The Four Noble Truths Seminar and Pilgrimage

Upcoming In Person Program: January 5 – 19, 2024

SINI’s signature annual program revolves around a sacred journey. This is an opportunity in which monastics and lay people from different cultures converge for a two-week intensive. Participants delve deeply into the most foundational Buddhist teachings, at the locations where they were first delivered over 2500 years ago.

The foundation of the Buddhist path lies in the exploration of these four questions:

1. What is suffering?
2. What is its cause?
3. What is its end?
4. What is the path that leads to its end?

These questions form the core of this unique program. It draws from both traditional sutra and commentary source material, and helps to deepen our appreciation of its profound and timeless truth in our lives, especially in this time of unprecedented global and personal suffering.

Each year, participants from around the world and monastics from Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan, join for a two week intensive program of teachings, practice, prayer and pilgrimage. The first part of the program begins with a week-long  seminar at SINI and marks the first stop on a pilgrimage route, which leads participants to the most sacred sites in the Indian Buddhist world, including Sarnath’s Dhammek Stupa, Vulture Peak, Nalanda, and Bodhgaya.

As our participant and guest, you experience an immersion into a world of monastics. Meeting traditional practitioners, you’ll be able to ask many questions. Dedicated teaching time only represents half of our program. Learning also takes place informally between sessions and seminar activities.

Participants regularly comment that the opportunity to connect with the Tibetan monastic tradition in such an accessible and authentic manner is profoundly life changing.

At the Nyingma Monlam Chenmo in Bodhgaya, where more than 8000 Buddhists gather from around the world, you’ll be invited into a devotional atmosphere. Wherever you are from, and whether you’ve been before, or this will be your first time, India provides an intense experience of humanity. The sacred places, locations that have been the place of practice for thousands of years, as well as the country itself, offers an unexpected vibrancy.

“SINI’s atmosphere of quiet, communal mission, is something I had never experienced in decades of living around the world. Though the monks suffer exile from family and motherland, they are fun-loving and focused on learning English for daily life and to further the spread of Buddhism; they model what a human being can be.” –Katherine K., FNT participant.

“SINI has become a sanctuary; a place where we can live and study in an oasis of beauty and quiet. We invite you to come to experience.” –Doug N., collaborator and volunteer since SINI’s ground breaking.