My most dear, most kind, precious wish-fulfilling one,
Please find below my advice for your life practice. Your deity is Most Secret Hayagriva. Also, do the following:
- 100,000 refuge
- 10,000 four immeasurable thoughts
- 110,000 Vajrasattva mantras
- 300 nyung näs. This is your main preliminary practice.
So many people have done 100 nyung näs; it’s very common. You should do 300. Reciting the six-syllable mantra, OM MANI PADME HUM, purifies negative karma and collects extensive merit. You can count the drops of the Pacific Ocean, the drops of rainfall and snowfall and the dust of the earth, but the merit of reciting one mantra is far more than that. It’s unbelievable. With a bodhicitta motivation there are skies of merit, and in particular, you then generate compassion to all sentient beings.
Lamrim Chenmo should be your main lamrim text. Study it four times. For effortful experience of the lamrim meditations:
- Guru devotion: five months
- Path of the lower capable being: five months
- Path of the middle path being: two months
- Bodhicitta: four months
- Emptiness: four months
Do this five times, then start effortless experience.
Do [effortful] meditation on guru devotion, no matter how many months or years it takes, until you get a stable realization that all the gurus are buddha and all the buddhas are the guru. If that happens for one or two days then disappears, it is the blessing of the guru, not the actual realization.
With that, then do more meditation on the path of the lower capable being, from perfect human rebirth up to karma. You don’t have to do the entire list of meditations in one day; you can do them gradually, step by step. Normally, it takes time, many months or years. Continue doing this until you have the effortless realization.
Putting effort like that is very important. This life’s happiness is not important, and you have to switch. Now you think that this life’s happiness is important, not future lives. Regarding the happiness of this life and the happiness of future lives, this life’s happiness is not important but the future lives’ happiness is very important. When the mind is totally clear about this, then our attachment, anger and so many problems—hundreds, thousands of problems—get stopped. The less you’re concerned about the happiness of this life and the more you’re concerned about the next life, the more your actions become Dharma. Your actions become only Dharma if you totally renounce attachment to this life.
The rest of the day, do everything—eat, walk, sleep and so forth—as much as possible with bodhicitta, for the happiness of sentient beings, to free them from the oceans of samsaric suffering.
Read the Diamond Cutter Sutra, then the Golden Light Sutra, and then the Diamond Cutter Sutra. Like that, go on until you die.
You are most unbelievably lucky to be able to do this, because you create skies of merit, good luck, by reading the Diamond Cutter Sutra. Even with the intention and without reading it, you get merit equal to numberless sentient beings having made charity of their body in the morning, afternoon and evening. You are unbelievably lucky. In one day the merit is just unbelievable and is preparation for quickly realizing emptiness. With the direct perception of emptiness, you cease delusions and karma, become free from true suffering and achieve nirvana, the blissful state of peace. With bodhicitta, you can achieve full enlightenment, and then you are able to free the numberless sentient beings from gross and subtle obscurations and bring them to the peerless happiness of full enlightenment, buddhahood.
Reciting the Golden Light Sutra brings so much peace in the world and your country and gives power to the leader of your country so that other countries can’t attack. It also brings prosperity to the country where you are and brings healing to all the sick people. It benefits all sentient beings, freeing them from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bringing them to enlightenment. It causes you to never ever be reborn in the lower realms and to achieve enlightenment quickly.
Thank you very much.
With much love and prayers...