My very dear one,
You need to have the Kopan nuns recite the Amitayus Long Life Sutra (Tse Dö) 2,000 times.
You need to recite Amitayus Long Life Sutra once a day, or best is two or three times every single day. When you recite the Long Life Sutra it has the same benefits as reading all the Buddha’s teachings. Read the sutra once, twice or three times a day.
When you recite it, dedicate also for His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s long life and for all holy beings in the world, for the success of all their wishes to benefit others. Dedicate for all the Sangha, for their long life, and for all the benefactors of the Sangha and the teachings of Buddha. Dedicate for the Sangha’s long life and for all their wishes to succeed. Also dedicate for people who do good things in this world, for their long life and the success of their wishes, and dedicate for the evil beings—the butchers and so forth—that they meet Dharma and change their mind; that they stop creating negative karma and change their mind to bodhicitta, cherishing others. Of course, also dedicate for yourself and your family.
[In A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life] Shantideva said if we haven’t harmed others or treated others badly, then nobody will harm us or treat us badly.
[6: 42] Previously I must have caused similar harm
To other sentient beings.
Therefore is it right for this harm to be returned
To me who is the cause of injury to others.
This is very logical. If we didn’t harm others in the past, nobody will harm us now. What caused that person to harm us is our self-cherishing thought, and the result is that we receive harm now. Even if we never met that person who suddenly hurts us or who says something bad, every experience, bad or good, comes from karma.
It’s important to think about karma. To know more about karma, you can read this section in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.
Abandon negative karma and
Practice good karma;
This brings happiness to you and others.
This is why Dharma practice is so important in your life. Why your mother treated you like that is because you are experiencing the result of your karma of having treated another person in a similar way.
If we haven’t harmed others, then no-one can harm us. Karma is so powerful and also the object—the person we help—has incredible power. Due to the power of the object, the result in this life of any small or bad [action] is very strong. Regarding our parents, the kindness of our parents, we have to be very careful due to the power of object.
You can apologize to your mother from the heart, to make her happy. Then any mantra you do, any practice you do, you can dedicate for her.
Buddha explained in the teachings that there are three types of karma:
- Create the cause in this life and experience result in this life.
- Create the cause in this life and experience the result in the next life.
- Create the cause in this life and experience the result after many lifetimes.
Starting with our parents, then even more powerful than this is the Sangha—numberless Sangha, including arhats who are free from samsara. One bodhisattva is a more powerful object than the Sangha. It is said in the teachings that if we look at a bodhisattva with a calm, devotional mind we create more merit than having offered our eyes to the sentient beings of the three realms—the desire realm, form realm and formless realm. One buddha is a more powerful object than a bodhisattva, and more powerful than a buddha is our guru. Our guru is a more powerful object than numberless buddhas. Our guru is someone with whom we have a guru-diciple relationship.
So any karma, any small service or respect done to our parents up to our guru is so powerful and we will experience the result in this life. In the same way, any small harm or disrespect we do to our parents up to our guru, we will experience the result in this life. That is just the start, then after the death time we will spend uncountable eons in the hell realms, then the preta realms, then the animal realms, particularly the animal realms. Not only will we experience the most unbearable suffering in samsara, but we will experience it for an unimaginable amount of time. Not only that, we will be reborn there again and again.
Whatever unpleasant thing we are experiencing came from our own mind; it is merely labeled by our own mind. Even that is related to attachment or the self-cherishing thought, so for some small comfort of this life we create this cause for unbelievable suffering, besides no ultimate happiness, liberation, enlightenment. So from a Dharma point of view this is totally the worst thing.
Among the human dharmas, the activities of general human beings, beating our own parents is the worst thing we can do. It is possible that this is not us, that something has entered our body and mind and made us beat them. To think like this is very good psychology, “This is not me; something made me do it.”
There is a story from one sutra about a clay maker boy. He wanted to do the same business as his father, who got jewels from the ocean but then drowned. The boy’s mother was concerned that her son would also drown if he did the same business, so she made a business with grass. The son sold the grass and offered the money to his mother.
He got four golden coins and gave these to his mother. This happened four times, that he gave four golden coins to his mother. Then he found out that in the past his father had actually worked on the ocean getting jewels, so the son wanted to go and do this as well. The mother grabbed the son’s feet and begged him not to leave, but the son actually beat his mother and left.
As the son went on the ocean, he saw an island with palaces and so many enjoyments, many deva girls, who all asked him to stay there with them, but he didn’t listen and left. Later he saw another island with the same enjoyments and many deva girls asking him to stay, but he went on. Then he saw two more islands that were similar, but he left each one.
Then he saw an island with a black iron fence around it and one man on the island whose head was being cut by a giant wheel. The wheel was turning and cutting the man’s head. The son heard a karmic voice from the sky saying that the wheel was going to transfer onto his head. The son generated bodhicitta thinking, “May I experience this pain for all others who also experience this pain.” Immediately the wheel left from above his head, because of the power of bodhicitta.
So the many enjoyments that he saw on the previous four islands were the result of having offered the gold coins to his mother four times. The last island that he saw was the result of him hitting his mother. This story is to prove the benefits of cherishing others and the shortcomings of the self-cherishing thought.
A very important key is that any service you can do for your parents you must do. You can bring the cause of happiness to other sentient beings from that.
If you are able to live one year longer, now that you understand karma, it’s an incredible opportunity to help your parents but it can be helping anyone, even insects. So you must do this and if you can live longer to help others, to benefit others, then it’s worthwhile for you to live.
When you do Amitayus meditation, visualize nectar entering your body, so your body is completely clear, like switching on a light in a dark room. Think your body is in the nature of light, totally clean, like crystal, and your life is prolonged. Think you receive all the qualities of Amitayus —omniscience, compassion for all beings and perfect power to benefit them. Do this meditation. You need to take Amitayus long-life initiation.
You also need to have 7,000 long-life tsa tsas made. Tsa tsas might be hard for you to make, so you could develop 7,000 long-life photos, but tsa tsas are better due to the number of atoms of the holy body. [If you develop photos] you can give the pictures to people or to centers or they can be put inside holy objects. Or you can put them on a table and go around the holy objects, purifying and creating the cause of enlightenment. [Read more here.]
Liberate animals in danger of being killed one hundred times. You can even liberate insects or fishing worms. First take them around holy objects; carry them around the holy objects before liberating them. [Find links to Rinpoche's book, Liberating Animals, in the FPMT Catalogue.]
Recite the mantra of Vajrapani Garuda Hayagriva [the Threefold Wrathful Ones.]
