Enjoy Your Life with Bodhicitta
This letter was sent to a new student who wrote to Rinpoche requesting life practices, their main deity practice and advice on lamrim meditation.
My most dear, most kind, most precious, wish-fulfilling one,
According to my observation, your main deity is Solitary Yamantaka and Kalachakra. These two deities came out. You can practice whichever you have the stronger feeling for.
Your lamrim text for study and practice is the Matri Lamrim, the Red Commentary. There’s also Jampel Sherlung (Wyl: ’Jam dpal shes lung), the transmitted teachings of Manjushri. This came out, but I haven’t seen it in English, so you can use Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. This doesn’t mean you can’t use other texts—you can use others, but this one should be your main lamrim. You can use the other texts in your lamrim meditation to clarify the points.
When you meditate, after you’ve studied well, use the outline from Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand or The Essential Nectar. Read the text mindfully three times from beginning to end, studying it well. The explanations are also there in the general commentary. Do effortful lamrim meditation, following the lamrim outline three times, then do effortless meditation.
Regarding your preliminary practices:
Tonglen: 300,000.
You should know tonglen is the best meditation for developing bodhicitta and the hero that overcomes self-cherishing. It’s the quick way to become free from samsara, the quick way to attain enlightenment, and the quick way to free numberless sentient beings from samsara and bring them to enlightenment. You should be happy to do this practice for eons.
It’s the greatest purification of negativities and defilements collected since beginningless time, and we collect extensive merit by doing this practice. So it’s a quick way to develop compassion and bodhicitta, then quickly achieve enlightenment.
When we take the suffering of the numberless sentient beings numberless times, it’s the greatest purification of negative karma and obscurations collected since beginningless rebirth. We collect numberless merit, more than skies of merit each time we do tonglen, taking and giving. By giving our body, possessions and merits to others, it’s the greatest accumulation of merit.
Also do:
- Guru Yoga: 150,000.
- Nyung nä: As many as possible each year.
For the nyung nä two-day practice, we collect the most powerful, unbelievable merits. When we take the eight Mahayana precepts with bodhicitta, we collect unbelievable skies of merit. Also by doing the practice—the prostrations to the Thirty-five Buddhas, then prostrations to Chenrezig, then reciting mantras, it’s unbelievable, unbelievable.
On the second day we are fasting, not even drinking water, and if we do it well, even if we do one nyung nä, we will go to the pure land. We say goodbye to everyone who doesn’t practice Dharma or lamrim; we practice then we go to the pure land. It’s like an apple a day, goodbye doctor. It’s like that.
You should live your life, not only during the meditation session, but normally in your daily life—for example, while walking, sitting, sleeping or doing your job—do everything with bodhicitta, the ultimate good heart, as much as possible. Then your actions become bodhicitta, the cause for sentient beings to become enlightened.
You received the perfect human body this one time, just by some opportunity, some miracle. To achieve it again is almost impossible. It doesn’t last a long time, and death can happen at any time, therefore bodhicitta is the greatest practice. It has the greatest merits and purification, so live your life as much as possible with bodhicitta for the benefit of others.
Thank you very much. Enjoy your life with bodhicitta.
With much love and prayers ...