This summer the programme will take place under special circumstances, since the Centre can resume activities provided that sanitary measures are strictly observed.

Whether you are vaccinated or not, whether you have a negative PCR test or not, does not change the need to respect sanitary measures.

Your presence in Montchardon implies that you strictly respect sanitary measures in all circumstances.

We are now used to these measures:

  1. Wear a protective mask in the temple during the whole teaching or practice period, in the refectory until you start eating, and in all situations where it is difficult to maintain a 1m distance with others.
  2. Hand wash with hydro-alcoholic gel when entering and leaving the temple and refectory, whenever accessing the self-service area and on all occasions when touching a collective object.
  3. Maintain a distance of 1m around yourself, in the temple, in the refectory and when moving around in the Centre.

Access to the temple will be limited to 70/80 people to respect sanitary distances.

For accommodation, the rooms that accommodate several people will become individual rooms, except for couples or families. The number of places in the dormitory will be reduced to space out the beds. This will allow us to accommodate about 80 people.

The campsite area will be open, and the layout of the tents should follow the same guidelines. Disinfectant will be available in all places where necessary.

These rules must be maintained in Montchardon at all times.

Indeed:

We have a moral obligation to protect ourselves and others from disease, especially as we live in collective premises.

It is important to continue to protect Lama Teunsang, whose immunity is greatly diminished, even though he has been vaccinated.

For these reasons, we are asking all those who come this summer to commit to respecting sanitary measures. This commitment will take the official form of a box to be ticked on the registration form, which will allow everyone to come to the Centre with complete peace of mind.

If you cannot or do not wish to follow these guidelines, we ask you not to come to the Centre while these rules are in effect.

The same applies, of course, if you are ill or have symptoms of the virus.

When you leave, if you need to have a PCR test, this can be done in the cities in the area. However, it will be up to you to organise (making an appointment, travelling to and from the test site), because the Centre cannot manage these procedures.

Presentation of the project concerning the new building

General presentation

In order to give you a more precise idea of this project, we present a video animation made from a digital model, which we created to visualize the building as a whole and to detail the different floors. You will find it here:


Select the subtitles using bottom right hand corner icone

The ground floor
It will be reserved for the temple of Nyung Ne, which Lama Teunsang is very keen about ( More about Nyung Ne practice ). The main entrance to the building will be through an access hall on the North side, facing the current big temple. This vestibule will serve as a cloakroom for shoes and outdoor clothing, and be equipped with sanitary facilities.

The temple will be 22m long and 9m wide, i.e. 200m2, an area close to that of the big temple. You can see on the video that the ceiling height increase from 3m at the entrance to 4.5m at the back of the room, to allow different statues to be placed in the altar. The main one for the practice of Nyung Ne is Chenrezig with Eleven Faces and a Thousand Arms, which will be transferred from the present Nyung Ne  temple in building B. The other key piece of the altar will be the stupa that was recently set up in the big temple, which houses the relic of a skull fragment of the 3rd Karmapa Rangjung Dorje (more about this relic, click here)

The video shows only a glimpse of the altar and the temple, which will be traditionally decorated. Other statues will be installed on the shelves and we plan to include the Kangyur (the complete collection of the Buddha’s words), which a friend of the Centre gave us a few years ago and which is currently in the retreat centre building. The floor will be made of wood, like in the big temple.

For many years, Didier Eudes, an artist friend living in Le Havre, has been engaged in the making of bas-reliefs illustrating the 12 Acts of the Buddha (see opposite), which he offered to Karma Migyur Ling. These are reproductions of bas-reliefs kept in museums or holy places, true masterpieces of ancient India Buddhist art. For more than 10 years, Didier has patiently created these works one by one, first making a clay mould in which a mineral substrate is poured to give the appearance of reconstituted stone. You might have seen one of these bas-reliefs at the entrance to the Centre, near the secretariat, showing the birth of the Buddha. The other sculptures were stored in the yoga room. Lama Teunsang requested that these bas-reliefs be placed on the walls of the new temple.

1st and 2nd floors
They will each consist of 11 individual rooms and a common sanitary block with two showers and two toilets. Each floor will have two staircases at each end, the second being an emergency access.

The 10m2 rooms will be arranged to facilitate the practice of retreat. Each room will be equipped with a toilet area (washbasin), a bed, a large wardrobe, a table, a meditation area and a shelf for the altar and offerings.

Basement – garden level
As the building is built on a mountainside, the rear part is partially buried while the front is at garden level (see video). This floor will therefore be under the Nyung Ne temple.

In the first version of the project, we thought we would leave this level empty, to be developed in the future. In the end, we felt that it would be better to use it right away by adding an additional seven rooms, based on the model of the upper floors, with a common toilet block. One room will be reserved for the boiler room, linked to the heating network coming from the wood-fired boiler room, with a hot water tank and an emergency boiler.

The rear part will be used as a cellar, surrounded by a gallery forming a sanitary space to isolate the building from the natural terrain.

Use of the building
This new construction will make it possible to organize annual Nyung Ne retreats, either in the form of 100 Nyung Ne or for shorter periods, according to the requests of the practitioners. We will also program collective practices, such as retreats to deepen Shine-Lhaktong meditation over one or several months, or the practice of Chöd. Finally, this building will also be very useful to host individual retreats over more or less long periods, in order to deepen the practice.

Financing
Now that we have chosen the companies that commit to a firm quotation, we know the total amount of this project, which amounts to 1.8 million euros.
We have created a page that explains how the project will be financed and how you can support it.