My very dear one,
I was very happy to meet you this time and spend time with you at the restaurant. I had hoped to meet with you at home, but it did not happen that way.

About the lam-rim: after you study Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand completely two or three times to gain a general understanding, you will have the correct background for any specific meditation. Then on the basis of daily meditation on guru devotion, until it is stable—seeing all gurus as buddhas and all buddhas as guru from your side—meditate on the basis of Guru Puja, Six-session Guru Yoga or Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga. Meditate for five months on the first scope, for three months on the middle scope, and for one month and one hour on the higher scope of bodhicitta.

Meditate on emptiness every day using the Heart Sutra or if you are doing a sadhana, meditate on emptiness at the time of the dharmakaya. You can read or use many different texts—mahamudra or others—for emptiness meditation, but the Heart Sutra is good, a basic Buddhist practice. With familiarity you will no longer need the words of the texts; the words are to plant imprints on the mind.

Daily recitation of the Heart Sutra is very good to purify the mind and guide you to enlightenment. With few words you can meditate, for example, the few words of the king of logic, dependent arising: the I is not truly existent because of dependent arising. These words show both conventional and ultimate truth; there are few words but they are very profound and sufficient to meditate on. With familiarity this is very rich. You can use any appropriate stanza, such as the emptiness verses from Guru Puja or any glance meditation text on lam-rim.

After you complete these months, then start again from the beginning until you achieve renunciation from all of samsara, then bodhicitta. Once you have realized any part of the path, you don’t need to spend as much time on that. So you don’t always do exactly the same thing.

For your quickest enlightenment, you should practice Yamantaka, Tara Cittamani and more Yamantaka. Try to realize Yamantaka’s nose! If you have not received the initiations, take the opportunity to receive them and study the commentaries well. These are the deities to be one with all the time. We call them “deity” but you should have the recognition of “guru.”

Regarding study, I don’t have a particular suggestion. Just learn from whatever opportunity is offered. From the beginning one thing must be clear, but you might have learned this already. Once we have taken any teachings—even one stanza or one mantra— with the recognition of guru/disciple, then that person becomes our guru. Then we should devote throughout our life. Ordinary people should devote according to the scriptures, the teachings of the Buddha, the valid scriptures of the Buddha, the pandits and yogis, etc. This is very important. This is the biggest decision in life, you can say. Depending on how it is done, we can either gain the greatest profit of enlightenment or the heaviest negative karma and the greatest suffering of the lowest hell. So as not to become messy about this point, it is the root of the path to enlightenment. It is essential to have this clear.

Normally you can still learn from someone, like listening to a lecturer, a professor. After sometime, if you think you can devote to that person, then you take them as your guru. In this way, you can be quickly liberated from samsara and reach enlightenment.

Please do the Thirty-five Buddhas practice with prostrations. This means reciting the names of each of the Thirty-five Buddhas three times, so you do approximately 100 prostrations each morning. Also do Vajrasattva practice each evening, with one mala of mantra recitation.

Here are the preliminary practices for you to do:

• Dorje Khadro: 40,000
• Refuge practice: 200,000
• Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga: 100,000
• Heart Sutra: 900
• Samayavajra: 100,000
• Tsa-tsas (Eight or Seven Medicine Buddhas, with or without Guru Shakyamuni) and Lama Tsongkhapa (the big one of Domo Geshe is best): 8,000

Not too many preliminary practices came out in numbers.

With love and prayers...