The most important thing you can do in your life is to practice the lamrim; that’s the most important thing to focus on. But that doesn’t mean only practicing meditation.

Your lamrim practice should be based upon devoting yourself correctly to your virtuous friend, who is the most important person in your life. Proper guru devotion is more important than anything else. On the basis of this you can receive all the realizations of the path and complete enlightenment; without guru devotion or practicing it incorrectly will create only obstacles and suffering.

Training your mind step-by-step in the three principal aspects of the path and later, if you can, secret mantra, is like building an inner stupa, or an inner buddha statue.

However, those, yourself included, who can’t meditate or concentrate—especially those who don’t meditate on the path, who don’t know Dharma or know it only intellectually, who are unable to generate pure motivation before engaging in daily life activities, or who when doing their daily prayers and practices spend less time on that than anything else—should build holy objects. (The amount of time we spend on activities like eating, watching TV, sleeping and so forth, which we do so well, is much greater than the time we put into our Dharma practice.) Building holy objects is a very powerful way for such people to accumulate much merit and purify many obscurations and gives them and unbelievable opportunity to gain realizations of the path and attain liberation and enlightenment.

Since the opportunity to create virtue and good karma, the cause of even temporary happiness, is extremely rare, those who don’t know any prayers or who don’t put the prayers they know into practice should keep in mind as purely as possible that building holy objects such as stupas, buddha statues and prayer wheels is a very powerful form of practice. Finally, if you build a buddha statue, it should be incredibly beautiful and inspiring.