Preliminary Practices and Lam-rim Meditation

Preliminary Practices and Lam-rim Meditation

Date of Advice:
January 2015
Date Posted:
May 2017

A student asked Rinpoche for life practices and advice on her personal deity [Tib: yidam] for tantric practice.

Your special deity is Yamantaka, Thirteen-Deity or solitary, whichever you feel a stronger connection with. 

Preliminaries
  • 900,000:  Water bowl offerings. Don’t worry [about the number]; just do whatever you can each year. You don’t have to worry, just carry on with your life. However, you need to know how to offer the water bowls; just offering water is not enough. Just offering to Buddha, Dharma, Sangha is not enough. Please read my most recent teachings [on water bowl offerings.]  Of course if your time is limited, then you can make the offerings in a big group. It’s better with bigger bowls.
  • 100,000:  Dorje Khadro Fire Puja.
  • 400,000: Prostrations to the Thirty-five Buddhas. Don’t worry about having to finish this in a short time. No. Do some prostrations every day and when you have more time you can do more and when you have less time, do less. Count and in that way you will get them done. Doing the Thirty-five Buddhas practice with prostrations is very common in the Lama Tsongkhapa tradition. Lama Tsongkhapa did 700,000 prostrations at Wolka by reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas’ names and received realizations like rainfall. Many lineage lamas did prostrations every day in the same way.
  • 50,000: Do Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga with migtsema and  counting. There is a commentary to Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga that I did, so you should read that.
  • 7,000:  Vajrasattva mantras.
  • 3,000: Tsa-tsas of the Thirty-five Buddhas, Lama Tsongkhapa, Manjushri and Chenrezig.
Lam-rim study and practice 

The main lam-rim text for you to use is Manjushri’s Own Words, [The Sacred Words of Manjushri; Jam päl zhal lung by the Fifth Dalai Lama.]  Read this text three times to fully understand it. If there is something you don’t understand, mark it very lightly with orange color. You need to respect the holy objects by offering color, as it is like making offerings to statues, stupas and so on. You could also write down the things that you don’t understand in a book and when an older student who has studied well comes, you can ask them questions, or you can ask a geshe.

With effort, train the mind in meditation. Follow the lam-rim outline four times and after that, do effortless meditation. 

As a guide book, use either The Essential Nectar or the outline from Manjushri’s Own Words. After you read the commentaries, that doesn’t mean you can’t read other lam-rim texts.  You can also read Lama Tsongkhapa’s lam-rim and Pabongka Rinpoche’s Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.