This four year course offers a great opportunity for Buddhist practitioners. It is a collaboration between fourteen FPMT Buddhist centers including Shantideva Center New York (USA), Jamyang Buddhist Centre Leeds (UK), Institut Vajrayogini in Marzens (FR), Yeshin Norbu in Stockholm (Swe) and Maitreya Instituut (NL) and therefore the course is attended by an international group of Buddhist practitioners.

The course is given in English, with French translation, online via Zoom. Recordings of both the teachings and meditations are made available to students after each session. It isn’t necessary to be available every week to join each session live; you can catch up in your own time through the recordings. If you’re enrolling later on in the course, it is possible to request access to recordings of previous classes.

• Provides students with long term, in-depth support in their meditative development:

• Authentic traditional instructions, in contemporary language

• A comprehensive set of meditation tools for students to transform their knowledge of the Dharma into personal experience.

• Traditional and modern theories on supplementary topics such as models of healthy psychological and spiritual development, ritual, narrative, ethics, and social engagement.

• An international community of meditators, online and live.

IDMT Year Four: Practical details

Year Four will have 3 terms. 

Term 1: September 5th to November 28th 2026

Term 2: February 6th to April 17th 2027

Term 3: May 1st to July 3rd 2027

If you are starting as a new student in year 4, don’t worry. You will get some preparatory advice on what previous recordings to have a listen to. Alternatively you may wish to join the new Ngondro Lam Rim Meditation course for 2 years before starting In Depth Meditation Training. They are designed to be complementary.

IDMT Year Four: The Vajra Ground: Mahamudra and Kriya Tantra

In this culminating fourth year of our journey, our path turns inward to the mind itself—its empty, luminous nature—and outward to the transformative methods of tantra, where the naturally pure nature of our perception is recognized as the very ground of awakening. As always, the year will start with generating the mind of awakening, using evocative instructions ranging from Langri Thangpa to Nāgārjuna and Lord Buddha in the famous Bodhisattvapiṭaka. This mind generation we’ll cultivate through the four immeasurable thoughts and the support of calm abiding. Illuminated by the life stories of the masters of the Gelug Mahāmudrā lineage and beyond, we’ll explore its roots in the history of the early Indian Mahāsiddhas, such as Saraha and Tilopa, through the Kagyü master Gampopa’s and Je Tsongkhapa’s Mañjuśrī lineage up to Paṇchen Losang Chökyi Gyaltsen’s Highway of the Conquerors and its perspective on this practice. In Sūtra Mahāmudrā we will practice resting attention in the empty nature of awareness, recognizing its clarity and openness as inseparable.

Kriyā Tantra offers a complementary method. Rather than suppress the ordinary, narrow self-narrative that we impose on ourselves and our world, it substitutes for it an extraordinary perspective of pure view. Occasionally, by way of introduction, we’ll also taste practices from the higher tantras—glimpsing how afflictive emotions can be met as innate wisdom, and how the dissolution of the death process opens onto the innate mind of clear light. The structured practices of generation and recitation become a rehearsal for transformation, training perception to meet appearances as pure. These methods rest on a relationship. We will therefore examine the practice of guru devotion candidly—both as the means by which the lineage’s realization is transmitted and as a practice with real pitfalls, requiring discernment as much as trust. Through the Ganden Lha Gyāma, the Yoga of the inseparability of guru and Avalokiteśvara, and supporting sādhanas, devotion is approached not as deference but as the ethical road toward the state of Vajradhara: the full integration of wisdom and method.

This final year is an invitation to let realization ripen into a way of being. Grounded in bodhicitta and the four immeasurables, sustained by the preliminary practices, and held by the strength of community, we learn to meet the mind without grasping and to meet the world as pure appearance. Our aim is not to accumulate practices, but to bring the path to maturity—wisdom and compassion no longer cultivated separately, but lived as one.

Student’s interests & profile

• An interest in deepening your knowledge about and your practice in (Buddhist) meditation

• Previous experience in a form of meditation either in retreats or other courses

• A basic understanding of Mahayana Buddhism is a prerequisite, you do not need to be a (Mahayana) Buddhist 

• Experience of studying Buddhism previously for example the FPMT study programmes such as Discovering Buddhism, Exploring Buddhism or FPMT Basic Programme.

Teacher: Venerable Losang Gendun

Venerable Losang Gendun has spent nearly four decades in Buddhist practice and has lived as a fully ordained Bhikshu in the Tibetan tradition for the past twenty years. Before taking robes, he worked across a wide range of fields — palliative care, technology, refugee organizations, and management — a breadth of human experience that continues to inform his teaching.

His formal training spans ten years of study in monasteries across France, India, Nepal, and Myanmar, complemented by more than four years in solitary retreat engaging deeply with Tibetan sutra and tantra, as well as the Burmese Theravāda Forest Tradition.

For the past eighteen years, Ven. Gendun has taught Buddhist philosophy, psychology, and meditation to students around the world. He serves the vision of H.H. the Dalai Lama and Lama Zopa Rinpoche as a teacher within the FPMT (Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition), and is a member of Mind & Life Europe, a multidisciplinary initiative bringing together scientists and contemplative practitioners to investigate the nature of mind and experience.

In 2023, Ven. Gendun founded The Buddha Project — a long-term initiative offering sustained guidance for serious meditators, fostering dialogue between Buddhist traditions, supporting scientific research into contemplative practice, and exploring the intersection of Dharma and the arts.

If you want to hear Ven. Gendun’s story in his own voice, listen to the Wisdom Podcast.

Recommended Donations:

Generosity is one of the cornerstones of the Buddhist path. With your donation we support our teachers in their cost of living and we keep our centre going, for the benefit of all sentient beings.

As the course is a collaboration with other FPMT centres it is not possible to offer this as part of our Jamyang Leeds membership programme.

• The recommended donation per calendar month is £45.

• If you are able to practice generosity and sponsor other students we recommend £58 per calendar month.

• If you are on a reduced income it is £31 per calendar month.

There is also the options to donate annually.

If none of the above options are affordable please do still register, we never turn anyone away from the Dharma for financial reasons and we can agree a donation that is affordable for you right now. Please email Marie-Odile our IDMT Coordinator idmt@jamyangleeds.co.uk if you would like to chat.

To complement FPMT In Depth Meditation Training course there will also be:

• Meditation Retreats – 5 annual retreats on vipassana, compassion, and mahamudra, offered both live at one of the centers and online. There are also opportunities to do Home Retreats in your own time supported by recordings from the Annual retreats. More details about retreats can be found on The Buddha Project website

• A new 2 year Ngondro Lam Rim Meditation course starting September 2026. More details can be found here

This meditation course is part of The Buddha Project led by Venerable Losang Gendun, a branch of which is the Buddha Research Project, an on-going collaboration between Buddhist contemplatives and scientific researchers from the universities of Nîmes and Lausanne, and the Mind & Life organization (founded by neuroscientist Francesco Varela in collaboration with His Holiness the Dalai Lama). It is aimed at investigating transformative processes in long-term meditators, regarding such topics as mental-health, perception, and self-transcendence. For the initial research it has been granted a European Varela Award. You can find out more about the Buddha Project here