Degeneration of Guru Devotion

Degeneration of Guru Devotion

Date of Advice:
February 2015
Date Posted:
September 2015

A student wrote to Rinpoche confessing that he had let his practice of guru devotion lapse. 

My very dear one,
How are you? Thank you very much for your kind letter, which I received a long time ago.

I’m very happy with what you have discovered, the mistakes and degeneration. We achieve enlightenment through discovering our mistakes and through that there is progression, thus we can cease the obscurations and complete the realizations. Then we can free the numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to peerless happiness, the state of omniscience. Therefore, I thank you for discovering this. It is very good.

Your life can be like the sun shining in this world, beneficial for sentient beings. Otherwise your life will be like nighttime, with no sun, no stars, gloomy, and you will be surrounded by tigers and dangerous animals that attack you. Like that, there will be no way to escape.

Thank you very much. Please continue your life like the sun shining at the dawn time, thus your life will develop and become more and more beneficial for sentient beings, with bodhicitta and guru devotion, seeing one guru as all the buddhas from your heart. Of course it doesn’t mean that I’m a buddha. It means you have the realization that one guru is all the buddhas and one buddha is all the gurus, however many gurus you have. Thank you very much.

With much love and prayers,