“To meditate means to become familiar with your positive thoughts, positive mind [the Tibetan word for meditation, gom, means to “familiarize”]. You try to increase the positive potentials of the mind and reduce the negative imprints in the mind. If you can’t do that it’s useless to just focus your mind on the breath. It’s meaningless. The main thing is to increase the positive potentials that are in your mindstream. That’s called meditation.”

One of H. E. Choden Rinpoche’s final wishes was to build a monastery in Pharphing, Nepal to house his many monks to study Buddhadharma and be the epicenter for the study of the Five Branches of Knowledge. It was Rinpoche’s express belief that the Five Branches could offer many benefits to all humanity. The proposed monastery would house over 100 monks and be a place for all student practitioners to come to study and practice with Rinpoche’s sangha of monks.