A huge thank you all who joined us in NYC and Boston for our Sounds of Liberation Benefit concerts and all of you who follow our updates on our social platforms here and Kirtan Wallah Foundation.
On October 3 and 5, three world-renowned devotional musicians reunited in song to help rebuild an earthquake-ravaged sacred site in Kathmandu. Krishna Das will share the stage with Ani Choying Drolma, hailed by CNN as “Nepal’s rock star nun”, and Tibetan chant master Lama Tenzin Sangpo for this year’s Sounds of Liberation
All three share powerful karmic links with the event’s beneficiary, Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling monastery in Nepal (aka the “White Monastery”), home of Tibetan Buddhist spiritual master Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, and its community of monks, nuns and laypeople.
The devastating Nepal earthquake of 2015 claimed the lives of some 9,000 people, laying waste to the entire region. Among the damaged sacred sites was the White Monastery, founded in the 1970s by Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche.
Many monks, nuns and other community members still lack safe living quarters and facilities, and the population of the monastery and nunnery has nearly doubled since the 2015 earthquake. This year’s concert will help finance the much-needed expansion of monks’ quarters, the reconstruction of the main temple at Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling, and the rebuilding of the three-year nun’s retreat at Nagi Gompa.
A longtime student of Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, Krishna Das organized the first SOUNDS OF LIBERATION concert in New York in 2015, together with Lama Tenzin Sangpo. A jubilant audience joined Krishna Das and Lama Tenzin to hear and chant exquisitely beautiful kirtans and mantras. That concert started a yearly tradition of benefit concerts.
This year Krishna Das on behalf of the Kirtan Wallah Foundation and Lama Tenzin are joined again by Ani Choying, a Buddhist nun with 16 albums to her credit. Ani Choying has deep ties to the area around the White Monastery. The monastery’s founder, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, was her root teacher when she first became a nun, and now she is a student of Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche. She describes Lama Tenzin as “a Dharma brother I’ve known since my first day of monastic life.”
This is a wonderful opportunity for all of us to raise funds for an institution that’s helping so many people.
It’s also an opportunity to make a statement about how all the different spiritual paths are related and blend into each other.”
~ Krishna Das
Together we can help each other by preserving the places of deep practice such as the monasteries and nunneries in Nepal benefited by your attendance at the Sounds of Liberation concerts in New York and Boston this past week. A lot of work is of course done behind the scenes to pull these types of events together so we acknowledge them and those in this photo. L-R: Arjun Bruggeman, Mark Egan, Steve Gorn, Krishna Das, Nina Rao, Patti Pearce, Jack Freudenheim, Ani Choying, Selina, Shyam Nepali, John McDowell, Lama Tenzin, Todd Isler, Noah Hoffeld.
