Advice on Practices for Life

My most dear, most kind, most precious, wish fulfilling one,
I heard that you have incredible zeal and perseverance and you are reciting prayers and doing virtuous practice every day for ten hours. Even reciting the Diamond Cutter Sutra every day is incredibly good. As I mentioned, that leaves many positive imprints for you to quickly realize emptiness, the absolute truth, the ultimate truth of I and phenomena. This is the cause of quickly becoming free from the oceans of suffering of samsara, that which we have been experiencing from beginningless rebirths.

I don’t know what other things you are doing, but this is incredibly worthwhile, and if it is done with bodhicitta you collect inconceivable, more than skies of merit, and you are able to remove both the gross and subtle obscurations. Then your mind becomes the omniscient mind, Buddha’s holy mind. Fantastic!

To tell you the truth, your life has become an inspiration even for me. I’m not joking. Thank you very much. It will be inspiring for so many people to practice Dharma, to practice the lamrim, the graduated path of the three capable beings. There is the graduated path of the lower capable being, to not be reborn in the lower realms and to get a higher rebirth; the graduated path of the middle capable being, to become free from samsara and to achieve nirvana forever; and not only that, the graduated path of the higher capable being, to become free from the lower nirvana, to achieve great nirvana, the total cessation of obscurations and completion of all realizations.

Here I am offering you advice for your lifetime practice, which is lamrim, then gradually you can practice tantra.

Your personal deity is Heruka, a Highest Yoga Tantra deity. Without practicing tantra, only practicing Mahayana sutra takes three countless great eons to achieve enlightenment. To complete the merit of wisdom and merit of virtue, the cause of dharmakaya and rupakaya, Buddha’s holy body and mind, by only practicing Mahayana sutra it takes three countless great eons. Therefore, we need to practice tantra.

Sentient beings take so long to become free from samsara and to achieve enlightenment, so we need to practice tantra. It’s unbelievable. That’s why we need to practice Mahayana tantra. By practicing the lower tantras, like Kriya Tantra, Charya Tantra and Yoga Tantra, we can achieve enlightenment in one life, because this is such a skillful method compared with what is mentioned in the sutra path. According to the sutra path, we have to first achieve a very long life, like a thousand years, then in that way we can achieve enlightenment in one life. So for sentient beings to become free from the oceans of suffering of samsara and to achieve enlightenment it still takes a long time. We can’t wait that long.

When we have incredible compassion there is the need to practice Highest Yoga Tantra, which has higher skills of method and wisdom. By practicing that, we can achieve full enlightenment in a very brief lifetime of this degenerate time. Therefore, for you to practice Highest Yoga Tantra, Heruka came out.

After you finish studying lamrim you can do the deity retreat. There is an enabling short retreat and there is a long three-year retreat you can do. If you are able to do it, there’s also the long retreat. Of course, generally it’s a lifetime practice, trying our best to achieve the deity, not just doing it for three years, then forgetting the deity. Not like that. Not having anything to do with the deity—not like that.

Heruka has Luipa, the outer mandala, which is a common practice in the Lower Tantric College and the Upper Tantric College. It’s very common to give the initiation and for people to practice this. There is also Five-Deity Heruka, so you need to take this initiation, then you can do the sadhana. There is also the Heruka Body Mandala, which is much more special. My suggestion is for you to do that in the future. You can learn that gradually, but at the moment, focus on lamrim. 

For you it came out very good to study the Lamrim Chenmo, Lama Tsongkhapa’s great commentary on the graduated path to enlightenment. It became elaborate because of the sections on calm abiding meditation, mental quiescence and right view, higher seeing, which is called special insight. Lama Tsongkhapa negated all the wrong views, many wrong views, then he explained the right view at the end. It is so good to learn this. However much you have read other lamrim texts, when you read Lama Tsongkhapa's teachings in the Lamrim Chenmo, you will think “I should have read this a long time ago, as the first thing.” It’s like you get that kind of thought.

The way Lama Tsongkhapa taught and wrote is depthless and so profound, so extensive, for us to understand Dharma. I think once you have studied Lamrim Chenmo, it’s also good to read Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand by Pabongka Rinpoche, the great Heruka yogi. As a basis, a meditation guide, you can use the outline in the Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand or The Essential Nectar. That shows the lamrim, but it’s not too short; it’s a little bit elaborate. It’s good to use one of these texts as a meditation guide, once you know the commentary.

If the main text for your study is Lamrim Chenmo then read it three times. Otherwise, if the main text for your study is Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand you should read it four times from beginning to end. Read it mindfully, because when you read it mindfully it becomes like meditation, so it helps you to actualize path to enlightenment. Once you achieve enlightenment you are able liberate numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to full enlightenment, peerless happiness.

To actualize the path to enlightenment we need to purify our negative karma and collect merit, therefore we need to practice the preliminaries.

Tonglen practice: 80,000 times.

Dorje Khadro (Skt: Vajra Daka) fire puja: 300,000 times. This is extremely powerful. It’s Lama Tsongkhapa’s golden Dharma. You don’t have to purify only your own negative karma; you can purify all sentient beings’ negative karma by absorbing it into the blessed black sesame seeds which are shaped like a scorpion on the plate. Think all sentient beings’ negative karma and obscurations absorb into that—the numberless hell beings, numberless pretas, numberless animals, numberless human beings, including your family, your friends, enemies and strangers, all the sura and asura beings, and all the intermediate stage beings. So like that, you offer all the negative karma and obscurations into the deity’s holy mouth.

This not only purifies you, it helps all the sentient beings, causing all their problems to be purified, including the virus disease [COVID19]. It’s a really, really good way to benefit sentient beings.

Tsa tsas: 400,000. Make small Lama Tsongkhapa tsa tsas, as well as a bigger one that comes from Domo Geshe Rinpoche. It’s a very beautiful Lama Tsongkhapa that people can put on their altar or in a stupa, for example, a Kadampa stupa and any other kind of stupa. Those tsa tsas that we put outside or inside can be used for circumambulation, for ourselves, our animals and our friends. We can go around the holy objects to create the cause of enlightenment for numberless sentient beings, if possible.

I will send you some pictures of the stupas at my Aptos house so you know how they are used for circumambulation after you make them. They are for everybody in the family to circumambulate, even for us to do so. We have them in Aptos, inside the house and outside, around the stupas we built, a little bit like Borobudur but smaller.

Chenrezig tsa tsas: We have a very beautiful Chenrezig tsa tsa here and at the Kopan Nunnery and Tsum Nunnery. There is Chenrezig and below it are Manjushri and Vajrapani. We can make a mold of that for the tsa tsas, because it is another very beautiful one. Share the total number of tsa tsas amongst these images.

Water bowl offerings: 100,000. You can offer water bowls in your house, if you can do it there. You can also offer with other people who need to do water bowl offerings; you can offer with people who also need to do the practice.

Many families in Singapore have household staff and at one student’s house the staff have been cleaning and offering water bowls for years. They do it very well. In many houses the staff help by doing the actual offering. The homeowners don’t do it so much but their staff make the offerings like that. So you can have a housekeeper or domestic worker doing it. You can explain the practice to them and they can make the offering. There’s one family in Singapore that has two domestic workers who have been offering water bowls for a long time. One worker had an arm problem; she couldn’t bend it or something, but by offering water bowls to Medicine Buddha she recovered from that.

You can do the water bowls in that way, or another way is at Kopan Nunnery where maybe a group of six or seven people, along with the nuns, offer thousands of water bowls. Even though you don’t offer them by yourself—you offer only a little and many people make the water bowl offerings at the same time —because you offer them together as a group, you can count [the total number], even if they are actually offered by other people. You can offer like this and in this way you’ll finish the number, like one hundred thousand, very quickly.

Regarding tsa tsas, normally if a large statue or stupa is built, the tsa tsas can go inside, because you need to fill the statue or stupa up with different mantras and holy objects. So that’s one way to use the tsa tsas. The other way to use the tsa tsas is to build a simple stupa like a throne, a square house, khambu tsekpa, and you put them inside, piled up nicely. Then people can circumambulate around the stupa to purify their negative karma and obscurations collected from beginningless rebirths. It is amazing, amazing! You can make the stupa any size, big or small, depending on how many tsa tsas you have. You can do also like that.

There are many different ways to use the tsa tsas. Also other people can have them in their house, so they can be put around a table which is set up nicely, then people can go around to purify their negative karma and collect merit and do prayers while they are going around. So the tsa tsas can be used like that, in different people’s houses, or you can build a stupa house or an actual stupa, so people can go around it. You can even take animals around it, so everybody creates the cause for enlightenment, for example, even the ants and the mosquitos. Whatever you find in the house you can put in a paper box and take the animals around the stupa.

The Singapore center made a paper box to pick up the insects in the house and take them around the holy objects. If there are a lot of insects, you can put them in a plastic bag and take them around the stupa. So many hundreds of thousands of insects or ants, whatever, like those insects and worms that are sold at the shop to feed the family’s pets, for their food. In this way, all of them create the cause of enlightenment; however many times you take them around. It’s unbelievably beneficial for them. That means, by the way, they are helping you to achieve enlightenment.

Those who cannot manage this or who do not have the money to make tsa tsas can print photos of the deities, the buddhas. They can print many photos and also do the water tsa tsas, putting the mold in the water. Of course, if you can manage tsa tsas, there is unbelievable merit.

You need to recite the Long-life Sutra because in my observation you seem to have life obstacles for this year and next year. So recite the Long-life Sutra sixty times. This doesn’t mean doing it only for yourself; there’s a whole motivation. If you have received a great tantra initiation, like the Chenrezig great initiation, you can do the White Tara practice for your long life.

You are most welcome to enlightenment for sentient beings. You don’t have to start everything at the same time. From these practices, you can read the Long-life Sutra once or twice—whatever you can do, you should start. Also start reading the lamrim and with that, maybe do one or two preliminary practices. You can do the practice slowly, slowly. You don’t have to worry; you don’t have to do everything in one day. Whenever there’s something you need to discuss with me, I’m always very happy to be in contact with you. So you can ask me questions; you can send me questions.

With much love and prayers ...

Lamrim Study and Practice

• Study The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, Lamrim Chenmo, by Lama Tsongkhapa. Also study the Middling Length Lamrim, which has more reasonings and debate cutting the wrong views, and Songs of Spiritual Experience, by Lama Tsongkhapa. 
• Also study Essence of Refined Gold by the Third Dalai Lama, with a commentary by His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
• Of course Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand by Pabongka Rinpoche. Your main text is this one. Please read this text four times and mark respectfully the passages you want further clarity on and ask qualified teachers like Geshe Dorji Damdul.
• Do effortful practice of guru devotion, following the lamrim outline—the graduated path of the three capable beings—and after that do effortless meditation.

Practices

• 10,000: Refuge.
• Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga: recite 200,000 migtsema mantras.
• Every year try to do two, three or four nyung näs, the fasting practice of Avalokiteshvara.
• Recite OM MANI PADME HUM, the mantra of Avalokitesvara, the Compassion Buddha, as much as possible. Also recite the Medicine Buddha mantra and do the short sadhana. Both are essential and very powerful in these degenerate times, also at the time of death.

Highest Yoga Tantra Practice

Your deity is Yamantaka, also called Vajrabhairava. This deity is a Maha-anuttara Yoga Tantra wrathful aspect of Manjushri. However, you must study lamrim first.

My most dear, most kind, precious wish-fulfilling one,
Please find below my advice for your life practice. Your deity is Most Secret Hayagriva. Also, do the following:

• 100,000 refuge
• 10,000 four immeasurable thoughts
• 110,000 Vajrasattva mantras
• 300 nyung näs. This is your main preliminary practice. 

So many people have done 100 nyung näs; it’s very common. You should do 300. Reciting the six-syllable mantra, OM MANI PADME HUM, purifies negative karma and collects extensive merit. You can count the drops of the Pacific Ocean, the drops of rainfall and snowfall and the dust of the earth, but the merit of reciting one mantra is far more than that. It’s unbelievable. With a bodhicitta motivation there are skies of merit, and in particular, you then generate compassion to all sentient beings.

Lamrim Chenmo should be your main lamrim text. Study it four times. For effortful experience of the lamrim meditations:

• Guru devotion: five months          
• Path of the lower capable being:  five months
• Path of the middle path being: two months
• Bodhicitta: four months
• Emptiness:  four months

Do this five times, then start effortless experience.

Do [effortful] meditation on guru devotion, no matter how many months or years it takes, until you get a stable realization that all the gurus are buddha and all the buddhas are the guru. If that happens for one or two days then disappears, it is the blessing of the guru, not the actual realization.

With that, then do more meditation on the path of the lower capable being, from perfect human rebirth up to karma. You don’t have to do the entire list of meditations in one day; you can do them gradually, step by step. Normally, it takes time, many months or years. Continue doing this until you have the effortless realization.

Putting effort like that is very important. This life’s happiness is not important, and you have to switch. Now you think that this life’s happiness is important, not future lives. Regarding the happiness of this life and the happiness of future lives, this life’s happiness is not important but the future lives’ happiness is very important. When the mind is totally clear about this, then our attachment, anger and so many problems—hundreds, thousands of problems—get stopped. The less you’re concerned about the happiness of this life and the more you’re concerned about the next life, the more your actions become Dharma. Your actions become only Dharma if you totally renounce attachment to this life.

The rest of the day, do everything—eat, walk, sleep and so forth—as much as possible with bodhicitta, for the happiness of sentient beings, to free them from the oceans of samsaric suffering.

Read the Diamond Cutter Sutra, then the Golden Light Sutra, and then the Diamond Cutter Sutra. Like that, go on until you die.

You are most unbelievably lucky to be able to do this, because you create skies of merit, good luck, by reading the Diamond Cutter Sutra. Even with the intention and without reading it, you get merit equal to numberless sentient beings having made charity of their body in the morning, afternoon and evening. You are unbelievably lucky. In one day the merit is just unbelievable and is preparation for quickly realizing emptiness. With the direct perception of emptiness, you cease delusions and karma, become free from true suffering and achieve nirvana, the blissful state of peace. With bodhicitta, you can achieve full enlightenment, and then you are able to free the numberless sentient beings from gross and subtle obscurations and bring them to the peerless happiness of full enlightenment, buddhahood.

Reciting the Golden Light Sutra brings so much peace in the world and your country and gives power to the leader of your country so that other countries can’t attack. It also brings prosperity to the country where you are and brings healing to all the sick people. It benefits all sentient beings, freeing them from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bringing them to enlightenment. It causes you to never ever be reborn in the lower realms and to achieve enlightenment quickly.

Thank you very much.

With much love and prayers...

My most dear, most kind, most precious, wish-fulfilling one,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. I am very sorry it took so long to reply. Regarding your request, I'm not qualified to be guru, but we can try. I accept, you try and I try.

Please study and read Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, also read Essence of Refined Gold. First read through Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand three times, from beginning to end.

If you are close to a center it is very good if you can study there and take teachings, and if you have questions after studying the lamrim you can ask the teacher there.

You are most welcome to enlightenment and most welcome to free numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric sufferings and bring them to full enlightenment. Thank you very much for your wish to do practice.

Please do every practice for all sentient beings—for every ant in all the universes; for every single fish in the Pacific Ocean; for even the very tiniest insect that you can't see with your eye, but only with a machine and for the biggest the size of a mountain; even for every mosquito, every worm, every chicken, every goat, cat and dog; and for every small fly that when you walk on the grass, those who fly away. Like this, do it for every sentient being. Thank you very much, most welcome.

Please find attached my advice for your life practice and additional material to support it. Please continue to make your life most meaningful with the thought of bodhicitta day and night and in every action you do.

With much love and prayers...

Practices

• Prostrations by reciting the Thirty-Five Buddhas’ names: 300,000
• Four immeasurable thoughts: 20,000
• Tsa-tsas
  • Deities: Lama Tsongkhapa and Mitukpa
  • Number of tsa-tsas: 20,000, divided between the two deities.

FOR EFFORTFUL LAM-RIM EXPERIENCE

• Guru devotion: five months.
  Practice correct devotion to the virtuous friend with thought and action by following the outline. Once you know the commentary and basic explanation, then use Essential Nectar or the outline from Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand as a guide book. For one week focus mainly on the advantages, then for one week focus on the disadvantages, then follow the basic outline. Go through the time in this way.The main thing is to spend time meditating that the guru is a buddha. Vajradhara said the guru is a buddha, the guru is the doer of all the Buddha’s actions, even nowadays. The guru does the work of all the buddhas and bodhisattvas, even nowadays. This is something definite, in one’s own view. Then meditate on the rest of the topics in guru devotion, so maybe spend two weeks on that one (the guru is a buddha) then go back again through the outline and in this way train the mind.

• The graduated path of the lower capable being: two months, from precious human rebirth up to karma. When you finish, go back again during those two months.
• The graduated path of the intermediate capable being: two months
• The graduated path of the highest capable being:
  • Bodhicitta: three months
  • Emptiness: one month

Repeat this cycle four times doing it from the start, guru devotion. Then afterwards do effortless meditation.

Your main deity

This is to free all the numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric sufferings and for them to achieve enlightenment in the quickest way. For that you need to achieve enlightenment quickly, so you need to practice Highest Yoga Tantra. The deity for you is Vajrakila. If you can, take this initiation from His Holiness the Dalai Lama or His Holiness Sakya Trizen when they give it in the world, wherever, if you can go. But there is no rush, first start with lamrim and the other practices.

My most dear, most precious, most kind one,
Thank you very much for asking for life practices. Probably at Kopan last time you gave me a letter requesting practices for outside. It could be yours. I’m so sorry it didn’t get done earlier.

• Refuge: 10,000
• Generating four immeasurable thoughts: 90,000
• Water bowl offerings: 100,000
• Mandala offerings: 30,000

You can choose one lamrim text, for example, Lama Tsongkhapa’s Great Lamrim, Pabongka Rinpoche’s Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, Manjushri’s Own Words or The Essence of Refined Gold. You can choose any lamrim text in English and study it from beginning to end three or four times, but not just reading fast like a puja, no. By thinking, using it for meditation.

Practice effortful meditation, following the lamrim outline twice through. The first time, spend fifteen months on emptiness, but the second time you can do five or ten months on emptiness. Then do effortless meditation.

Your deity is Heruka Five Deities or Kalachakra. Whichever you have stronger faith for and feel closer to, decide on that and meditate.

Thank you very much for spending your life practicing lamrim.

Put effort into doing nyung näs. It is for two days and is a very intensive, very powerful, quick way to generate compassion. It is a quick way to get enlightened and a quick way to be born in the pure land. If you can, do at least four nyung näs each year, but more is better. Try to do that.

With much love and prayers...

My most dear, most kind, most precious, wish-fulfilling one,
I am very sorry for the long delay in replying to your email. Please do the Daily Meditation each morning; that is what you should do first thing. You must begin the morning with that. [See The Method to Transform a Suffering Life into Happiness (Including Enlightenment) which has now replaced the Daily Meditation.]

Your preliminary practices are:

• Refuge: 5,000
• Dorje Khadro: 10,000

You should read the Golden Light Sutra. It is not necessary to finish it every day, but you should read it for your whole life depending on your time and how much you want to read. Read it with bodhicitta, wishing to free the sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering as quickly as possible and bring them to full enlightenment. For that you need to achieve enlightenment as quickly as possible. If you read the Golden Light Sutra with that motivation, it is unbelievable, unbelievable purification. You collect skies of extensive merits, and it brings all the success, including enlightenment. Also, read the sutra for peace in your country and in the world.

You should also study one lamrim text. There is the Great, Middle and Short lamrim by Lama Tsongkhapa. The short one is called Hymns of Experience and there is a commentary to that by the Third Dalai Lama called The Essence of Refined Gold. Then there is Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand by the great enlightened being Pabongka Rinpoche and Sacred Words of Manjushri [Tib: jampal zhel lung] by the Fifth Dalai Lama. There are different lamrim texts available in English and of course in Tibetan there are many more. Choose one lamrim text and read it from beginning to end. If there are things you don’t understand, you can write them down in a book and discuss with any geshes that come to teach or Western students who have studied well.

Practice effortful meditation on the lamrim outline starting with guru devotion, correctly devoting to the virtuous friend with thought and action. Meditate on the lamrim outline five times, then do effortful meditation.

Your deity is Secret Vajrapani. I haven’t done the retreat yet, so I can’t give the initiation but there are other lamas who can do it. Kyabje Chöden Rinpoche did the retreat at Sera Monastery because we requested the initiation at Land of Medicine Buddha. Once you have the initiation you can do the practice and read the commentary.

After having generated bodhicitta you can do more on tantra, the generation stage, and just a little bit of meditation on the completion stage to plant a seed.

Also do nyung näs as much as you can. Complete any number of nyung näs each year. Doing a nyung nä well one time purifies the negative karma collected from beginningless rebirth and collects extensive merits. When you do nyung nä with bodhicitta you collect more than the sky of merits with each OM MANI PADME HUM mantra, besides the nyung nä itself, and especially if you generate compassion to all sentient beings, then it is a quick way to be reborn in a pure land. Once you are born in Amitabha Buddha’s pure land there is no way to be reborn in the lower realms and if you are born in Vajrayogini’s pure land you will definitely become enlightened there.

Thank you very much. Please enjoy your life, making it meaningful by practicing Dharma. Not only meditating with bodhicitta but especially walking, sitting, sleeping and working with bodhicitta as much as possible.

With much love and prayers...