Good morning, good afternoon, maybe good night! Thank you very much; thank you so much for your prayers for me, for sentient beings, for Buddha, from where all sentient beings receive their happiness.

When we say “happiness,” we should not think only about temporary happiness, samsaric happiness. Don't think that. We must think about ultimate happiness, liberation from samsara forever; the peerless happiness of full enlightenment.

So when I recite the long version of the Six Session Guru Yoga, instead of “happiness” I say “enlightenment,” full enlightenment, the cause of enlightenment. I change that word because it helps my mind to think of the highest happiness, true happiness. Just to say “happiness” normally means temporary happiness; it makes us think of temporary happiness, but we have had temporary happiness numberless times from beginningless rebirths.

Why we have the center is to have happiness for sentient beings—to increase, to develop happiness for sentient beings.

To help sentient beings have a perfect human rebirth in the next life, to be born in a perfect human body, to achieve all that happiness, to have the means of living, the conditions—all that happiness needs pure morality. We need preliminary practice in our past life and pure morality. Even just to be reborn as a human being, without talking about having the perfect human rebirth, we need pure morality. We need that and we also need not just an ordinary human body, but a perfect human rebirth, to meet Buddhadharma, to follow Buddhadharma. Only that gives us the opportunity to be guided by the perfectly qualified guru.

So we need pure morality and charity, and to dedicate the merits to receive a precious human body which has all the opportunities, and to practice the graduated path of the lower capable being, including refuge, so that in the next life we are able to meet the Dharma and be guided by the perfectly qualified guru. It may not be necessary to have refuge just to be reborn as an ordinary human being, but to meet Dharma again and to be guided by the guru and so forth, we should have refuge as a cause, as well as pure morality. So you see there is a need for Buddhism in order for sentient beings to achieve happiness in future lifetimes, and even to receive a perfect human rebirth.

To achieve ultimate happiness, liberation from samsara, we need to achieve the fundamental path of great insight—lhag-tong, special insight. Then special concentration, shamatha. That depends on the higher training of morality, so we need the graduated path of the middle capable being, the basic path.

To achieve liberation from the oceans of samsaric suffering forever, we need to achieve direct perception of emptiness which directly ceases the seed of delusions. So for that we need special insight, the wisdom which realizes emptiness, unified with shamatha, the higher training in concentration, and that depends on the higher training in pure morality. So you can see that we need Buddhism to bring sentient beings to ultimate happiness.

Then to bring sentient beings to full enlightenment, the basic path, the root, is bodhicitta. The root of the Mahayana path to enlightenment is bodhicitta, and that depends on great compassion to all sentient beings. So in order to generate great compassion for all sentient beings, first we have to realize our own samsara, our own deep oceans of samsaric suffering. Then it is very easy to generate real compassion for others, otherwise our compassion is very limited, it is just on our lips. Our compassion is very limited, very small compassion.

[Ven. Roger interrupts to say that the plane is leaving. Rinpoche laughs and leaves to catch the plane to Hong Kong.]