Tibetan Buddhist Practice Dates

Tibetan Buddhist Practice Dates

This application is a calendar that displays the recommended dates for various Tibetan Buddhist practices and several Tibetan Buddhist holidays. These dates can be displayed or downloaded as an .ics file. The downloaded .ics file only contains dates for those practices that are selected in the left area of the screen.

The practice date calendar application is available at https://practicedates.christian-steinert.de

The main motivation for programming this calendar was to offer a download feature of all dates as an .ics file so that these dates can be imported easily into standard appointment calendar applications.

Content of the calendar

You can click on any calendar event to see the corresponding Tibetan date for that day. Currently the following dates are calculated based on the Tibetan calendar system:

  • The following four Buddha days:
    • Day of Miracles (Chötrul Düchen) on day 15 of the 1st Tibetan month
    • Buddha’s Birth, Enlightenment and Paranirvana (Saka Dawa Düchen) on day 15 of the 4th Tibetan month
    • Buddha’s first teaching (Chökhor Düchen) on day 4 of the 6th Tibetan month
    • Buddha’s descent from Tushita after the Buddha had taught the Dharma to his mother there (Lhabab Düchen) on the 22nd day of the 9th Tibetan month
  • Full moon and new moon of each month (15th and 30th day of each Tibetan month)
  • Tsog days (10th and 25th of each Tibetan month)
  • Tara practice days (recommended by Lama Zopa Rinpoche on the 8th of each Tibetan month)
  • Medicine Buddha practice days (recommended by Lama Zopa Rinpoche on the 8th or 15th of each Tibetan month)
  • Days that are particularly powerful for taking precepts: the four Buddha days mentioned above, the first 15 days of each Tibetan year (the 15 ‘Miracle Days’ that culminate in the Day of Miracles/Chötrul Düchen), full moon days, new moon days, and the 8th day of each Tibetan month.
    Note: days of solar and lunar eclipses are also considered to be very powerful for taking precepts but those are not included in this calendar
  • Protector Pujas (recommended by Lama Zopa Rinpoche on the 29th of each Tibetan month)
  • Other dates:
    • Tibetan new year (Losar) – the 1st day of a new Tibetan year
    • Guru Rinpoche Universal Prayer Day (Dzamling Chi Sang, also called ‘Universal incense day’). Commemoration of the taming of local Tibetan deities by Padmasambhava and the founding of Samye Monastery on the 15th day of the 5th Tibetan month.
    • Je Tsonkhapa’s parinirvana (Ganden Ngamchö) on the 25th day of the 10th Tibetan month
    • Birthday of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama on the 6th of July according to the modern Western calendar


The Tibetan calendar sometimes has doubled days (i.e., two successive days with the same day number) and missing days (i.e., a skipped day number). If a date is doubled then the respective practices are shown for the second day with that day number. If a date is missing then the respective practices are shown on the previous day before the Tibetan date that is skipped.

The Tibetan calendar sometimes also has doubled months. If a month is doubled then any of the four Buddha that falls into such a doubled month is shown on the first of the two Tibetan months with the same number.

Source code of this application

This application is open source under GPL v3. You can find the source code at https://github.com/christiansteinert/TibetanBuddhistPracticeDates.

More extensive calendars by the FPMT

For a more extensive calendar which also lists favorable and unfavorable days, fire puja dates and other things, see also the FPMT calendar of dharma dates at https://fpmt.org/media/resources/dharma-dates/.

The Liberation Prison Project also publishes a calendar in printed and PDF format that contains additional details. Please consider supporting them by buying their printed or PDF-based calendar at https://liberationprisonproject.org/support-us/request-calendar/.