Dalai Lama audio and video | The Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama: "Kalachakra Preliminary Teachings"
Day one of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's three day teaching on Gyalsey Thokme Sangpo's "37 Practices of A Boddhisattva (laklen sodunma)" and Kamalashila's "Stages of Meditation - Middle Volume (gomrim barpa)" given on July 9-11, 2011, that were preliminary teachings to the Kalachakra Empowerment. (www.dalailama.com)
Kalachakra
कालचक्र Kalachakra (Sanskrit: कालचक्र; IAST: Kālacakra) is a Sanskrit term used in Tantric Buddhism that literally means "time-wheel" or "time-cycles." The spelling Kalacakra is also correct.
Kalachakra refers both to a Tantric deity (Tib. yidam) of Vajrayana Buddhism and to the philosophies and meditation practices contained within the Kalachakra Tantra and its many commentaries. The Kalachakra Tantra is more properly called the Kalachakra Laghutantra, and is said to be an abridged form of an original text, the Kalachakra Mulatantra which is no longer extant. Some Buddhist masters assert that Kalachakra is the most advanced form of Vajrayana practice; it certainly is one of the most complex systems within tantric Buddhism.
The Kalachakra tradition revolves around the concept of time (kāla) and cycles (chakra): from the cycles of the planets, to the cycles of human breathing, it teaches the practice of working with the most subtle energies within one's body on the path to enlightenment.
The Kalachakra deity represents a Buddha and thus omniscience. Since Kalachakra is time and everything is under the influence of time, Kalachakra knows all. Whereas Kalachakri or Kalichakra, his spiritual consort and complement, is aware of everything that is timeless, untimebound or out of the realm of time. In Yab-yum, they are temporality and atemporality conjoined. Similarly, the wheel is without beginning or end.
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