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Advice book

Practices to Purify Negative Karma

How Vajrasattva Practice Purifies Negative Karma

Date of Advice:
Date Posted:

A student sought guidance for her practice. Rinpoche gave the following advice.

My dear one,
Your deity is the five-deity Heruka, so it is good to do that practice. Since there is a commitment after taking the initiation, at least you are reading the words, and that makes a big difference, it puts a positive imprint for quick enlightenment.

Do Vajrasattva practice every day. At least recite the short mantra 28 times or the long one 21 times, to stop the negative karma created that day from multiplying. Otherwise if you don’t purify the negative karma, it doubles each day, and after fifteen days the karma of killing a small insect becomes the same as having killed a human being.

Even if you don’t have any story of having killed, if you don’t purify the negative karmas that have been created that day, then each one multiplies and after 15 days it becomes the same as having killed one human being. Then after 18 days each negative karma collected with the body, speech and mind—and there are so many, so many, so many—increases 131,072 times. This was explained by the great enlightened being Pabongka Rinpoche in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.

When you die, each and every one of the negative karmas collected today becomes like the number of dust particles of the mountains. It’s unbelievably, unbelievably heavy, so there is no other way but to go to the lower realms and suffer for eons and eons. The worst lower realm rebirth is in the hells, but there are others. Who knows—you may be born as a chicken that is trapped in a cage and killed for many lifetimes, or as one of those lobsters that is boiled to death in the hotels and so forth. Usually all those fish, chickens and so forth who are killed have been butchers themselves many times in past lives, and so it goes round and round in circles.

If you do Vajrasattva practice, even just reciting the long mantra 21 times or the short mantra 28 times, and especially with the remedy of the four powers, it not only purifies today’s negative karma but also your past negative karma from this life and past lives, so there is no multiplication. Instead there is unbelievable, unbelievable profit. It makes the negative karma so much lighter. Depending on how you purify, and especially if you do the practice with bodhicitta and emptiness, that much incredible negative karma gets purified and you don’t have to experience the suffering result.

Therefore, even if you just do Vajrasattva practice for example, it is said in the teachings by Sakya Pandita that, “A wise person’s negative karma may be big, but it can easily be made small. A foolish person’s negative karma may be small, but it becomes big.” This means that somebody who knows how to do the Vajrasattva purification can make their negative karma weak, but for those who don’t know how to do this, their negative karma will become strong.

With much love and prayer...

Purifying Negative Karma

Date Posted:

A Spanish student wrote that after eighteen years of contact with the Dharma, he understood that he must purify the heavy karma collected in this life. He requested practices to purify the karma from all his negative actions and asked Rinpoche to remember him in his prayers.

Practices:

Effortful experience of lamrim:

  • 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 lamrim prayer and do direct meditation on the lamrim. 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...

Mantras for Purifying Negativities

Date of Advice:
Date Posted:

This practice advice was written in Tibetan for a monk at Kopan Monastery and translated into English by Ven. Khedup Sherpa.

Recite the following:

  • Vajra Armor mantra: three malas
  • Most Secret Hayagriva mantra: four malas
  • Chenrezig Senghe Dra (Avalokiteshvara Simhanada) mantra: three malas

Visualize, with great compassion of the guru-yidam, rays of white light nectar pouring down from the heart and entering into your body, purifying and washing down from the two lower doors all karmic delusions and negative obscurations accumulated from beginningless time. Visualize this as much as possible, without your mind being distracted.

After this, visualize all the sickness and spirit harm washing down in the form of blood and pus, snakes, frogs and scorpions. After this, generate great belief that all negativities are cleared and sicknesses are cured. All the negativities and delusions come out from the lower doors and enter into the mouth of the Lord of Death, which is wide open, nine stories down under the ground, and they become nectar. The Lord of Death closes his mouth and it is sealed tightly with a heavy, golden double vajra. It is said that if we visualize this way, it will help to increase our lifespan. So, it is good to do like this.

The main practice for you is the recitation of the above-mentioned mantras. The operation did not come out well in my mo.

In general, death is uncertain, so it is good to prepare for death all the time. The teachings, mainly on lojong, bodhicitta, giving and taking, should be integrated into a lifetime practice, combined with the five powers. Also, it is important to keep in mind that the practice of death needs to be done, combining this with the five powers. It is important to keep these practices in mind, believing that you will die now. I hope you will follow these practices.

I, by the birth name of Thubten Zopa, send this with prayer.
February 14, 2011

Practices for Purification

Date Posted:

A Japanese student asked Rinpoche what practices to do for purification.

My very dear one,
Thank you very much for coming all the way from Japan, so we are able to meet this time.

You asked about purification practices. It came out good to recite the Arya Sanghata Sutra every day for four years. It is not necessary to finish reading the sutra every day; just read as much as you can. If you can  finish reading it every day, that would be best, but it is not necessary.

The Arya Sanghata Sutra purifies unbelievable karma—just hearing the word, the sound, immediately purifies the extreme negative karmas (Tib: tsam mä nga)—the five uninterrupted negative karmas, which are killing one’s father, mother or an arhat, drawing blood from a buddha and causing disharmony in the Sangha. If any of these karmas are collected, we are born immediately in the extreme hell realm, where there is extreme, heavy suffering for the longest time. This is the very first benefit mentioned in the Arya Sanghata Sutra.

There is an unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable, limitless sky of merit when we read the Arya Sanghata Sutra. It is most amazing!

Study the commentary and meditate on the Heart Sutra and also study teachings by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Study the Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga commentary and do the practice. Also study Lama Tsongkhapa’s middle lamrim from beginning to end, and meditate on the outline. Discuss this text when someone like Geshe Thubten Sherab comes to Japan, and ask questions about anything you don’t understand.

Also do Vajrasattva practice every night.

With much love and prayers...

Tsa-tsas for Purification and Merit

Date Posted:

A student wrote to Rinpoche asking for advice on purification practices.

Dear Bob,
To repay kindness, for your own purification, and to collect merit, please make a total of 90,000 Lama Tsongkhapa and long-life tsa-tsas. Also, please make a small stupa.

With much love and prayer...

 

Purification Practices, Water Bowls and Tonglen

Date Posted:

A student wrote requesting practices especially for purification.

Dear Norman,
The following practices would be best for you to do:

  • 70,000 prostrations while reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas’ names
  • 200,000 Vajrasattva mantras
  • 9,000 tsa-tsas (the three types of Buddha: Manjushri, Vajrapani, Chenrezig)
  • 200,000 guru yoga (migtsema—Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga, counting the migtsema with the meditation)
  • 50,000 tonglen—the bodhicitta practice (see explanation below)
  • 10 nyung näs

Please write out the Sanghata Sutra. This collects the most merit, as mentioned in the Arya Sanghata Sutra. You should write out the complete text three times in this life. You can write a little bit each day.

Please read the Golden Light Sutra. It would be very good if you can read it twice a month.

For you, water bowls is a major preliminary practice, but you can share it with other people. If there are five or ten people doing the water bowl preliminary practice, you can do it together. The smallest number for you to do is 600,000, but 800,000 came up many times in my divinations. Maybe you can go to a place where there are other people and you can do them together. You set up the offerings together, then everyone offers everything that has been set up and you can count all of them in your number, including the ones the others have set up. When you make water bowl offerings with others, you all do the work setting them up, but when you offer them, every single person counts every single water bowl. So, in this way, you can finish a large number quicker.

When you are working, you can offer and count some water bowls every day. Then, on weekends, etc., you can make time for a retreat to do that. If there is a place to put many water bowls, you can offer them together with some other people. Then, another time, in one year, offer water bowls together with other people. Anyway, according to your karma, this is the number it seems you need to do. Every day when you offer a certain number of water bowls, you can count them, just to add to the number. Then each year, you could do some form of retreat.

If you don’t find other people to help you or if there is no place to offer many water bowls, then you are most welcome to come to my house in Aptos or to the retreat land in Washington: Buddha Amitabha’s Pure Land. There are many water bowls in these places and you can help the other people to offer them. Also, in Aptos, the nuns offer many water bowls and you can help them and count all of them. Usually there are many water bowls offered there every day, big ones and small ones. This way it is easy. So, you can spend some time there: a week, a month, two months, whatever. It is also like that in Washington. You can do that every year—come and spend some time there. This way, it also helps those Sangha members who have the responsibility for the bowls; it gives them less work.

On tonglen preliminary practice

This is a most powerful practice to do. It involves making the requesting prayer together with the meditation of giving and taking. Here, each time when you take the sufferings and the causes of sufferings, including the negative imprints, take all sentient beings’ sufferings, including the delusions and karma, together with the negative imprints, and also the undesirable environments. In the hell realm, there is the ice fire, ice mountain, burning ground, and iron house. The pretas’ environment is a very depressing place with no water, and is so hot and cold. The human environment is a very dirty place full of thorn bushes. You take the environmental sufferings as well in the form of black pollution, and you give them to the ego and destroy the ego—one’s worst enemy. This is the greatest demon that has interfered so far with your being able to achieve enlightenment. It hasn’t allowed you to achieve enlightenment, liberation from samsara, and hasn’t allowed you to enlighten all sentient beings, not even one. In these ways, you can see how one’s own ego is not only an enemy to you but an enemy to all sentient beings.

Also, you collect vast amounts of merit by taking all the sufferings, the causes of suffering, and the undesirable environments. Then, when you give, you collect vast amounts of merit by offering your body as a wish-fulfilling jewel, and by offering your possessions to all sentient beings. However many possessions you have, you give them to sentient beings, and collect that much merit. Because sentient beings are countless, you collect countless merits with each possession you offer.

Then, by giving all the past, present, and future merits—the three times’ merits—you collect so much merit. You give all your future happiness—your present happiness, and from the next minute’s happiness up until enlightenment, including liberation and your realizations—to every single hell being, hungry ghost, animal, human, sura, and asura being. You can see that sentient beings are countless. By giving to each of them, you collect so much merit. If you really knew how much merit you collect, you would faint!

There is a prayer from Nagarjuna’s teachings:

Whatever sufferings there are, may they ripen on me; whatever happiness I have, may it ripen on sentient beings.

With the first part, you do the practice of taking. With the second, you do the practice of giving. Then, you count on the mala (each time you recite the verse). I think, from this practice, you will be blissed out and sentient beings will be blissed out!

Lamrim meditations:
  • one month lower
  • four months middle
  • four months bodhicitta
  • three months emptiness

The main deity for your quickest enlightenment is Guhyasamaja. 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 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.

With much love and prayer...