Practices
- 500,000: Refuge.
- 50,000: Tong-len with meditation and prayers. There are three different prayers.
- 50,000: Mandala offering.
- 200,000: Guru Yoga, based on Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga and counting migtsemas with meditation.
- 10,000: Water bowls.
One of the main practices for extensive purification, that is most powerful for collecting extensive merits and achieving realizations quickly, is to aim for 300 nyung-näs in this life.
The Highest Yoga Tantra deity that came out best for your practice is Chenrezig Gyalwa Gyatso.
Maybe you can attempt shi-nä sometime in the near future.
Effortful lamrim
- Two months: Guru Devotion. If you have never read lamrim, first read it from beginning to end. For you, it came out as the main lamrim, Happy Path, then you can also read Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, the Essence of Refined Gold, Manjushri’s Own Words and in the near future Lama Tsongkhapa’s Middle-Length Lamrim.
- Two months: Lower Path
- One month: Middle Path
- Five months: Bodhicitta
- Five months: Emptiness
This is for effortful experience once you have read the complete lamrim from beginning to end. Then try for the effortless experience of whichever realization you haven’t achieved. For example, train your mind in guru devotion, to have a stable realization seeing the guru 100 per cent as Buddha—not just for a few hours or days or weeks, but stable. Then train the mind in renunciation of this life and the next life, and bodhicitta. Every day do some emptiness meditation, even just for a few minutes, either by reading the Heart Sutra or any other teachings or stanzas, or by using the Four Analyses.
The conclusion is: life is very short and this is about one time that you have got a human rebirth, which is unbelievable, most unbelievably precious, so therefore you should train the mind to have some development and realization in the path. So this way either you have four realizations, or three, if not three then two, or at least one, or at least close to the realization then it is so easy to have realization in future lives.
To lead sentient beings from suffering, who have been suffering from beginningless rebirth and need to be free—for that you need to achieve enlightenment quickly so you can free sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to enlightenment quickly. For that, you need to achieve enlightenment quickly, so you need to practice the tantric path and the Highest Yoga Tantra deity, Gyalwa Gyatso. So, you can receive the initiation and do the retreat. Also, there is the great nearing retreat, the three-year retreat, that you can do in the future.
The minimum commitment for you is to read the lamrim prayer.
