Ngondro Gar Rules

Practice content

Ngondro Gar is a community dedicated to Ngondro practice, therefore only Ngondro practice should be counted as your total practice hours.

Reporting practice hours

Please login your account on the Ngondro Gar website to report your practice hours in the previous month before the 3rd of each month. If you fail to report your practice hours for 12 consecutive months, your NDG account will be suspended.  

Rules for calculation of retreating hours

You can accumulate practice hours in retreat, but it would have to be a Ngondro retreat.  The practice hour for retreat on other practices cannot be counted as your NDG practice hours.

Here are the rules for that:

  • If you do retreat for less than 7 days, you count the hours you have actually practiced.
  • If you do retreat for 7 consecutive days that has 4 sessions and over 8 hours of practice per day, you can count all 24 hours of the 7-day period, so that is 168 hours.
  • The 24-hour per day option is ONLY for 7 days per year. If you do a retreat for longer, then after the 7 days, you can only count the actual hours you practice. Example: for a 10-day retreat, you would count 7 days x 24 hours (168) plus the actual hours you practice in the additional 3 days. So, 168 hours + 3 days of actual hours. 

Means of communication

Email is the main means of communication in NDG. And it is your responsibility to provide an accurate and reachable email address.

Individual instructor may use social media such as Whatsapp, Wechat alike to enhance the communication between participant and instructor, but not all instructors follow such practices.  And we shouldn’t expect all instructors to do so. 

The administration team of NDG does not nor authorize anyone to organize any chat group on any social media platform.  Please verify with the administration team at [email protected] if you receive such invitations. 

Secrecy in the Vajrayana

Rinpoche wrote in the beginning of Social Media Guidelines for so-called Vajrayana Students:

“It’s important to maintain secrecy in the Vajrayana. The Vajrayana is called ‘the secret mantra yana’ because it is intended to be practiced in secrecy.”

Please respect the secrecy of Ngondro Gar and do not share any information within Ngondro Gar to friends who are not in the Gar.  Yes, some of the information might be easily found on Internet these days, but it is you samaya and practice to safeguard this secrecy.