Student's Letter

Dear Lama Zopa Rinpoche,
I am 26 years old and I have a tumor in my spine, in my neck, that is about 10 cms long and was diagnosed recently. I had a biopsy, but they can’t do anything. If they were to take it out, I could possibly die. One surgeon said it is unlikely I would be able to get rid of it and another gave me five years to live. However, I am staying positive.

The surgeons say it has been growing for about ten to fifteen years. I have paralysis in my left hand, lack of strength in my right fingers, nerve pain on the left side of my back, and I used to get dizziness quite a lot, but that has eased a fair bit in the last year or two. The doctors are amazed I'm still walking and are surprised to see in my MRI that my spine has doubled in size to accommodate it. They think this may have something to do with the acupuncture I receive from my Dad. I believe I almost died from this a few years ago, when I was bedridden for five months.

I have done a lot of charity work in my life, both with animals and people, and I initiated an animal liberation ceremony at the Dharma center near where I live. We had a good turnout, releasing 4,050 crickets. We will be doing another one soon. I also make tsa tsas and read literature on the Dharma (my father is Buddhist and introduced me to it).

One of the big things that has got me through all this was reading your book Ultimate Healing. I call it my bible, as it has been such a big help, in the way of changing thought patterns. Whenever I feel down, I turn to that book, and within a few paragraphs I am lifted.

I hope you are well and happy and I hope I hear from you soon, because I really need help and I'd like to come out of this a healthy and better person, from all I'm going through. Thank you so much for your time.

Much peace and love...
 

Rinpoche's response

My very dear one,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. I am very sorry for all these different sicknesses that you have.

As you have seen in my healing book, your sickness can be very positive, very good, because it makes you realize karma. Your sickness did not come from outside, it came from your own mind—delusion and negative karma. So, thinking like this you can generate more faith in karma and more faith in wanting to abandon the cause of the suffering—negative karma—and to purify all the past negative karma. Also, this helps you and inspires you to engage in Dharma practice to purify and practice strongly and to not commit negative karma again. This is how your sickness gives you strength in your life, not only physically but mentally, so you can practice and, in this way, collect so much merit.

Meditating on the lamrim path, thinking of the cause of suffering, inspires you to actualize the path. Only by actualizing the path can you eliminate the cause of suffering—delusion, and only then are you able to achieve ultimate liberation, freedom forever from old age, sickness, death, and rebirth, be free forever from all sufferings, from the suffering of suffering, the suffering of change (which is called samsaric pleasure), and from all-pervasive compounded suffering.

In this way, your sicknesses are incredibly positive, because they inspire you to work for liberation. Your sickness helps you to generate compassion for others, for numberless sentient beings who also have all the different kinds of sicknesses, so helps you very much to generate compassion for all living beings. Generating compassion causes you to achieve enlightenment for sentient beings.

Your sickness is actually the cause for you to be able to achieve enlightenment and to enlighten all sentient beings: all the numberless hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, human beings, suras, and asura beings. Without compassion you cannot really benefit all the numberless sentient beings. Also, this is the quickest way to achieve enlightenment and to be able to liberate numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and their causes and to bring them to enlightenment.

Use your sickness to develop bodhicitta by practicing tonglen (taking and giving). Each time you do this you are collecting vast amounts of merit. By the practice of giving, giving all your body and possessions to numberless sentient beings, you collect vast amounts of merit each time. When you give all your merits, past, present, and future, to all sentient beings, each time you do this you collect unbelievable amounts of merit, even if you do it for just a few seconds.

When you do the practice of taking, you take numberless sentient beings’ sufferings. In each realm, so many beings are suffering, so you take those sufferings, and each time you do this you collect so much merit. By taking the suffering of sentient beings in each realm you create so much merit, even by just doing this practice one time—you can’t imagine. If you do this practice many times a day, it is unbelievable! This makes your life most productive, the best life.

Please try to do this practice every day, again and again. This is how you use your sickness to destroy negative karma and collect so much merit, up to enlightenment.

Also, think how samsara is in the nature of suffering. This inspires you to be free from samsara and helps you to end this sickness forever, to end all sufferings. This is similar to how people use snake poison to cure and heal people bitten by snakes.

Please try to do this practice of taking and giving and generating compassion by taking on all the sufferings and their causes and then offering loving kindness. In Colorado there was one elderly lady who had cancer that was spreading quickly. The doctor was afraid to do an operation as she was so sick. She did this meditation and practice of tonglen for some time, and later, when she went to hospital, the doctor could not find any cancer at all. This is just one story, but there are many other stories of people being healed by bodhicitta, by their own mind.

Anyway, please think about these things.

I checked about your health and these things came out as very good for you to do:

• Take eight ratnas precious pills (two each week, have a few days break between pills). I will send these to you.
• Take one kün khyen pill each day for three months. I will mail this to you.

It would also be good for you to wear these protections:

• Hayagriva
• White Umbrella
• Liberation from bondage of body, speech, and mind
• Great Breath protection

I will mail these to you. You wear them in a little cloth bag around your neck, but don’t get them wet or sleep with them on (in case you sleep on top of them, which is disrespectful). Take them off at night but keep them close by.

I am also making prayers for you.

I also checked and these practices would be very good for you to do:

• Vajra Armor
• 200,000 Vajrasattva mantras for purification
• 500,000 Samayavajra mantras

Meditate on the lamrim. This is the most important thing, to go over the lamrim again and again until you have stable realizations.

I hope you enjoy these cards (coming in the post).

With much love and prayers, please let me know how you are time to time,

Lama Zopa