Practices for Life

My very dear one,
Thank you very much for your kind email.

I think your dream is showing that you have a strong connection to Lama Tsongkhapa’s teachings. You are very lucky; you should know that! You can always find answers and guidance through different things. Definitely Buddha is guiding you in different ways, and you should rely on that completely. Feel very happy and lucky always.

I am very happy to hear about your prayers for my health and a long life, and that you are dedicating your life to me. I hope you can be of benefit to others.

I am sending you some precious pills by post and some other things. These precious pills are most precious. They come from Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche, who was one of the gurus of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

You will need this pill for highest yoga tantra retreat. You just need one pill; crush it, then place it in water or black tea and add a little alcohol. Then purify yourself and make an offering to the deity. You can also use it for dying people.

Regarding your practice, your main deity is Tara Cittamani. If you feel a stronger connection to Yamantaka or Heruka, then choose one of them as your main deity.

Regarding your practices, please find attached details on how to do the practices:

• Prostrations: 30,000, to the Thirty-five Buddhas
• Mandala offerings: 5,000
• Water bowls: 300,000. Do these alone or as a group. If you do the offering with a group, then you can finish them quickly. You can do them at the center, or with the nuns at the Kopan nunnery, and offer them together.
• Guru Yoga: 200,000 Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga, with meditation, counting the Migtsema mantra
• Tsa-tsas - Padmasambhava and Heruka: 60,000, to divide between the two deities

Write to me if you have questions, or discuss them with Geshe Chonyi in Singapore.

Lamrim meditation:

• Four months on guru devotion
• Two months on the lower capable being
• Three months on the middle capable being
• Seven months on bodhicitta
• Two months on emptiness

For all the topics, follow the outline of lamrim texts, such as The Essential Nectar. Also use Lama Tsongkhapa’s Lamrim Chenmo, or middle lamrim, Essence of Refined Gold, or Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.

Your main focus after this is to continue with guru devotion until you have stable realizations, seeing the guru as all the buddhas and seeing all the buddhas as the guru, and for that to be stable. Try to have realizations on all the aspects of the lamrim, from the precious human rebirth up to karma. Each week, focus on the same topic. Once you finish the above, then start again from the beginning. Do this until you have realizations, no matter how long it takes. Do meditation on emptiness every day, reciting the Heart Sutra or other texts.

Until you have achieved a stable realization of bodhicitta, that is your goal in life. After that, practice the generation and completion stages of tantra. Practicing tantra comes after the realization of bodhicitta, otherwise you will not achieve realizations in tantric practices.

I will send you some other things. Please email me your postal address.

With much love and prayers...

Dear Nick,
Here are the practices I advise you to do:

• 100,000 mandala offerings
• 80,000 Dorje Khadro

Recitation of the Vajra Cutter Sutra once a day is the most amazing purification and way of collecting merit. Just doing that creates so much merit that it would make you faint.

Your main deity is Kalachakra. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has given this many times. If he is giving it again, you can travel to receive it later and if not, you can receive it from other Gelugpa lamas. If you want to recite the Kalachakra mantra, I can give you the lung later by phone.

Plan more time for retreat in your life, but before doing this, study the lamrim well. The purpose of life is to have realizations, so study well and meditate in order to have realizations.

Meditation on the lamrim:

• One month on guru devotion
• One month on the precious human rebirth
• One month on its usefulness

Study the lamrim from the beginning to end. When you meet geshes, lamas or older students, study lamrim with them. If you have realizations, meditate on the topic to stabilize them. If there are obstacles, then study more and do six months’ retreat later. When you finish that, repeat the process.

After meditating on the lamrim, live your life with the feeling of the meditation you have generated and the thought to benefit others for the rest of the day.

8,000 special bodhicitta practice of tonglen:
This doesn’t mean just reciting the words, but practicing the meditation. Do the elaborate version at the beginning, or two to three times; then do the condensed version and at the end do the elaborate version.

The condensed version is as follows: all suffering, karma and delusions of sentient beings are taken into our heart and totally destroy the ego and self-cherishing thoughts; take their suffering and its causes. Any problems that we see, for example, a sick person on the road or an animal carrying a heavy load, take the causes and destroy our self-cherishing. Then dedicate all the three times’ merits and all the three times’ happiness and give them to all sentient beings, or do this for each realm.

For one short session, take on the suffering of all beings and think that the self-cherishing thought is our worst enemy.

My very dear Jane,
Whatever practice you do, you need to do it within the context of a guru yoga practice. This could be the Guru Puja, Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga, or the Six-Session Guru Yoga.  Whatever preliminary practice you are doing (prostrations, water bowl offerings, lamrim meditation, etc), base your practice on that and stop at the appropriate place, so that whatever you do is combined with guru yoga.

Generally, I checked and it comes out very good for you to do more study of Dharma, when you can. Please find below my advice for your practice:

• Prostrations by reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas’ names: 300,000
• Mandala offerings: 10,000
• Vajrasattva (at night): 21 or 28 mantras
• Dorje Khadro (burning offering): 10,000
• Water bowl offerings: 6000
• Tsa-tsas: Deity: Thirty-five Buddhas and Mitukpa: 2,000
• Four Immeasurable Thoughts: 300,000
• Guru devotion: three months
• The graduated path of the lower scope: two months. Spend one week on the perfect human rebirth, one week on its usefulness, one week on the difficulties in finding it again, one week on impermanence and death, one week on the lower realms, and one week on karma. In this way divide it up according to the outline in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.
• The graduated path of the intermediate scope: three months
• The graduated path of the highest scope: bodhicitta: one month; emptiness: five months

Keep going back through the lamrim and whenever you achieve a realization, then start from the next one. It is very good if you can do a little meditation on guru devotion every day, regardless of what section of the lamrim you are up to, also a little on emptiness. Do a little of these two each day; it could be five or ten minutes. Then follow the outline in the lamrim and keep circling in this way.

Your main aim in life is to achieve the lamrim realizations, renunciation, bodhicitta and right view.

My very dear one,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. I was very happy to receive it and read your news. Please find attached my advice for your practice, what you should focus on your whole life.

It is very important to meditate every day on the lamrim; this is very important. Also, recite one lamrim prayer every day, read it slowly, going over the meaning (such as the Foundation of all Good Qualities, the Three Principles of the Path, etc). The lamrim is what you need to actualize, no matter how long it takes. Please put your effort there. Probably you are doing Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga every day. If so, this is excellent, if not, then now you can start. This is when you can stop and do the lamrim meditation, before the guru absorbs into you. You stop and meditate on whatever section of the lamrim you are up to.

One meditation that you must try to do every day is on guru devotion. Sometimes, if you miss it, it's OK, but then just continue. There is no question of time; it is up to you to see what fits.

Continue with whatever lamrim topic you are on, doing the meditation every day, going through the subjects slowly. Whatever meditation you did in the morning, then continue with that mind during the day. That way your mind is in the lamrim all day.

Please try to meditate on the lamrim, based on guru yoga, like this, and on this basis you achieve all the realizations and the most success in your life. It is important to try to achieve all the realizations, in order to actualize enlightenment. This is in order to liberate numberless sentient beings and enlighten them. That’s the real project, the real goal of one’s life.

Please practice as much as you can. Life is not long, the nature of this life is impermanent, and death can happen at any time. This is the foundation of the Buddha’s teachings, and this was the last advice Buddha gave, before showing the aspect of passing away.

What makes your life most meaningful is meditation on the lamrim, then to live your life with a bodhicitta motivation. This is the best.

With much love and prayers...

My very dear one,
Thank you very much for your kind letter and I am very sorry for the long delay in replying.

Thank you also for the earlier letter regarding how you quit smoking.

Regarding your request for practices, first study Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand every day. Read a little each day, slowly going through the whole book gradually, thinking about the meaning and relating it to your own life by reading it mindfully. In this way, it becomes a meditation. Whatever you don’t understand or if you have questions, then write these down in a notebook, and when you are around an older student or geshe, then you can ask the questions you have and you can discuss them. Also, if you have any discoveries or things that greatly move you, also you can write them down and you can use that in your meditation later. So, it is very important to have an idea of the whole path.

Each day do one meditation on guru devotion, however long is up to you, but it is very important to do it every day. You could do it for one hour, half an hour, fifteen minutes, or you could do two sessions of ten to fifteen minutes. You can proceed like that, and in this way train the mind in order to have realizations. Read the lamrim, but every day practice some meditation on guru devotion. Try to train the mind until you have stable realizations, until you see all the gurus as all the buddhas and all the buddhas as your guru, from the bottom of your heart, without any question, definitely. This is extremely important. While reading the lamrim every day, practice the meditation on that by following the outlines, and when you finish, then go back again and go over and over them. When you have finished, then start on perfect human rebirth, and so on. Go through the lamrim like this. Until you have stable realizations, then keep going, starting from the beginning and working slowly through.

Also, every day it is important to practice one meditation on emptiness. Do this for quite some time until you have realizations. This will be easy for you to understand. By reading the lamrim, this becomes a meditation, training the mind in guru devotion first, then start from the beginning of the path—perfect human rebirth. Then, each day, practice a meditation on bodhicitta.

To clarify: one meditation a day on guru devotion, one meditation a day from wherever you are up to in the lamrim (perfect human rebirth and so on), one meditation on bodhicitta, and one meditation on emptiness.

It would be very good to do Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga every day.

The first thing is to generate a bodhicitta motivation, how to live your life. After generating bodhicitta, think: whatever virtue or non-virtue, whatever action of body, speech, and mind, whatever I am going to do, I am going to do for all sentient beings; may it become the cause of all sentient beings’ enlightenment, may it become the cause of happiness for all sentient beings.

First thing, when you wake up in the morning, rejoice that you are still alive, and that again you have the opportunity to practice Dharma. Remember impermanence and death and think how fortunate you are, by thinking about the eight freedoms and ten richnesses. By having a perfect human body you can achieve the three great means in just one lifetime. Remember that life is impermanent and death can happen at any time. After this life it is not sure where one will be born, it could be in the lower realms. If one is reborn there, apart from the most important thing that one is unable to help other sentient beings, also one has no opportunity to practice Dharma, and one’s sufferings are so heavy and for an unimaginable length of time. Also, one has not been reborn in the higher realms, even that is not sufficient, as I have mentioned before, that is not the real meaning of life. In samsara there is only suffering life, constant suffering, the suffering of change, which in samsara we call pleasure, and the pervasive compounded suffering. So, until one is free from suffering, there is not one second’s break or holiday in samsara. This is how it is experienced, since beginningless rebirths. I have been suffering in samsara and only experiencing suffering, so I must be liberated from samsara, I must achieve enlightenment, there is no other solution.

Then wash, make offerings, and do prostrations by reciting the names of the Thirty-five Buddhas. This is an extremely powerful practice. This is what helped Lama Tsongkhapa. After Lama Tsongkhapa did many hundreds of thousands of prostrations by reciting the names of the Thirty-five Buddhas, then he had realizations like rainfall. If you can, do one set (this means 35 prostrations), or two or three sets, whatever you can manage. You don’t need to recite the last prayer every time when you are doing more than one set, you just recite the last prayer at the very end (so you don’t need to recite it for each set). When you recite the last prayer, do it mindfully, confessing with the remedy of the four powers.

Next, do Chenrezig—OM MANI PADME HUM practice.

Then practice Lama TsongKhapa Guru Yoga. Within this practice you stop and do the lamrim meditation, before the guru absorbs into you. You can read from a lamrim book, or recite a lamrim prayer. It is important to read the lamrim prayer book mindfully. This then becomes a direct meditation on the whole path.

It is very important to recite one lamrim prayer each day, such as the Three Principles of the Path, the Foundation of all Good Qualities, or Calling the Guru from Afar (long version), etc. Also, you can recite the lamrim prayer that is contained at the end of your deity’s long sadhana, which contains all the stages of the path of the common and tantric paths. Each time you recite it, it leaves the imprint of the whole path, the common and tantric paths. Each time you read it, it brings you closer to realizing the path and closer to enlightenment each day. This means each day that you read one lamrim prayer mindfully, it brings you closer to liberating all sentient beings from the eons of samsara’s suffering, and brings you closer to enlightening all sentient beings, which is the purpose of one’s life. In this life, one needs to benefit sentient beings, to work for sentient beings, this is the meaning of one’s life. That is the real meaning of life, so for this one needs to practice Dharma, to achieve the path, to cease all the numberless sufferings and their causes: karma and delusion, and the negative imprints. The motivation of one’s life is to be able to liberate all sentient beings from the oceans of sufferings in samsara and to enlighten them.

Reading the lamrim becomes a direct meditation, so you can expand from the lamrim prayers using Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, as well as Essential Nectar and the Lamrim Chenmo.

Before going to bed, recite 21 long Vajrasattva mantras. Vajrasattva practice is very important to stop the day’s negative karma from doubling, and tripling the day after. After three days, the negative karma is multiplied by eight, the fourth day by 16, and so on, getting heavier and heavier. Doing Vajrasattva practice purifies the day’s negative karma, as well as past lives’ negative karma. So you can see how important this practice is, how urgent it is to purify—it should feel so urgent that you can’t wait even one second before purifying! You can see in this way if you kill one tiny insect but do not purify this, then each day the karma multiplies, and it can become a huge thing if it is not purified.

We need to purify obstacles and delusions to achieve realizations on the path to enlightenment, so that we can do perfect work for sentient beings, not just to cause temporary happiness but to cause ultimate happiness, liberation from samsara, so they never experience the sufferings of samsara again, and ultimately to bring them to full enlightenment. This means ceasing even the subtle mistakes of the mind and achieving completely all the realizations and, by the way, purifying this life’s problems, such as relationship and health problems, which all come from negative karma. Also, disasters of the elements (from fire, wind, earth, and water) also come from negative karma. All this negative karma is purified along the way, so that you don’t have to experience catastrophes or health problems, such as cancer, or if you do experience them it is only a little bit.

This all depends on how strongly, continuously, and perfectly one does purification practice. The answer to being free from all these sufferings lies in how one does purification practice.

So you can see if you do not purify each day, then one’s negative karma multiplies, then it can become so heavy, and the result is that one can experience numberless eons in the lower realms and experience so much suffering. Just by reciting Vajrasattva mantras (28 short mantras or 21 long mantras) one can stop one’s negative karma from doubling. It is unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable, it is extremely essential, and not only can it purify today’s negative karma but also past negative karma from this life, past lives, and so on. This practice is extremely important.

You are already practicing Medicine Buddha. This is extremely important for success, very powerful for achieving enlightenment and being able to benefit others.

Also, you are already reciting Chenrezig mantra, for happiness for oneself and all sentient beings, particularly to develop compassion for all sentient beings and to be able to liberate all the numberless suffering sentient beings and bring them to enlightenment.

Normally, I say there are two mantras that everyone must do, even the cockroaches, even the crocodiles should do these. Why? Because they want happiness and do not want suffering. Unfortunately, the cockroaches and crocodiles cannot do it, because they are not human, so we have a human body, we are unbelievably fortunate, so we MUST take the opportunity. We have met the Buddhadharma and have faith, we are so fortunate, and must do these practices and especially recite these two mantras.

For the rest of the day, in the break time (from sitting meditation), try to perform all your actions with the thought of bodhicitta, the thought of benefiting sentient beings. Also, you can act from the mind of renunciation, or guru devotion, whatever meditation you are up to in the lamrim that you did in the morning. Try to live your life with awareness of the lamrim, meditation on the lamrim, keeping one’s mind in that, performing all one’s actions in that, including one’s meditation, but also when one is eating, walking, and working, keep one’s motivation in the lamrim and bodhicitta. This way, whatever you do becomes the cause of the highest success: enlightenment, and this means the highest success: happiness for all sentient beings.

Sentient beings have unimaginable suffering. Even one sentient being has been suffering without beginning, it is so unbearable, so we need to liberate them as quickly as possible from the oceans of samsara’s sufferings. If we don’t liberate them, then sentient beings continue to experience all the sufferings in samsara, such as the numberless hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, suras, asuras, and intermediate state beings, who are suffering and cannot stand even one more second of suffering. Think: I must liberate them and bring them to enlightenment, therefore, I have to achieve enlightenment as quickly as possible, and therefore I need to rely on a highest tantra deity practice. According to my observation, you have a strong connection to Heruka and Secret Hayagriva, so you can choose—the one to which you feel more strongly connected. You can take both initiations when the time comes. This is the reason you practice tantra, this is the motivation.

Here I have given you a project, a plan, what to practice, how to purify negative karma and collect merits, some idea how to quickly transform your mind in the path for quick realizations. Please find attached more specific preliminary practices for you.

Generally, for you to meditate and to do retreat, as well as social service, comes out very good. Social service can also mean service in a Dharma center, but it can also mean other services.

Regarding your request, I am not qualified as a teacher, but I accept as you have requested.

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

With much love and prayers,

Lama Zopa

Practices:

•  Refuge: 80,000
• Prostrations: 50,000, by reciting the names of the Thirty-five Buddhas
• Mandala offerings: 300,000
• Vajrasattva: Every night, 21 mantras
• Dorje Khadro (burning offering): 100,000
• Guru Yoga: Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga every day (one, two, or three sets)
• Tsa-tsas:
  • Deity: Three longlife deities (in one mold)
  • Deity: Lama Tsongkhapa
  • Number: 300,000 (divide between these different tsa-tsas)
• Nyung Nä retreat: three
• Medicine Buddha mantra: Every day
• Chenrezig mantra: Every day
• Four immeasurable thoughts: 500,000. This does not only mean reciting the prayer, but meditating on it. This is an unbelievable practice; each time you do it you collect inconceivable numbers of merits and purify so much negative karma. You should be unbelievably happy to do this practice, like you are the luckiest guy in this world.
• Deity practice:
  • Main deity: Heruka and Secret Hayagriva