They were ready. After 30 minutes of silent meditation, nearly 100 students of Buddhism trained their eyes on the middle-aged storyteller, cancer survivor, and Buddhist sitting before them.

Laura Simms, the speaker at a recent Tuesday night dharma gathering at the Shambhala Meditation Center at 118 W. 22nd St., sat cross legged on a platform raised slightly above her audience. Most of the devotees, both first-timers to the center and longtime Buddhists, sat comfortably on rounded floor cushions placed in neat rows on the wooden floor. As the charismatic teacher leaned into the microphone, she had one message in mind: Never forget the Hinayana.

In the Buddhist tradition of progressive revelation, “Buddha’s first presentation, the Hinayana, was the ‘lesser vehicle,” Simms explained. Ignored in favor of the later teachings, the Mahayana and Vajrayana, it was easy to forget that the early teachings remained the basis of Buddhism, she said.

Moving naturally into professional storyteller mode, Simms, author, performer and leader of storytelling workshops, recalled her days in the 1970s studying with the Shambhala Center’s founder — Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Part way through her three month study session in an isolated tent camp, Simms recalled, her class was ready to begin learning the Vajrayana, the highest Buddhist teachings. “The night before we were going to learn the Vajrayana,” she said, “people slept. Suddenly, at 2 a.m., the gong rang. We were woken up to hear an important teaching.” In the cold early morning, Simms and all of her classmates assembled in the main tent. There, the Rinpoche greeted them with only four words, before sending them back to bed.

As college students to senior citizens listened intently, waiting for the ultimate teaching, Simms let her words hang in the air.

“Never forget the Hinayana.”

On hearing the story, some listeners smiled, nodding their heads in recognition and others jotted notes on small pads of paper, as Simms explained the importance of Buddhism’s most basic teachings, the entrance to Buddhist practice.

The basis of the Hinayana, she explained, is the sitting practice, the meditation that all adherents practice, from the gurus in Tibet to the novice practitioners now sitting before her in a 6th floor apartment in Chelsea. Meditation, she said, is the key to mindfulness, to becoming aware of one’s thoughts and emotions.

“It is the idea that we can question how we perceive the world,” she said.

Part of this shift in perception is the recognition that everyone suffers, she said. Through Buddhist practice, one must recognize others’ pain as well as one’s own.

“We see the force of our own suffering and see others involved in the same process,” she said. “We see people with compassion.”

Determined not to give her audience any excuse to let their attention wane, she turned the conversation to her own struggle with cancer. Looking professional but comfortable in a black jacket over a red silk shell and a long black skirt, it was hard to imagine Simms enduring grueling radiation treatments.

It was Buddhist teachings that helped her face her illness, she told the audience. She endured the treatments during the three months that a Tibetan guru coincidentally ended up living in her home.

One might think the guru’s presence would have been a blessing, and in many ways it was, Simms said. “But you don’t know how distressing it is when you want to feel sorry for yourself to have an enlightened person always present and always cheerful,” she quipped.

Through her own struggles, Simms said, she discovered what it meant to learn from the Hinayana. “The first teaching of Buddha deals with investigating ourselves, knowing the origins of suffering,” she said.

Simms’ message rang true to a number of students present. Ann Kenan, 33, formerly an Episcopalian, found Buddhism through her work as a yoga teacher. After learning yoga, she began to meditate and that led her to seek out further Buddhist teachings, as Simms suggested it would.

Of the progression from yoga to meditation to Buddhism, Kenan said, “It’s all built on top of each other.”