End of Three Year Retreat

End of Three Year Retreat

Date Posted:
November 2009

Rinpoche gave the following advice to a student doing a three-year retreat, who had asked what to do at the end of the retreat.

My very dear one,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. Anything that you do with a bodhicitta motivation makes your life most meaningful, most beneficial for sentient beings, so numberless billions of thanks from the bottom of my heart.

I checked your questions. For the rest of your retreat do Guru Puja/Lama Chöpa Jorcho and recite the Sutra of Golden Light. It is extremely beneficial to read the Sutra of Golden Light. Please do Guru Puja combining Jorcho as extensively as possible. You can use His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s commentary. Expand the different meditations, making direct requests to the guru on your crown (from the end of Jorcho), with direct meditation on guru devotion, and expand the meditations from there.  

This doesn’t mean that each session you begin Lama Chöpa again, it just means that you do the practice as extensively as possible, and whereever you finished, you pick up from there, and continue it throughout the sessions. You can spend longer meditating and do very well.

For the last session of the day, do extensive dedications, such as King of Prayers, etc.

Regarding concluding your retreat, if your retreat was Great Gyalwa Gyatso retreat, the great three-year retreat, then you would have to do 100,000 fire pujas. It comes out best for you to do 2,000 Gyalwa Gyatso fire pujas, if you can. You can do a minimum of 1,000, but the best would be 2,000. This means you can do one (or more) fire pujas, and you offer each ingredient 1000 times to the deity. This means 1,000 handfuls (or pinches) of every substance offered, while reciting the mantras.

Having meditated on the lam-rim is what makes one’s life most productive. This is what makes your life so much closer to liberating numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering, which has no beginning, and not only that, brings you closer to enlightenment. Remember this every day and rejoice. You can spend time rejoicing in the seven limbs. This is very important to remember, particularly engaging in three-year retreat, meditating on the lam-rim, and, especially, bodhicitta is a great motivation.

With much love and prayers...