The Next 500 Years
Buddhist wisdom teaches us that after you have seen emptiness directly, you will have a clear vision of the next 500 years. You will know what is going to happen and what the future will look like. Using karma, you can do things today to ensure the best possible outcome for all the beings in all the worlds. You can take actions, make plans, and dream big to create a wonderful future.
With Geshe Michael Roach's help, that is exactly what ACI is going to do in Kyoto, Japan this December.
Together, we’ll create a vision for ACI–not only for the next 30 years, but for the next 500 years!
What is the 30/30/30 Plan?
It's Asian Classics Institute's 30th anniversary. And Geshe Michael has made an anniversary promise: by 2030, he will finish the lam rim teaching he started 14 years ago; he will teach us the emptiness chapter of Je Tsongkapa's Lam Rim Chen Mo; he will create 100 meditation videos; and he will create 100 images of the lam rim teaching so it can be transmitted far into the future, when people might not even read anymore. This wonderful work will reach beyond 2030 and help many. It will be a fitting legacy for ACI.
Geshe Michael asks a few things of us in return. To find out more about this, please click here: https://asianclassicsinstitute.org/eng-30/30/30-plan
In Kyoto, we will be gathering, strategizing, and dreaming big to bring great ideas to life. Our goal is to secure the future of the dharma and help it spread as far and wide across the globe as possible over the next few generations. We want to inspire our kids and grandkids with the beauty, wisdom, and compassion of the Buddha's words so that they too, like us, will be motivated to preserve and teach this healing, unifying gift to as many people as have ears to hear.
There's a method to learn to achieve this.
The Buddha was compassionate as well as wise, and he left us many teachings about the connection between cause and result. It's called karmic correlations--what action creates what result. Some of the connections are surprising, such as making yourself beautiful, not by applying makeup, but by destroying your anger. Diamond Cutter Press has published an e-book about it. It's called All the Kinds of Karma. You can find it here: https://www.diamondcutterpress.com/ebooks/exclusive-advance-edition-the-golde-key-z6ph4. It gives hundreds of pages of karmic correlations.
We will use these correlations in Kyoto to dream up a 500-year plan for Asian Classics Institute. We thought it would be a fitting tribute to Geshe Michael's 1993 vision, when he started ACI in New York City to make all the wisdom of a traditional Tibetan geshe degree available to all beings, men and women alike, free of charge. Together, we’ll create a vision for ACI–not only for the next 30 years, but for the next 500 years!
A 500-year plan is a big dream indeed. How do you dream big? How do you bring such great ideas to life? During our upcoming Steps on the Path retreat in Kyoto, we will have seven special classes with senior ACI teachers to explore the methodology we need to do a good job of making a 500-year plan. Studying how karma works brings method to our planning. We’ll work together as karmic scientists to move Asian Classics Institute brilliantly into the future.
Using karmic correlations, we will also learn how a karmic scientist investigates where problems come from and designs strategic solutions for the future that avoid obstacles. For example, what problems come from lying? What problems come from suffering from bad health, or intoxication, or speaking divisively? Karmic correlations teach us how to diagnose a situation and create a strategy for success.
Using karmic correlations, we'll learn:
how to come up with and identify a 500-year dream for ACI
how to plant big karma for big dreams
how to anticipate future obstacles
how to overcome unanticipated obstacles
The Last 30 Years Have Been Great
Since 1993, ACI has made a lot of progress. Geshe Michael completed the Herculean task of distilling the traditional geshe curriculum into 18 foundation courses, and translating them into accessible English. He began the work of making them attractive and available to anyone in the world that wants them, which he continues to this day.
The world pandemic of Covid in 2018 had the interesting effect of bringing many more people to the dharma, because live online classes allowed us to include hundreds, even thousands, of new people in virtual classes. The hunger for the dharma is great around the world, and the beginning of mass online teachings is satisfying that hunger to a large extent.
ACI brings three annual Steps on the Path teachings to the world every year, too, giving people a chance to experience Geshe Michael teaching his favorite book--Liberation in Our Hands, by Pabongka Rinpoche. This year will mark our 45th consecutive Steps on the Path teaching from this book, with more to come.
In 2023, ACI trained and certified more teachers, and established quarterly teacher trainings to create even more teachers to help satisfy the need for qualified dharma teachings in many places in the world. We began a monthly series called Bringing Wisdom to Life designed to give quick, effective insights into how the dharma might have a positive impact on some practical problem you're having in everyday life. Because you can't have a direct perception of emptiness without meditating an hour a day, we started Traveling to the Diamond World--monthly meditation classes to help people learn to sit on the cushion for longer and longer periods of time.
In the last few years, ACI developed and offered an online student platform so students can access all 18 ACI Foundation Courses easily in one place, and turn in, track, and grade homeworks, quizzes, and final exams in one convenient place.
Perhaps the most amazing recent ACI achievement, though, is the very beautiful karmic flowering of offering the dharma in many modern languages--we are up to 15 now! This includes English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Russian, German, Ukrainian, French, Bulgarian, Turkish, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Japanese, and Malaysian. It's an amazing achievement, requiring the tireless volunteer work of almost 250 volunteers who translate every event live and work on translating written materials in their spare time. It has an immeasurable effect on making Geshe Michael's teachings and the dharma available to thousands more people than before. It's an unprecedented achievement.
Help ACI Plan for the Future
We have 8 billion people to make a dent on! How should we do this? What are your ideas? Let’s start working together on how to plant seeds for ACI's 500-year legacy and our continued expansive success in the world. We'll have to choose the right karma to plant, and will have to take into account as well the obstacles we may face, and how to dissolve them using karmic correlations.
Join us in Kyoto. Space is still available, online or in-person. We need you for ACI’s dream-building exercise for the next 500 years. You are a part of the grand plan, and you are invited to take your place in the vision.
