Preliminary Practice Advice

My most dear, most kind, most precious, wish-fulfilling one,
Thank you very much for your kind letter and for clarifying what happened in your life.

As you asked for practices, the most important thing when you first wake up, what you should meditate on, is the morning motivation, The Method to Transform a Suffering Life into Happiness (Including Enlightenment). This changes your motivation for the whole day.

Now regarding your daily practices, a very important one is reciting OM MANI PADME HUM mantra and also reciting the Medicine Buddha mantra and names. These are very important: Chenrezig and Medicine Buddha.

Medicine Buddha is for success. The biggest success is to achieve enlightenment for sentient beings, to free them from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to enlightenment by yourself. For that you need success. Of course, you can do the Medicine Buddha practice for success in becoming free from samsara, success in attaining a higher rebirth, success in meeting the Dharma and any other success that you need in this life.

Because you asked generally for practices, here I am sending you many years of practice. This could be a whole life of practice. I am advising that you don’t have to feel, “How dare he send so many practices!” You don’t have to freak out or think about jumping off the roof or jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. You don’t need to feel like this.

Please do these preliminary practices, as much as you can, gradually. Do what you can, one by one, or two together, like that. Try that and take it easy. You don’t have to think that everything has to be done in one day. Don’t think like that.

Preliminary Practices

• Prostrations to the Thirty-Five Confession Buddhas: 50,000
• Mandala offerings: 500
• Dorje Khadro (burning offering) mantras: 300,000
• Water bowl offerings: 7,000
• Four immeasurable thoughts: 300,000 recitations. You are so lucky, because when you think about each one of the four immeasurables you collect more than skies of merit of good karma. You are able to achieve realizations quickly and achieve enlightenment quickly and you are able to free the sentient beings from samsara and bring them to enlightenment quickly.

Lamrim Study and Practice

The main lamrim text for you is The Essential Nectar, a commentary by Geshe Rabten. There is also the root text, but the commentary explains in more detail.

The Essential Nectar is your meditation guide book and the other commentaries you can read are texts like Liberation in the Palm of your Hand, Lama Tsongkhapa’s Middle Lamrim or Great Lamrim.

When you read the text mindfully from beginning to end, that is the meditation. Anything you don’t understand you can write down in a book and ask a geshe or a student who has studied the lamrim well.

Read The Essential Nectar from beginning to end four or six times. Read it through slowly, relating it to your own life.

To gain effortful lamrim experience, meditate according to the lamrim outline. Go through the cycle of meditations three times, spending the specified number of months on each subject, and then do effortless meditation.

Highest Yoga Tantra

When you take your main deity initiation, then you can do retreat on that; the enabling retreat.

The reason for taking Highest Yoga Tantra initiations and doing the practices is because this is the quickest way to achieve enlightenment in this life, then to be able to free the numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to enlightenment the quickest.

Your yidam [tantric deity] is Five-Deity Heruka. The other one is secret Chenrezig, Gyalwa Gyatso. You can take the initiation of this in the future, but maybe practice Heruka. You will need to take the Heruka initiation and you can take the Gyalwa Gyatso initiation also, but practice Heruka unless you have a very strong feeling for Gyalwa Gyatso.

Your daily life practice is the Chenrezig sadhana written by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, The Inseparability of the Spiritual Master and Avalokiteshvara. I think that is according to Highest Yoga Tantra. Once you have received Highest Yoga Tantra initiation you can practice Lama Chöpa Jorchö. You can do the extensive guru yoga after receiving Highest Yoga Tantra initiation.

Preliminary practices

• 100,000: Refuge
• 400,000: Tsa-tsas, the saviours of the three types [Tib: rik sum gönpo] Manjushri, Chenrezig, Vajrapani. All three come together as one tsa-tsa. Do some tsa-tsas as statues with clay and also some can be done on the water, like that. Those are two possibilities.
• 300,000: Vajrasattva
• 100,000: Prostrations to the Thirty-Five Confession Buddhas

Lamrim Study and Practice

The main lamrim for you is Manjushri’s Own Words [The Sacred Words of Manjushri; Jam päl zhal lung] by the Fifth Dalai Lama. Of course you can read Lama Tsongkhapa’s lamrim, Pabongka Rinpoche’s lamrim and other lamrim texts, but the main one to study is Manjushri’s Own Words.

Read the text through four times from beginning to end. The things you don’t understand mark with orange color as an offering like painting a buddha statue or thangka, or like offering color or robes to holy objects. In other words, mark the text in a respectful way. Don’t mark the texts with black ink. Marking texts in a disrespectful way creates negative karma and is a cause to be born in the lower realms. One Western professor who is very good in Buddhism said that in the past many times he marked many manuscripts with black color right over the letters and created the cause to be born in the lower realms many times.

Also you can write down all the questions you have, everything you don’t know, in a book and discuss these afterward with the geshes or Western students who have done very good study in the Basic Program and Masters Program. If there is someone who has studied well then they can help.

Do effortful meditation on the lamrim, then effortless experience.

Your special deity is Yamantaka, Thirteen-Deity or solitary, whichever you feel a stronger connection with. 

Preliminaries

• 900,000:  Water bowl offerings. Don’t worry [about the number]; just do whatever you can each year. You don’t have to worry, just carry on with your life. However, you need to know how to offer the water bowls; just offering water is not enough. Just offering to Buddha, Dharma, Sangha is not enough. Please read my most recent teachings [on water bowl offerings.]  Of course if your time is limited, then you can make the offerings in a big group. It’s better with bigger bowls.
• 100,000:  Dorje Khadro Fire Puja.
• 400,000: Prostrations to the Thirty-five Buddhas. Don’t worry about having to finish this in a short time. No. Do some prostrations every day and when you have more time you can do more and when you have less time, do less. Count and in that way you will get them done. Doing the Thirty-five Buddhas practice with prostrations is very common in the Lama Tsongkhapa tradition. Lama Tsongkhapa did 700,000 prostrations at Wolka by reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas’ names and received realizations like rainfall. Many lineage lamas did prostrations every day in the same way.
• 50,000: Do Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga with migtsema and  counting. There is a commentary to Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga that I did, so you should read that.
• 7,000:  Vajrasattva mantras.
• 3,000: Tsa-tsas of the Thirty-five Buddhas, Lama Tsongkhapa, Manjushri and Chenrezig.

Lamrim study and practice 

The main lamrim text for you to use is Manjushri’s Own Words, [The Sacred Words of Manjushri; Jam päl zhal lung by the Fifth Dalai Lama.]  Read this text three times to fully understand it. If there is something you don’t understand, mark it very lightly with orange color. You need to respect the holy objects by offering color, as it is like making offerings to statues, stupas and so on. You could also write down the things that you don’t understand in a book and when an older student who has studied well comes, you can ask them questions, or you can ask a geshe.

With effort, train the mind in meditation. Follow the lamrim outline four times and after that, do effortless meditation. 

As a guide book, use either The Essential Nectar or the outline from Manjushri’s Own Words. After you read the commentaries, that doesn’t mean you can’t read other lamrim texts.  You can also read Lama Tsongkhapa’s lamrim and Pabongka Rinpoche’s Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.

The Golden Light Sutra:
Try to read it once every week, so this means you read a little every day and in this way complete one recitation every week. Continue this for your whole life. You will see how unbelievably beneficial this is; by reading it you will read about the unbelievable benefits. This is an unbelievable, most precious teaching that brings you to enlightenment in such a quick way. It is unimaginable, unimaginable. You can purify and collect so much merit and liberate the numberless sentient beings from the oceans of suffering and bring to them to enlightenment.

Tonglen:
This is a special practice of taking and giving, a special bodhicitta practice. This is taking all sentient beings’ sufferings and causes and giving all one’s merits to others. This practice is like being a Dharma Olympic hero; this is an extremely special powerful way to practice bodhicitta.

This is a most powerful way to practice, and you definitely collect extensive merits. Every time you do this practice it brings you closer to enlightenment and by the way, closer to liberation from samsara and closer to liberating the numberless beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and closer to bringing to enlightenment the numberless hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, human beings, suras, asuras and intermediate state beings.

Please read the section on bodhicitta, exchanging yourself and others, in the lamrim, to understand more.

The Diamond Cutter Sutra:
This practice is unbelievably, unbelievably, unbelievably beneficial. Please read some of the benefits. If you can memorize it, that is the best thing, because then you can recite it while you are driving the car, walking, or even in your dreams.

Advice after giving tsa-tsa commitment:
Of course if the tsa-tsas are bigger it means more merit, but if smaller then less expensive.

What to do if you have to make a lot of tsa-tsas:
My first emphasis is not to think that these are like clay bricks or something that you use to build a house. You need to remember these are buddhas, so treat them like buddhas, with great respect. Treat them like living buddhas; they are manifesting for you. You can put them in a very nice box, piled up respectfully.

Advice after giving lamrim meditation commitments in preliminary practice:
This means for this period of time, lamrim is your main meditation. After you finish, start again and whatever realization you did not have, then spend more time on that. If you did have realizations, then you don’t need to spend as much time. So in this way, step-by-step, train your mind to have the realization of renunciation of this life, and the realization of bodhicitta and emptiness.

So every day you should still do some meditation on emptiness. After you have realizations in the three principal aspects of the path, then practice tantra—try to generate realizations in the generation and completion stage.

Live your life with bodhicitta motivation during the break time from sitting, so that whatever you do as much as possible every day becomes a cause of enlightenment, a cause of happiness for all sentient beings. This is the best life, the best preparation for death, then every day is most beneficial for all sentient beings, of great benefit to this world and by the way you achieve enlightenment.

My most dear, wish-fulfilling Isabel,
Thank you very much your kind letter and news. My idea is that you need to start the preliminary practices first, then you can start the actual retreat later. You can do the preliminaries that are needed now, slowly, slowly, while you are working for the centers and helping the centers.

In essence, for so many years since you became a Buddhist and particularly since you divorced your husband, your devotion has grown continuously, more and more. Your life is completely dedicated to sentient beings—particularly to the FPMT, the teachings of Buddha, and particularly to Lama Tsongkhapa and to me, and of course to His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Lama Yeshe. This is bringing happiness to the world and to Spain.

Wherever you are, you help the peoples’ mind, so it’s very good. Even though you didn’t have much opportunity to study extensive philosophy and teachings, the essence is lamrim—you are studying, meditating and guiding people in this, so it’s very good.

So even giving you skies filled with wish granting jewels is not enough.

With much love and prayers...

Preliminary practices to do:

• Refuge: 50,000
• Prostrations by reciting the Thirty-Five Buddhas: 100,000
• Mandala offerings: 200,000
• Chanting the Names of Manjushri: 30,000 recitations. This is the first preliminary you should focus on.
• Vajrasattva: 500,000
• Tonglen: 30,000
• Tsa-tsas: The deity is Thousand-arm Chenrezig - 100,000

I have an example of the particular tsa-tsa mold I am suggesting. There is also a smaller mold of this same aspect at Kopan Nunnery, but we have the bigger mold at the Aptos house. I would like to send you some money for the cost of tsa-tsa material, so when you get to that time and are making them, please let me know the costs. Once you have made the tsa-tsas, give them to people who can paint them gold. They are a very good present for people, as well as for centers; they can have them all lined up on a wall or high on a ledge.

My very dear Julie,
Your main deity for quick enlightenment and to be able to enlighten sentient beings soon, is Chakrasamvara (Five Deities). Kalachakra also came out well. It is very good to take Kalachakra initiation and do the Kalachakra Guru Yoga practice or at least chant the mantra every day after the initiation, if you wish. If you feel a stronger connection with Chakrasamvara, then do Chakrasamvara practice, because that is your main deity.

The following number of preliminary practices is to purify negative karma collected from beginningless rebirth and to collect extensive merit, so that you have the conditions for realization on the stages of the path to enlightenment for sentient beings.

• Refuge: 300,000
• Prostration: 1,700
  • It is very good to do some prostrations every day. Many practitioners do 100 prostrations every day. This is an unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable way to collect extensive merit. It is unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable, most powerful purification.
• Vajrasattva: 600,000
  • You can do a large number of mantras in a retreat, otherwise at other times recite some in daily life, then again do retreat, to finish a larger number, then again do some mantras in daily life. You can do the mantras like this, or if you want to do everything in the form of retreat, this also can be done.
• Dorje Khadro Fire Puja: 3,000
• Water bowls: 7,000
• Tsa-tsas: 100,000
  • The tsa-tsas can be divided among Mitukpa, Kunrig and Kalachakra. 
• Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga: 300,000
  • Recite and count migtsema, therefore I hope you are here at the teachings.

Lamrim meditation:

• Two months: lower path of lamrim meditation
• Four months: middle path
• One month: bodhicitta
• Four months: emptiness

Then after that, meditate on the graduated path topics, one-by-one, starting from the precious human rebirth. Try to achieve the realizations one-by-one, no matter how many weeks, months or years it takes.

With much love and prayers…