Practices:
- 300,000: Refuge
- 300,000: Generating the four immeasurable thoughts
- 300,000: Mandala offerings
- 400,000: Guru Yoga. Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga, counting migtsema with meditation
- 100,000: Vajrasattva
- 40,000: Dorje Khadro
- 30,000: Water bowls
- 400,000: Tsa-tsas - Lama Tsongkhapa,Namtose, three long-life deities.
[See Rinpoche's advice on what to do with tsa-tsas.] - 10,000: Prostrations with Thirty-five Buddhas
- Two: Nyung-nä
- 11 million: OM MANI PADME HUM. This is your lifetime practice. Chant some every day and sometimes in retreat chant more. Do something every day. Finish, okay. Even you don’t finish, you try, okay. If you don’t finish, it doesn’t matter. But of course, there are so many people who finish many millions.
Effortful experience of lam-rim:
- Seven months: Guru devotion
- One month: Lower path
- Four months: Middle path
- Three months: Bodhicitta
- One month: Emptiness
One month on emptiness is for effortful experience, but emptiness is something you have to meditate on every day using the Heart Sutra, the Four Analyses or even one verse or one stanza on emptiness.
After the effortful experience, try to get the effortless experience no matter how many months or years it takes. Go back through, starting from guru devotion, then the lower path, the middle path and the higher path.
After generating bodhicitta, put more emphasis on tantra—the generation and completion stage.
At least every day, for realization of the path, for enlightenment and to enlighten all sentient beings, the minimum practice is to recite a lam-rim prayer and do direct meditation on the lam-rim. Also, recite your own deity’s graduated path (the prayer is at the end of the long sadhana of the deity.) You must at least do these two as a minimum practice.
Your deity: Guhysamaja, Chenrezig Gyalwa Gyatso. Choose whichever you have strong feeling for as your main deity, but you can get the initiation for both.
With much love and prayer...
