Daily Practice Advice

Dear one,
Vajrayogini is your main deity to achieve enlightenment quickly for sentient beings. In order to receive this initiation you need to receive another Highest Yoga Tantra initiation. So, in the future, take an initiation that is good for you from a lama. Most importantly, you must develop the mind of lamrim and the three principal aspects of the path. To achieve realizations based on guru devotion, first you should study and read the whole lamrim, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. You can read the lamrim of Pabongka Rinpoche [Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand], the Essence of Refined Gold by the Seventh Dalai Lama, and also teachings from geshes in your country who have taught lamrim from a long time. Those teachings could be helpful for you to get a clear understanding. It is not just only reading a lamrim book and meditating on the path, sometimes also you need to do practices of strong purification, accumulation of merits, and guru devotion.

If you can, do purification practices such as prostrations reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas' names, repeating Vajrasattva mantra before going to bed, and making extensive dedication such as the King of Prayers. If you can do this, it could benefit sentient beings, in the same way as the bodhisattvas and Buddha. Collect the merits of mandala offerings and making offerings to the great Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha every day. You can offer food, water, flowers, and lights in front of the altar, holy objects, Guru Puja merit field in the ten directions of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, or statues, scriptures and buddhas in the ten directions. So, every day, please do this as much as possible, you will create many merits. By generating bodhicitta you collect vast amounts of merit. Practice bodhicitta meditation: taking other sentient beings’ sufferings and giving them all your merits and possessions; giving to others and guiding them to enlightenment; generating loving kindness for all sentient beings; and offering service to all sentient beings with a sincere heart, knowing that sentient beings are the most kind beings in your life.

Be kind to others every day of your life, inside and outside your house, also to other beings such as animals, and you will collect merits. The other method to collect vast amounts of merit is to practice every day rejoicing in your own past, present, and future merits; the merits of sentient beings of the three times; and the merits of buddhas and bodhisattvas of the three times. This practice of rejoicing collects so much merit in a minute, in an hour, at any time. The highest merit is from practice with the guru: giving service; obeying advice; and doing things that please the guru, other people’s guru, and your own guru with whom you have made a Dharma connection.

Practicing like this is the best way to take care of yourself and others. When you practice like this with guru devotion, you purify negative karma, collect merits, and take care of countless sentient beings.

With much long prayer...

My very dear one,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. I am very happy to know of your interesting practice, especially your practice of bodhicitta and dedicating your merits to all sentient beings, so that their sicknesses are healed. I saw that you are reciting mantras but I didn’t see that you are practicing guru yoga—Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga or Shakyamuni Buddha Guru Yoga, or the most extensive one, which is Lama Chöpa.

Lama Chöpa might be difficult for you to do at the moment, as to be qualified you need a Highest Yoga Tantra initiation. Until then, you can practice Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga, meditating on the oneness of the guru-deity, looking at Buddha from your side and seeing oneness. That causes realizations on the path to enlightenment.

Also, reciting a prayer of the stages of the path to enlightenment (lamrim prayer) every day plants the seeds of the realizations of the whole path to enlightenment every day, and that means you become closer to realizing the path to enlightenment every day, which means you become closer to enlightening all sentient beings every day. This is by doing direct meditation on the stages of the path to enlightenment (any lamrim prayer*). This is a fundamental practice in one’s daily life. On the basis of this, then you can do elaborate meditations on the stages of the path to enlightenment, step by step, until one achieves stable realizations. If you don’t have much time, then at least do meditation on the lamrim, which means reading a lamrim prayer mindfully.

Also, it is very good if every year you can do some retreat, it can be a week, a month, or many months long, it doesn’t matter how long it is. It can be a deity retreat or a retreat on the lamrim, combined with preliminary practices, or a preliminary practice retreat combined with lamrim.

With much love and prayers...

*Note: See, for example, the lamrim prayers composed by Lama Je Tsongkhapa.

My Very Dear Keith,

Thank you very much for your kind letter. I am very happy to hear that you want to dedicate your life to daily practice, and also the preliminaries. Here are the answers from my Mickey Mouse observations for your daily practice.

For guru yoga, it would be best to do Chenrezig. In the meantime, you can do the Eight Verses practice, the Everflowing Nectar of Bodhicitta practice. The Chenrezig practice of reciting OM MANI PADME HUM is the most important practice in daily life. The very heart of the purpose of life is to develop compassion for every single hell being, animal being, hungry ghost, human being, sura, and asura being, because the purpose of life is to benefit others. To benefit others, what drives this? The Buddha of Compassion. Without the Buddha of Compassion, it’s like not having fuel in a car or an airplane, you cannot use the vehicle to bring the people to the place where they wish to be for their happiness. Without compassion, you don’t care about others’ happiness, so you don’t help others. If there is compassion, you bring peace and happiness to your family, society, neighbors, area, country, the whole world – to all sentient beings – those who are in different universes and realms, to everyone, without leaving out even one being; you help to benefit everyone.

Compassion helps you develop the wish to be able to help others. Then you see you need general wisdom, Dharma wisdom, and in particular, the wisdom to realize emptiness. What causes the need to achieve enlightenment is compassion generated toward every living being. What causes us to achieve enlightenment is compassion. Because of compassion, you collect extensive merit. That helps you to realize emptiness, and that wisdom causes you to eliminate all the defilements, both gross and subtle. Because of the vast amounts of merit that you collect all the time, with the root of compassion for countless beings, you are able to complete the path. Therefore, you are able to remove the gross and subtle defilements and achieve full enlightenment.

After you achieve enlightenment, you are able to perform perfect works without any effort. You simultaneously work for sentient beings, until everyone becomes enlightened. It is like one sun rising, but it reflects simultaneously in every body of water in the world in the ocean and even in one dew drop. So, working for sentient beings becomes like that. You benefit them without the slightest mistake and bring everyone from happiness to happiness to enlightenment, including yourself.

So, you see now how compassion is the most important thing, the most important realization. It makes life most meaningful and every single action of yours most beneficial for all sentient beings. Therefore, you need to receive the blessings of the special deity of compassion, and that is the Compassion Buddha, Avalokiteshvara.

Please get the book on the Teachings from the Mani Retreat. It explains the benefit of the mantra and the Chenrezig (Avalokiteshvara) practice. If you get that, I don’t have to explain too much here.

As for preliminary practices, probably you have some understanding why to do these. Lama Tsongkhapa asked Manjushri, “What is the quickest way to achieve enlightenment?” Manjushri replied, “Practice purifying the obstacles to realizations, collect the necessary conditions due to merits, and one pointedly request to the guru.” This means, with the mind of guru yoga – the pure mind seeing the guru as Buddha – with that devotion, making one pointed requests to grant blessings, just like all the lineage lamas who actualized the path and achieved enlightenment. This is what they did. All the realizations and enlightenment that they achieved, enabling them to enlighten all other sentient beings, this is the profit, the advantage, that comes from these practices, including one pointedly requesting the guru with that pure mind of devotion.

For the actual body and mind training of the path, the root of the path is guru devotion, in order to have stable realizations. Then, there are three principle paths to enlightenment: renunciation, bodhicitta, and right view. Then, there is the uncommon path: highest tantra and the two stages.

Your preliminary practices are as follows:

Water bowls: 90,000
Tsa-tsas: 70,000
Mandala offerings: 300,000
Guru yoga: 80,000
Dorje Khadro: 90,000
Tonglen – the bodhicitta practice: 100,000

Tonglen is making the requesting prayer together with the meditation of giving and taking. Here, each time when you take on sufferings and the causes of sufferings, including the negative imprints, take all sentient beings’ sufferings, including the delusions and karma, negative imprints, and also the undesirable environment. For example, in hell, there is the ice fire, the ice mountain, the burning ground, and the iron house; then the pretas’ environment is a very depressing place with no water, and so hot and cold; the humans’ environment, it 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 own 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, or to enlighten all sentient beings, not even one. In these ways, you can see that one’s own ego is the enemy of all sentient beings, not only an enemy to you.

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

Then, by offering all the past, present, and future merits, the three times’ merits, again, you collect so much merit. You offer all your future happiness, present happiness, from the next minute’s happiness up until enlightenment, including liberation and the realizations to each and 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 many merits. You can’t imagine. I think if you really knew how much merit you collect, you would faint, fall down – it might be difficult to get up! I hope it’s not for a long time! I hope people won’t take you to a hospital or a psychologist. I hope your family or friends don’t take you to the hospital because of it!

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 you will be blissed out from this practice and the sentient beings will be blissed out!

As for meditations on the lamrim, please do the following:

Five months – lower scope
Three months – middle scope
Two months – bodhicitta
Four months – right view

With much love and prayer...

My dear one,
This will be your morning practice.

In the morning, the first thing is to rejoice, thinking, “I didn’t die, especially today. Today I have a precious human body, especially, a perfect human rebirth.” Here, you rejoice in each one of the ten richnesses, thinking how precious each one is. Then, make a strong determination to practice Dharma on the basis of correctly devoting to the virtuous friend. This is the basis of the Hinayana, then the Mahayana, then tantra. Even though you’re not engaged so much in tantra now, this is for the future.

Think about impermanence and death. Death can happen any moment, even today, within this hour, even in the next minute. So, what can one do? Think, “I must renounce the ‘I’ and cherish others, because all suffering comes from the ‘I,’ while all virtue and happiness, up to enlightenment, comes from cherishing others. So, others are the most precious beings in my life.” You can do these meditations while reciting the Chenrezig mantra, OM MANI PADME HUM. In order to better understand the disadvantages of cherishing the “I” and the advantages of cherishing others, you can read some of the talks I’ve given in the past.

At this stage, after doing the meditation on giving up the “I” and cherishing others, you can practice tonglen. You can read about this practice in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. After doing tonglen, make the determination that there is nothing else to do but cherish all sentient beings. Then think, “What sentient beings need is happiness. What they don’t need is suffering. I must free them all from suffering and its causes and bring them to enlightenment. Therefore, I am going to do all the virtuous practices and activities for that purpose. (“Virtuous practice” here means traditional practices such as mandala offerings, etc. “Activities” here means eating, sleeping, working, etc, which are not normally labeled virtuous).

So, this becomes your daily motivation for the rest of your life’s activities. Also, it becomes part of the practice of integrating your whole life into the practice of the five powers. Of these five powers, this is the power of the attitude of life, the way of turning one’s actions into bodhicitta, such that all actions naturally become the cause of enlightenment. Also, in this way, if you have a commitment to recite OM MANI PADME HUM, it gets done at the same time. If you’re able to recite ten malas a day, that is best. But if you’re able to do more, of course, that is still better. So, the practice is done together with many things.

In addition, before the main meditation in the morning, you can do prostrations to the Thirty-five Buddhas. This is done by repeating each name of the Buddha three times in a row continuously while prostrating. When you’re lying flat on the ground, you go to the name of the next Buddha. Afterwards, recite the names of the seven medicine Buddhas. Then complete the rest of the confessional prayer that includes the four opponent powers. If you have time, you can do the general confession after this. At the end, you can do the praise to Chenrezig that comes from the Nyung Nä practice, which gets recited while doing prostrations.

There may be occasional days when you aren’t able to do this meditation practice, but if in general you can keep doing it, it will have an incredible result. This kind of practice will bring you to the pure land at the time of death, or to another great rebirth—one of the best rebirths. And, of course, in this way, you liberate sentient beings quicker from the ocean of samsaric suffering.

At this point, you need to meditate on the actual body of the lamrim on the basis of guru yoga. Therefore, you need to practice guru yoga. The purpose of this practice is to receive the blessing of the guru. For this, you can use the practice that I put together. Later, when you have received a great initiation of highest tantra, you can do Lama Chöpa combined with Jorchö. When you do the lamrim prayer which is in Lama Chöpa, meditate on guru devotion when you recite the first verse of the prayer or after you have completed the prayer, which becomes a direct meditation if you recite it mindfully. You can do the same with other parts of lamrim meditation, such as the perfect human rebirth.

Every day before you go to bed, you should again recite the names of the Thirty-five Buddhas three times quickly, without repeating them. Then recite one mala of the Vajrasattva mantra, either while prostrating or while sitting and doing the visualization. If you do the mantra recitation with prostrations, two very powerful methods are combined. Then, generate strong faith that all negative karmas are being purified. The stronger one’s faith is here, the more one is able to purify.

My advice is that everyone who wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering should practice Chenrezig meditation to develop compassion for sentient beings, and practice Medicine Buddha for success.

After doing purification practice in the evening, make an extensive dedication, including the King of Prayers. The other very important prayer is Lama Tsongkhapa’s “taking the essence day and night,” that is, whatever section of the lamrim you are trying to actualize, to use that in your daily activities, to perform your daily activities with that thought. During your actual sitting time, as well as in the break time, try to have the continuous thought of the lamrim meditation that was practiced in the morning. These might include, for example, guru devotion, renunciation of samasara, bodhicitta, the kindness of sentient beings, suffering, or emptiness—looking at the self and object as dreams, how one sees them as truly existent while they are not.

The main emphasis should be on cultivating bodhicitta. Your sitting mediation and all the activities in the day should be performed with the mind of bodhicitta; the thought to benefit others should be the heart of your practice twenty-four hours a day. That involves watching and checking your mind twenty-four hours a day, each day of your life.

Studying or working for a Dharma center means working for the teachings and for sentient beings, so working for a center accomplishes both services.

My very dear Nina,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. It is great that you wish to practice these two – Medicine Buddha and Chenrezig. This is my general advice to everyone. It is very important in everyday life to do these two practices. Since you want to achieve enlightenment for sentient beings, liberate sentient beings from suffering and the causes of suffering, bring sentient beings to enlightenment, and at least liberate yourself from the oceans of sufferings, it is very important to do these two practices.

Also, it is very important to recite one lamrim prayer every day. This includes all the stages of the path to enlightenment within it and it is very important to recite it without your mind being distracted. Then, this becomes a direct meditation on the lamrim and that plants the seed of enlightenment. Also, in some lamrim prayers there are a few lines of the tantric path. Then, when you have taken a highest tantric initiation you can recite your personal deity’s tantric stages of the path. It is very important to recite that every day. This prepares your mind for the tantric path to enlightenment and helps you achieve enlightenment quickly.

All of these practices I am giving you (in enclosed sheets) should all be performed on the basis of guru devotion. If you haven’t taken a highest tantric initiation then you should practice Guru Shakyamuni daily meditation or Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga, which ever you feel closer to, then you will receive more blessings.

As you have already received the Chenrezig great initiation, you are qualified to practice the sadhana and recite the mantra. So, even while you are doing your job in the daytime, your mind should focus on Chenrezig with devotion while reciting the mantra as much as possible. Then, you can visualize nectar flowing out from Chenrezig and entering your body, speech, and mind. You are completely purified and the four things are completely purified (disease, spirit harm, negative karma, and defilements). So, sometimes focus on purifying, and sometimes meditate on the two types of bodhicitta: exchanging yourself and others and the seven point mind training: six causes and one effect. While meditating on these two, recite the Chenrezig mantra. You can also meditate and recite at the same time while meditating on tonglen – taking on suffering and the all the undesirable things and then giving loving kindness, compassion, and all your merit of the three times and the resulting happiness up to enlightenment. Your body becomes a wish-granting jewel for all sentient beings. You can also mentally offer all your belongings.

You can find a link to the longest Chenrezig mantra in the FPMT Catalogue. [See also Rinpoche's advice on Chenrezig practice.]

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

With much love and prayers...

My very dear one,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. Regarding your mother, I checked regarding her practice. Please pass this on to her.

Every day, she can practice Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga or Guru Shakyamuni Buddha daily meditation practice, before absorbing the merit field into her (of Lama Tsongkhapa or Shakyamuni Buddha). She should do one lamrim prayer and meditate on each section of the lamrim for two weeks, so, for instance, spend two weeks on guru devotion, then two weeks on death and impermanence, then two weeks on karma, etc. In this way, she can work through the lamrim, and then go through it again, starting from the beginning, until she has stable realizations. She can follow the outline in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand or Essential Nectar. Read slowly through these books. At least read Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand completely twice.

In the morning, she should generate a bodhicitta motivation. She can do this while reciting OM MANI PADME HUM. She can find a good bodhicitta motivation from one of my talks or from the Wish-fulfilling Golden Sun.

Then, if possible, if she can do prostrations to the Thirty-five Buddhas by reciting their names. She should prostrate to her altar, to many pictures of the merit field, and holy objects. If she can do thirty-five prostrations once, twice or three times a day, that would be best.

Before going to bed she should recite one mala or half a mala of Vajrasattva and remember the four opponent powers. It would be great if she can do this.

With much love and prayers to you and the whole family, and I hope to see the whole family soon.