their incarceration.  We are dedicated to the serious study and personal practice of the original teachings of the Buddha. Our purpose is to provide a thorough, accurate Tibetan Buddhist education to anyone interested. We offer 15 formal study courses that can be taken as correspondence courses, which parallel the same basic core of information that a geshe (Tibetan for Doctor of Theology) learns at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. This curriculum is provided free of charge to prisoners who are unable to pay. People in prison arguably need the comfort, wisdom, and compassion Buddhism provides even more than other people. Dr. Michael Moore, MD, who has been studying with Geshe Michael Roach since the 1990s, runs ACI's prison wisdom program. He has success stories and challenges to share with us, as he takes us through the process our prison system requires in order to share this timeless wisdom with people in prison.

Click here to see the video

Now that we've spent some time studying the importance of developing a good heart, how do we put that into practice? Geshe Michael taught that there are 18 very practical pieces of advice we can use in daily life, to help us notice opportunities as they arise and instruct us about what to do on a moment-to-moment basis.

The 18 Advices are practical things you can do in your own life, with your family, in your business, with your kids, how to treat them better. It's just things you can remember and always have with you to guide small daily actions. They are teachings, but we are teaching them like meditations you can do one after the other. Then you think about what they mean, and this will lead you to a deeper understanding of how to develop a good heart and what that actually means. We are in the process of making recordings of guided meditations featuring these 18 Advices, and we will share them with the whole world when they are ready.

It's really about upgrading your spiritual life constantly and working on it steadily. And always going for a higher thing--when you feel like you're settled and you're comfortable, don't be complacent. Go to a higher level. This practice will take you there. You need to be serving and planting good seeds and stopping planting bad seeds in order to develop this good heart and have these amazing experiences. To change your whole world to a beautiful world, you need to change your heart first. And then that will reflect in your own everyday world. If you perfect yourself, your heart, your mind, then your world is going to start to change.

Do you feel stuck in your life? Maybe you'd like to travel but can't. Maybe you're not as happy as you could be. Consider becoming an Asian Classics Institute Help Desk volunteer. You'll get virtual opportunities to help and make friends with ACI community members around the world. And it seems like volunteering might actually improve your happiness levels too.

Three wonderful ACI volunteers, Josephine Chan, Svetlana Claire Dunaeva, and Monica Torres, each from a different part of the world, share their stories with us. They all work on the Asian Classics Institute's Help Desk with a large group of other Help Desk volunteers that keep things going smoothly and answer lots of questions every day for ACI's students and friends. It gets especially busy during an event.

Learn what these three have in common. As a result of their volunteer work, they all feel very connected with ACI students and communities around the world, and each has noticed positive benefits in their lives which they attribute to their volunteer work.

How can my personal meditation have any effect on changing the world for the better? Find out how using the Asian Classics Institute Meditation Timer tool can add your precious meditation minutes to a global community pool of minutes meditated, and have a cumulative impact on bringing peace and harmony to a troubled world.

We launched a project in January 2023 designed to invite everyone to do two things: 1) learn to meditate for a full hour; and 2) track all their meditation minutes in 2023 so that collectively we could reach a goal of ten million minutes by the end of 2023. The Meditation Timer is an important part of this project. It allows participants in the project, which is called Traveling to the Diamond World, to track the minutes they meditate during the year. At the end of the year we will use the Meditation Timer to find out how many minutes we have meditated, to see how close we got to the goal of ten million minutes this year.

Meditation is important, not just for helping individuals reach their spiritual goals, but also for having a positive effect on the world in general. You are invited to participate in Traveling to the Diamond World and track your meditation minutes using the Meditation Timer. You can start at any time. You don't have to participate in Traveling to the Diamond World to use the Meditation Timer to track your meditation minutes.

Why should I care about the ACI Online Learning Platform?

ACI's online learning platform was created to provide easy access to our course work as well as to support our students’ growth and development in their spiritual aspirations. It functions as the action arm of ACI to provide a rich array of information and content. The platform is the "My ACI" of a personalized student experience to guide students on their journey through the classical ancient wisdom

Learn a novel way to apply the art of tonglen to your daily life, based on a new idea Geshe Michael cooked up. The Asian Classics Institute and Diamond Mountain Retreat Center are launching a new quest--to raise $100,000 to help bring more people in to work on special projects to spread the teachings and the dharma around the world. In particular, Geshe Michael cooked up this idea to help support the needs and the popularity of the Asian Classics Institute's Lam Rim Retreats.

What is ACI doing to help real people dream big? As part of the Asian Classics Institute’s community service arm, we provide a yearly scholarship competition for deserving students within the Hispanic community to the college or university of their choice. As the home team is located in Sedona, Arizona, USA, we offer these awards to students graduating from the Sedona Red Rock High School.

Ask yourself this question: if you wanted to make Geshe Michael teaching a class simultaneously available to anyone in the world who wanted to see it, how would you do that?

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It all begins with an idea.