Advice for Prisoners

Practices to do:

1. Middle length Medicine Buddha puja.

2. Seven malas of Oser Chenma (OM TARE TUTARE TURE SARBA NAGA VISHA SHANTING KURU SVAHA).

3. Strong praises to Tara, particularly prayers to the Tara liberating from prison, one of the 21 Taras. Just think strongly of this one, even if you are not clear what she looks like.

4. Practice in sessions and recite at least one mala each session.

I send my love and prayers. You just need to change your thinking. This is a very good opportunity to do retreat.

The letter from the prisoner read:

I am a prisoner in Central Florida, USA. I have been a Buddhist practitioner now for over three years. I found Buddhism while in prison, a most fortunate situation. I took refuge vows last year over the phone by your authority with the nun who works for the Liberation Prison Project. She gave me my Dharma name, which is Thubten Jangchug. Even though I have never met you, every time I see pictures of you, I can feel the limitless love you have for all of us. Please, Rinpoche, I am lovingly requesting if you could advise me on my life practices. I am currently getting up at 4 am to do my daily practice and about 45 minutes of meditation every morning. I will be released from prison in about two years and want to devote the few remaining years I have left on this earth with this fortunate rebirth as a human being to living and breathing the precious Dharma.

Rinpoche, I know with your omniscient, clear mind, you know what is best for me. I also would like to make the request to you, humbly and with devotion, to allow me to be your disciple, and accept me and be my lama.

Rinpoche's Response

[Rinpoche commented that you could tell by the way the letter was written, the style of the handwriting, that this person is a very kind and goodhearted, sincere person.]

My very dear one,
Sorry it has taken eight months to reply to your letter. I apologize for that. In recent times, I have done quite a bit of traveling in Nepal, southern India, northern India, and other places, traveling and taking teachings from my gurus, like His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I am sure there is no question that laziness is still there. Of course, there is laziness! First, you must know that I am very happy to receive your letter and your total faith toward the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and wanting to practice from the heart.

First of all, because you are in prison, you met the Dharma and were able to receive help from the nun who works for the Liberation Prison Project. Because you are a prisoner, then the Prison Project was able to reach you. If you were not in prison, it is possible that you might not have met the Buddhadharma. So, your being in prison has turned out to be for enlightenment! It turned out to be the means by which you have met the unmistaken path that brings you to inner liberation from the inner prison of samsara – where you are imprisoned by delusions and karma. There are two ways to think of inner prison – you are kept in the prison of samsara by delusions and karma. Buddhism shows the complete, unmistaken, most reliable path for how to eliminate the cause of the samsaric prison – karma and delusions. The way it eliminates delusion is by eliminating its cause, the negative seed or imprint.

Of course, a person practicing Buddhism, especially Mahayana Buddhism, the Mahayana path, is able to eliminate even the subtle negative imprint, achieve full enlightenment, and liberate countless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to enlightenment. So, this proves that it is not just faith, not just belief, because Buddha, himself, met the guru and received teachings and correctly followed them. Then through listening, reflecting, and meditating, he actualized the complete path to liberation, to enlightenment. He eliminated all the gross and subtle defilements and achieved full enlightenment, besides being liberated from the oceans of samsaric sufferings forever. Then, there are so many great yogis and pandits, like the stars in the nighttime sky, who by following the path correctly, as Buddha taught, achieved liberation and full enlightenment. So, therefore, your being in prison is an incredibly fortunate thing. It means that anyone who blamed you or put you in prison is the most precious, kind one for you. Why? Because through being in prison, you met Dharma. You are able to practice Buddhism and liberate yourself from the oceans of samsaric sufferings, the continuation of which has no beginning, and the causes of negative karma – the gross and subtle obscurations, and so you are able to achieve enlightenment.

So many great scholars from India, Tibet, Nepal, and other places completed the path and became enlightened. In this way, the Buddhadharma is well proven. Up to now it is proven that people can actualize the path. It happens to people who know Buddhism, who know the path and practice it. It is happening to them. Of course, it isn’t happening for those who don’t know the path, who don’t practice it correctly, or who don’t practice as instructed, according to how they are guided. Because of not practicing correctly and due to a lack of understanding of the whole path, even if you practice for billions of years then nothing can happen. This is very important to recognize, to remember. When there is no attainment occurring – you think you have been practicing a long time, but no change is happening in the mind – that means you are making some mistakes and not changing those mistakes, and this blocks the attainment from your mind.

Your main deity, according to my divinations, is Hevajra. For your quickest enlightenment, to be able to enlighten sentient beings most quickly, you need a deity of highest yoga tantra to practice. For you, that is Hevajra (Kye Dorje in Tibetan). This is the main deity to practice being one with, day and night. Then, through this practice, you actually become the deity (which means enlightenment – your body, speech, and mind become the deity’s body, speech, and mind) and then through this, you can enlighten all sentient beings. Through this practice, you bring all sentient beings to this deity’s enlightenment. You are able to free all beings from the ocean of samsaric sufferings and bring them to enlightenment. But to practice this, you need to receive a great initiation. Then, you are permitted to practice, to receive the commentary, and practice the tantric path of that deity.

Until then, you must put all your effort into lamrim. Meditate on lamrim day and night, then whether you are eating, walking, sleeping, doing a job, whatever, you do it with a bodhicitta motivation. This makes life the best, most fruitful, meaningful, and beneficial for all sentient beings. That means it is also most beneficial for you. Whatever you do, everything becomes the purest Dharma and, especially, the cause of enlightenment. This is what we need, to achieve enlightenment in order to liberate countless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to enlightenment.

Even after you have received the initiation, until you actualize bodhicitta, you must put your main effort into lamrim, to have renunciation of samsara, of this life, and of future lives, etc. The root of realizations is guru devotion, seeing the guru as buddha, which means seeing the guru as all buddhas from your side, through effort looking at it that way. Then, every day, also do some meditation on emptiness.

After you have received the initiation, commentary, and complete teachings, then see if you can plan to do a three-year Hevajra retreat. One very important thing you should do in daily life is one guru yoga practice. You can do Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga. I have written a commentary for it, so you can read that. Then, on the basis of that you can meditate on lamrim. The same day, when you meditate on lamrim, if you practice Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga in the morning, then in the evening you don’t have to repeat the whole Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga prayer again, just visualize it there, generate refuge and bodhicitta, then practice the lamrim meditation.

To achieve enlightenment for sentient beings, you need to actualize the path. That is the main body of the practice, to meditate on lamrim, but for success in that you need to purify the defilements and the obstacles and accumulate the necessary conditions, the merits. Like when planting a seed, you need to water the seed and provide it with the necessary conditions of soil, etc. In the same way, you need to receive the blessings of the guru in your heart by practicing the guru yoga meditation and making requesting prayers to the guru. You need the support of these three things: purification of defilements, accumulation of merits, and making requests to the guru, who is inseparable from all the buddhas. You need these three in order to achieve realizations on the path, otherwise it is difficult to develop realizations, to be able to transform the mind.

For your preliminary practices, please do the following:

• 100,000 mandala offerings
• 8000 water bowl offerings: In the case of water bowls, you can do them with many other people if there is a center or a place where you can set up many water bowl offerings. At the time of offering, everybody offers all the bowls, but while you work to set up the bowls, you can divide that up between people. This way it gets done quickly. Of course, you can do it alone by yourself as well, but it is much quicker the other way. When you are setting up, many people set up together, and when you offer, you can offer everything that is offered.
• 60,000 guru yoga
• 300,000 tsa-tsas (Guru Shakyamuni Buddha, Tara, Medicine Buddha, Manjushri)
• 400,000 Dorje Khadro

From time to time, please practice nyung nä, especially, if you can, on the solar eclipse or the special Buddha days, when the merit increases 100 million times. To do nyung nä on those days is extremely good. Sometimes you can do it a few times in a row, sometimes one by one, depending on what is more convenient. The nyung nä is a two-day retreat, but it combines many, many powerful practices such as prostrations, reciting mantras, taking the Eight Mahayana Precepts, meditation on deity yoga, bodhicitta, etc. There are many, many powerful practices. So, it is very good to do on those special days when the merit is increased 100 million times. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it at other times too.

If you can, at least one time each month, take the eight Mahayana precepts. You can take the lineage of this practice from the nun who works for the Liberation Prison Project. Probably that will have to be done by telephone since it may be difficult for her to go to the prison. Anyway, it is much more convenient in this case to do it long distance. She will explain it to you. This is one practice that makes your life so rich in merit. It benefits the whole world, the country, and the area where you are, and causes everyone to achieve enlightenment and fulfill their wishes.

Also, read the Diamond Cutter Sutra four times each month, which means once a week. If you can do that, it is incredibly powerful purification and enables you to be quickly liberated from samsara, because its subject is emptiness. Each time when you read it, it leaves an extra positive imprint to realize emptiness, so each time you read it, you are closer to liberation and enlightenment.

For lamrim meditations:

• One month lower scope
• Three months middle scope
• One month bodhicitta
• Two months on emptiness

Then, circle back until you receive all those realizations. You don’t have to spend so much time on those meditations in which you achieve realizations. 

You can write from time to time if there are things with which you need help.

With much love and prayer, take care with love in Dharma (bodhicitta)...

My dear one,
You should do a lot of practice (lamrim) and tonglen, with OM MANI PADME HUM.

Please read Transforming Problems and The Door to Satisfaction.

In prison, think that it is not prison, it is your retreat house to become liberated, enlightened, and to enlighten countless beings, who are our precious mother sentient beings

With much love and prayers...

My very dear Martha,
I hope you are doing well and that you are happy. You can learn a lot from your present situation by looking at it in a positive way.

Normally, you don’t have the opportunity to learn this, by not being in such a situation. Especially, you can learn to have courage and develop your full potential. In this way, one can overcome all sufferings and their causes, including the cycle of birth, death, old age, and sickness. One can achieve peerless happiness and full enlightenment. Not only that, one can cause so many other living beings to have perfect happiness and to bring them from happiness to happiness, to the peerless happiness of full enlightenment, by liberating them from all the sufferings of cyclic existence – samsara – including the causes of negative emotional thoughts and their actions – karma.

I have seen you so many times on TV and thought that I would like to send you some meditation books for you to read in prison, as you have a lot of time to analyze things, to look within yourself, to study your life, to explore change, and to achieve freedom, inner freedom, which is most important, because then you have freedom over all external things.

At other times, your life must be extremely busy, so you may not have much time to really meditate or analyze. So, this situation you are in now is like when one is alone in retreat, where one has space to think about one’s life, qualities, mistakes, and one can see deeper into one’s own life. Through that, one can benefit others more deeply and bring more peace and happiness to others.

My name is Lawudo Lama; usually people call me Lama Zopa. I bear the name of an incarnate lama. I guess this is from some merit, positive actions, committed in past lives, and this is the result. I was born in the Himalayan Mountains, near Mount Everest. That’s why I am sending you this picture of Mount Everest. Hopefully, one day you can visit there; it is a totally different world.

On one side of Mount Everest is Nepal and on the other side is Tibet. In ancient times, many great yogis achieved high attainments in these places. Many holy beings meditated in the caves in these areas and were liberated there.

Liberation does not mean you become nothingness, it does not mean that you disappear. Not only does your body not disappear but your mind also does not disappear. It does not mean that your mind becomes non-existent; it is not like that.

Liberation means one achieves total control over one’s body and mind, not only the gross body and mind but even the extremely subtle ones. One is free from all the gross and subtle defilements, wrong concepts, and delusions and their actions – karma. One is liberated from the sufferings of rebirth, old age, sickness, and death, as well as from the suffering of pain and the suffering of change – the latter of which is temporal, samsaric pleasures, but which are derived from delusion and karma, whose nature is only suffering. If you analyze samsaric pleasures you discover that they are only suffering, just like a hallucination, they appear as pleasure through our ignorance. Not only that, you become liberated totally from the aggregates (the body and mind), whose nature is suffering, because they are contaminated by the seed of delusion. This seed is the foundation for the sufferings of change and pain.

I try to help a little bit in the world, teaching meditations on the nature of phenomena and cause and effect, showing which causes come from which effects. From positive causes come happiness and from negative causes come suffering. I try to emphasize ethics and also teach compassion in order to alleviate the suffering of living beings, and to bring them ultimate, everlasting, peerless full enlightenment, the completely liberated state, when we have eliminated all the mistakes of mind, gross and subtle, and have a complete, full understanding, and all realizations. With this one is able to do perfect work for so many living beings and bring them perfect, peerless bliss and full enlightenment.

Please enjoy life with a good heart and have a liberating and enlightening journey with these books.

With much love and prayers...

My very dear Cameron,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. I am extremely happy that you opened your heart. By being in prison you have been able to open your heart to Buddhism, so this makes your life most beneficial for all sentient beings and, by the way, you free yourself from samsara, and achieve great liberation and enlightenment.

I accept what you requested – to be your guru. If you have the book Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand by Pabongka Rinpoche, please read the section on guru devotion.

Keep this as the object of your life – train your mind in guru devotion – until you have stable realizations, until you see all the buddhas as the guru and all the gurus as the Buddha. This should be stable in your life, not just for days, but for months and years. Then train your mind in renunciation, bodhicitta, and emptiness in the same way.

Later, you can receive tantric initiations, read the commentaries, and do the retreat on your deity. According to my observation, your main deities are Secret Vajrapani, Kalachakra, and Hevajra. From these three, you can see which one you feel closer to, or you can ask for some indication in your dreams. Before you go to bed, make strong prayers to Tara to show you which deity you should practice for your quickest enlightenment, so that you can enlighten sentient beings quickest.

Then, also according to my observations, it comes out best for you to do 16 nyung näs. There are some books on this practice. Of course, it is not so easy to do while you are in prison, but try. Just fit the session in however you can, according to your convenience. You can discuss with Ven. Robina how to do it in a flexible way.

You should take the Eight Mahayana Precepts six times a month. This makes your life most meaningful, you create so much merit, and if you take each precept with the mind of bodhicitta, then it causes happiness for all sentient beings and ultimately causes enlightenment for all sentient beings. By taking the Eight Mahayana Precepts, it causes you to have a good rebirth in your next life and is the best preparation for your happiness, not only a good rebirth after death but all the way up to enlightenment. Taking the Eight Mahayana Precepts creates the cause to be free from samsara.

I am also attaching some instructions I have given on how to meditate on the lamrim and preliminaries, so please read those.

Please meditate for eight months on the Lower Path, eight months on the Middle Path, nine months on bodhicitta, and two months on emptiness. This means that you mainly focus on these subjects each day for that many months. Then, when you have finished, start again from the beginning until you have stable realizations.

Before taking the Eight Mahayana Precepts, you need to receive the lineage. You can get that from Ven. Robina. You can contact and ask her. Once you have received it one time, then you can take the Precepts from your altar.

Please live your life with a bodhicitta motivation toward others. This is the purpose of your life – to benefit sentient beings.

With much love and prayers...

My very dear one,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. It sounds like you are a very old student of twenty or thirty years. I am very happy with what you are doing, all the mantras and practices that you are performing, and also your prayers. I will also pray for you.

Please make your life most meaningful with the thought of bodhicitta.

With much love and prayers...