Letter to Martha Stewart

Letter to Martha Stewart

Date Posted:
December 2005

Rinpoche sent the following letter to the American celebrity, Martha Stewart, when she was in prison.

My very dear Martha,
I hope you are doing well and that you are happy. You can learn a lot from your present situation by looking at it in a positive way.

Normally, you don’t have the opportunity to learn this, by not being in such a situation. Especially, you can learn to have courage and develop your full potential. In this way, one can overcome all sufferings and their causes, including the cycle of birth, death, old age, and sickness. One can achieve peerless happiness and full enlightenment. Not only that, one can cause so many other living beings to have perfect happiness and to bring them from happiness to happiness, to the peerless happiness of full enlightenment, by liberating them from all the sufferings of cyclic existence – samsara – including the causes of negative emotional thoughts and their actions – karma.

I have seen you so many times on TV and thought that I would like to send you some meditation books for you to read in prison, as you have a lot of time to analyze things, to look within yourself, to study your life, to explore change, and to achieve freedom, inner freedom, which is most important, because then you have freedom over all external things.

At other times, your life must be extremely busy, so you may not have much time to really meditate or analyze. So, this situation you are in now is like when one is alone in retreat, where one has space to think about one’s life, qualities, mistakes, and one can see deeper into one’s own life. Through that, one can benefit others more deeply and bring more peace and happiness to others.

My name is Lawudo Lama; usually people call me Lama Zopa. I bear the name of an incarnate lama. I guess this is from some merit, positive actions, committed in past lives, and this is the result. I was born in the Himalayan Mountains, near Mount Everest. That’s why I am sending you this picture of Mount Everest. Hopefully, one day you can visit there; it is a totally different world.

On one side of Mount Everest is Nepal and on the other side is Tibet. In ancient times, many great yogis achieved high attainments in these places. Many holy beings meditated in the caves in these areas and were liberated there.

Liberation does not mean you become nothingness, it does not mean that you disappear. Not only does your body not disappear but your mind also does not disappear. It does not mean that your mind becomes non-existent; it is not like that.

Liberation means one achieves total control over one’s body and mind, not only the gross body and mind but even the extremely subtle ones. One is free from all the gross and subtle defilements, wrong concepts, and delusions and their actions – karma. One is liberated from the sufferings of rebirth, old age, sickness, and death, as well as from the suffering of pain and the suffering of change – the latter of which is temporal, samsaric pleasures, but which are derived from delusion and karma, whose nature is only suffering. If you analyze samsaric pleasures you discover that they are only suffering, just like a hallucination, they appear as pleasure through our ignorance. Not only that, you become liberated totally from the aggregates (the body and mind), whose nature is suffering, because they are contaminated by the seed of delusion. This seed is the foundation for the sufferings of change and pain.

I try to help a little bit in the world, teaching meditations on the nature of phenomena and cause and effect, showing which causes come from which effects. From positive causes come happiness and from negative causes come suffering. I try to emphasize ethics and also teach compassion in order to alleviate the suffering of living beings, and to bring them ultimate, everlasting, peerless full enlightenment, the completely liberated state, when we have eliminated all the mistakes of mind, gross and subtle, and have a complete, full understanding, and all realizations. With this one is able to do perfect work for so many living beings and bring them perfect, peerless bliss and full enlightenment.

Please enjoy life with a good heart and have a liberating and enlightening journey with these books.

With much love and prayers...