Preliminary Practices

Preliminary Practices

Date Posted:
December 2012

A compilation of snippets of advice from Rinpoche.

The Golden Light Sutra:
Try to read it once every week, so this means you read a little every day and in this way complete one recitation every week. Continue this for your whole life. You will see how unbelievably beneficial this is; by reading it you will read about the unbelievable benefits. This is an unbelievable, most precious teaching that brings you to enlightenment in such a quick way. It is unimaginable, unimaginable. You can purify and collect so much merit and liberate the numberless sentient beings from the oceans of suffering and bring to them to enlightenment.

Tong-len:
This is a special practice of taking and giving, a special bodhicitta practice. This is taking all sentient beings’ sufferings and causes and giving all one’s merits to others. This practice is like being a Dharma Olympic hero; this is an extremely special powerful way to practice bodhicitta.

This is a most powerful way to practice, and you definitely collect extensive merits. Every time you do this practice it brings you closer to enlightenment and by the way, closer to liberation from samsara and closer to liberating the numberless beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and closer to bringing to enlightenment the numberless hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, human beings, suras, asuras and intermediate state beings.

Please read the section on bodhicitta, exchanging yourself and others, in the lam-rim, to understand more.

The Diamond Cutter Sutra:
This practice is unbelievably, unbelievably, unbelievably beneficial. Please read some of the benefits. If you can memorize it, that is the best thing, because then you can recite it while you are driving the car, walking, or even in your dreams.

Advice after giving tsa-tsa commitment:
Of course if the tsa-tsas are bigger it means more merit, but if smaller then less expensive.

What to do if you have to make a lot of tsa-tsas:
My first emphasis is not to think that these are like clay bricks or something that you use to build a house. You need to remember these are buddhas, so treat them like buddhas, with great respect. Treat them like living buddhas; they are manifesting for you. You can put them in a very nice box, piled up respectfully.

Advice after giving lam-rim meditation commitments in preliminary practice:
This means for this period of time, lam-rim is your main meditation. After you finish, start again and whatever realization you did not have, then spend more time on that. If you did have realizations, then you don’t need to spend as much time. So in this way, step-by-step, train your mind to have the realization of renunciation of this life, and the realization of bodhicitta and emptiness.

So every day you should still do some meditation on emptiness. After you have realizations in the three principal aspects of the path, then practice tantra—try to generate realizations in the generation and completion stage.

Live your life with bodhicitta motivation during the break time from sitting, so that whatever you do as much as possible every day becomes a cause of enlightenment, a cause of happiness for all sentient beings. This is the best life, the best preparation for death, then every day is most beneficial for all sentient beings, of great benefit to this world and by the way you achieve enlightenment.