Dear Friends,
This month we are excited to give you a sneak peek of our upcoming publication, Rinpoche’s Animal Friends! You won’t want to miss it. Read on to learn more about this joyful book and to see what we have in store for you: a new video and podcast from our archives, the latest installment of the Big Love Audiobook Heart Project, and fresh translations of some of LYWA’s popular titles, among other highlights.
Your ongoing support for LYWA inspires us to explore new and innovative ways to share the immense love and wisdom of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Thank you for being an essential part of this journey. We look forward to continuing this relationship well into the future!
Please enjoy this month's eletter and feel free to share it with others!
Forthcoming from LYWA: Rinpoche’s Animal Friends
We’re delighted to announce the publication of Rinpoche’s Animal Friends in early 2025. This new free book showcases the soft toys, also known as plushies, which appeared regularly in Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s video teachings from Kopan during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was in lockdown. The plushies were inscribed under Rinpoche’s direction with Dharma messages and mantras, and later gifted to students around the world.
Rinpoche’s Animal Friends features more than one hundred images, along with a selection of brief teaching excerpts. Whether you’re an older adult or a parent seeking to introduce a child to Buddhist values, this photobook is a must-have addition to your collection. You can enjoy the playful photos, recite the powerful mantras and reflect on the quotations, which serve as a reminder of the importance of Dharma practice in these difficult times.
Sincere thanks to Rebecca Smith and Thubten Kunga Ling Buddhist Center, Florida, whose generous contribution has made this book possible. We are also deeply grateful to all the members and friends of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive for your invaluable support.
You can support this project and the ongoing work of LYWA by making a donation here. With your donation of $100 or more, you can request that a copy be automatically sent to you when the book arrives in 2025!
Read an excerpt from this book in our featured teaching below. You can read more excerpts online and view sample pages from this book as downloadable PDFs.
FROM THE VIDEO ARCHIVE: The View of Karma
This month from the LYWA video archive, Lama Zopa Rinpoche explains how karma distorts our body and surroundings, and guides us to recognize and become free of this distortion. These teachings were given during the first Light of the Path retreat, hosted by Kadampa Center at the Blue Ridge Mountain retreat center in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2009.
Visit and subscribe to the LYWA YouTube channel to view more videos freely available from our archive. See the FPMT YouTube channel and the Rinpoche Available Now page on the FPMT website for many more videos of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings.
ON THE LYWA PODCAST: Using Everything to Practice Mindfulness
Because you look at everything as empty, the strong selfish mind, the ego, doesn't arise. When you think like this, it makes your life stable, filled with peace, happiness and contentment; it brings so much benefit.
—Lama Zopa Rinpoche
This month on the LYWA podcast, Lama Zopa Rinpoche explains how to practice mindfulness throughout the day and offers advice on daily practice. These teachings were given by Rinpoche at the Thirty-third Kopan Meditation Course, held at Kopan Monastery in Nepal in 2000. You can follow along with the unedited transcript here on our website.
The LYWA podcast contains hundreds of hours of audio, each with links to the accompanying lightly edited transcripts. See the LYWA podcast page to search or browse the entire collection by topic or date, and for easy instructions on how to subscribe.
BIG LOVE AUDIOBOOK HEART PROJECT
We are excited to share another installment of the audiobook Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe, written by Adele Hulse. This heartfelt project, organized by Janet Brooke, features narrations recorded by personal friends of the late Åge Delbanco (Babaji), one of Lama Yeshe's earliest students.
This month the Big Love Heart Project brings you Chapter 13: 1975: We Need An Organization, narrated by Pam Cayton. Chapter 13 includes the recognition of Yangsi Rinpoche, the events during the Lamas' international teaching tour to Australia, New Zealand, the United States, England, Switzerland, and Italy, and the beginning of the FPMT and Wisdom Publications.
This is an incredible opportunity to listen to this extraordinary account of Lama’s life, narrated by those who were present as the story unfolded, especially if you don’t have a copy on hand. As a reminder for LYWA Members, you receive a 50% discount when you order Big Love from our online store. If you already have a copy, you can order another and have it sent to a friend as a gift!
What's New On Our Website
This month we have posted teaching excerpts from the 52nd Kopan Course, held at Kopan Monastery, Nepal, in 2019. In these short extracts, Lama Zopa Rinpoche discusses the good heart, and urges students to remember the deep suffering of others. Rinpoche teaches that everything which appears real is a hallucination, a projection, like a dream, and says that the purpose of our life is to bring all sentient beings to buddhahood, the awakened state.
The next publication in LYWA’s Kopan eBook Project will be an ebook featuring Rinpoche's teachings from this course. Led by editor Gordon McDougall, the project aims to create ebooks for all the annual Kopan courses, encompassing both those already available on our website and in ebook format, as well as those yet to be published.
We are also pleased to announce two new French translations of Lama Zopa Rinpoche's titles: How to Practice Dharma and The Heart of the Path, published by Éditions Mahayana. You can find both books and a list of translations by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche on their website.
Additionally, the Spanish translation of the popular Lamrim Year, the essential guide for meditating on the lamrim by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, is now available from Ediciones Dharma. LYWA partners with foreign publishers worldwide to translate our publications. Currently, LYWA titles have been translated from English into 18 different languages!
As always, thank you so much for your incredible support. We’d love to hear your thoughts! Please let us know what you think, as we aim to create more content that you’d like to see. Continue on to read an excerpt from Rinpoche's Animal Friends.
Big love,
Nick Ribush
Director
THIS MONTH'S TEACHING: Cherishing others more than myself
OM MANI PADME HUM. I’ve eaten numberless shrimp from beginningless rebirths. Not only that, all sentient beings. Now I cherish them most because happiness from beginningless rebirths, now, even in future, including enlightenment is received from them. Buddha, Dharma, Sangha came from their kindness. That’s why they’re the most precious, kind. I’ve taken full responsibility to enlighten them.
—Lama Zopa Rinpoche
As I have mentioned in the past, all the sufferings of the past, present and future, all the obstacles, everything comes from cherishing I. All the past, present and future happiness including enlightenment, everything comes from cherishing others.
As I mentioned, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, in whom we take refuge, come from sentient beings. Therefore, “May I cherish sentient beings the most, more than me.” We should give up the I but instead of giving it up, now we give up other sentient beings. We give up one or many, and we cherish I the most, from beginningless rebirths. That is why we didn’t become enlightened yet.
The numberless buddhas were like us before. They had all the delusions, all the problems and suffering, but they changed their minds. They renounced I and cherished others, from where all the happiness comes. They renounced I, from where all the suffering comes, and cherished others, from where all the happiness comes. They became enlightened a long time ago, so we are late.
“May I cherish most the sentient beings, more than I. May all their suffering be ripened on me and may all my virtue be ripened on them.” So all the suffering, everything comes to us, into our heart and we give it to our enemy, the self-cherishing thought, and totally eliminate it. And then our virtue, every single virtue, which means all our happiness, everything, “May it ripen on other sentient beings.”
Excerpted from “Teachings on Thought Transformation During the Time of COVID-19, Video 12: The Conclusion is ‘Subdue One’s Own Mind,’” Kopan Monastery, 11 April 2020.
