It’s difficult to remember contentment teaching and even more difficult to follow this teaching

Lamasang lived humbly and practiced contentment very well, with little attachment to material things. He also taught us that, and how important it is to have a simple life. It’s difficult to remember this teaching and even more difficult to follow this teaching.

When I actually started running the monastery, after Lamasang passed away, I found that many, or some monks, and some dharma practitioners here were deeply interested in material things. Because Lamasang was either sick or busy and the monks and practitioners lacked his teachings, a lot of them were distracted by making money and not able to focus on dharma during the 2000 to 2009 period. So I tried very hard to fix that problem, and gave a lot of teachings on how to have a genuine life as a monk, a nun, or a yogi.

It took some years to really address the problem, but now it looks like it is going pretty well. Those kinds of problems exist in many monasteries in different Buddhist traditions, especially in monasteries that are tourist attractions. The monastery is continually expanding, by the numbers of monks and nuns, by geographical area, by the number of buildings, etc. We are keeping all the important traditions of Lamasang’s as a foundation.

 Hungkar Dorje Rinpoche, “History of the Winter Retreat and Other Related Matters of Longngon Monastery”