Practices to Purify Negative Karma

My very dear one,
Thank you for your letters. This advice is the answer to your question regarding how to purify whatever non-virtue has been committed, to purify it, and, not only that, but to create vast amounts of merit in the shortest time, for your quick enlightenment, so you can liberate all sentient beings as quickly as possible and bring them to enlightenment as quickly as possible.

1. Prostrations to the Thirty-five Buddhas: 50,000
2. Arya Sanghata Sutra: Recite 2,000. After you have finished this number, then continue reading it in everyday life, a little each day.

Your Highest Yoga Tantra deity for your quickest enlightenment is:

1. Vajrakilaya
2. Heruka Five Deities

You can pick from these two, depending on which one you have more feeling for.

The most important thing is to practice the lamrim. I will send you some information on how to meditate on the topics and the length of time for each topic:

• Lower capable being: 4 months
• Middle capable being: 4 months
  • Bodhicitta: 5 months
  • Emptiness: 12 months

Recite the Thirty-five Buddhas’ names, prostrate to all the buddhas, Dharma, and Sangha in the ten directions, which are numberless, and all the holy statues, scriptures, and stupas in the ten directions, which are numberless. If you prostrate only to the Thirty-five Buddhas you create only 35 causes of enlightenment. So, the visualization is of all the buddhas, Dharma, Sangha, statues, scriptures, and stupas in the ten directions. With one prostration you create numberless causes of enlightenment. How many times? Six times a numberless number, which means numberless buddhas, Dharma, Sangha, statues, scriptures, and stupas. Then, by thinking of all of them as the same as the essence of the guru, you create six times a numberless number—the most extensive merit.

In this life, your main motivation should be to learn Dharma and do hard work for sentient beings. Working at Dharma centers offers two services: hard work for sentient beings and to help spread the Buddha’s teachings. So, do hard work for sentient beings, as explained, with strong bodhicitta, as much as possible.

With much love and prayers...

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...

My very dear Kim,
Thank you very much for your kind letter, I want to advise you to recite the Diamond Cutter Sutra seven times and, every day, perform 100 prostrations by reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas’ names. You can recite the rest of the prayer when you have finished. That is best, because every day we create so much negative karma.

It is best to do full-length prostrations if you have space in your house. This would be incredible. When you travel long distance by plane, or are sick and so forth, it is difficult to do them, otherwise you should try to do them. It is an emergency to do them because with all this negative karma, from birth and from beginningless rebirths, the terrifying lower realms can be there in any minute, any time when the breath stops.

The ultimate result is liberation and enlightenment.

With big love and prayer...

My very dear Kristen,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. According to my observations, it would be best for your purification if you make 500 stupa tsa-tsas, not the Tibetan kind, where there are 100 impressions on each mould, but 500 separate stupa tsa-tsas with the four powerful mantras inside them.

After you have made them you can decorate your house and the walls with them. You can make beautiful altars on one wall, with offerings of Christmas lights in front of each stupa. Or you can have them at your gate or in the dining room. You can put all the stupas on a table, piling them up, with many flowers and offerings around them. Then, family and visitors who come to your house can circumambulate around the table and stupas. You can use them for circumambulation, purifying so much negative karma and collecting so much merit every day, which enables you to create the causes to achieve enlightenment every day.

With much love and prayers...

My very dear one,
Thank you very much for your letter and I am sorry it took so long to reply.

It is great what you have been able to do—studying Yangsi Rinpoche’s commentary on the Lamrim Chenmo, especially discussing, reading, and doing analytical meditation on the lamrim, offering water bowls, practicing the Ever-flowing Nectar of Bodhicitta, Thirty-five Buddhas practice, Medicine Buddha, Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga, and animal liberation. This is amazing, really something to rejoice in. I wish everyone in the world could practice like this.

Regarding what practices to do for purification of sexual misconduct, doing 500,000 prostrations to the 35 Buddhas is a very powerful purification practice that purifies many eons of negative karma, not just karma created in one day, or in this life. The benefits of reciting just one name of the 35 Buddhas is incredible.

Also, for purification, it would be very good if you read the section on renunciation in the lamrim. I think here the essential idea is to understand how negative imprints are left on the mind and how this harms future lives. Understanding this is very helpful, to stop the pattern in future lives. By stopping this now it will make a difference in your future lives, so that you can live purely in morality, abstaining from breaking the vows. If you don’t live in morality then it makes other practices difficult; it makes it hard to have realizations because morality is the basis for those.

Of course, in Mahayana, if the three negative actions of one’s body (killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct) and the four negative actions of one’s speech (lying, gossip, slander, and harsh speech) are performed in order to benefit sentient beings, then they are permitted by Buddha. If the person’s attitude is coming from having a brave heart, pure attitude, compassion, bodhicitta, wisdom, and the thought of benefiting others, then from the individual’s side there is no harm engaging in these actions. There is no question when you are talking about a high level tantric yogi, having bodhicitta realizations, realizations of emptiness, and tantric realizations. His or her mind is already learned, so that means it is a pure basis. Because of that all their actions only become a quick path to achieving enlightenment.

When a practitioner of highest tantra, on the basis of the lamrim, guru devotion, and the three principles of the path, directs his or her actions as a cause to achieve enlightenment, then at that time one can take a different path to that of severe discipline. The practitioner can use a skilful means to create the conditions that directs one toward enlightenment, such as using the 64 arts of love as a condition to use desire on the path, using it to realize emptiness as the foundation, without losing one’s seed. In that way, one is able to generate great bliss, more intense than before, and to use that for deep meditation on emptiness. That meditation on emptiness is not done by the gross mind, so it is a very intense, powerful meditation that one is able to use to unite method and wisdom to eliminate the defilements and dualistic view. So, using these actions makes it a much quicker path for achieving enlightenment. This act becomes a very skillful action, like a roller coaster taking one quickly toward enlightenment.

One has to know what is most beneficial and also one has to base actions on the realizations of the three principles of the path.

With much love and prayers,
Lama Zopa

Practices:

• Refuge: 50,000
• Prostrations: 500,000 to the 35 Buddhas
• Vajrasattva: 7000. This is a big number to try to do all at once, maybe you can do some in retreat, but of course you still need to do it every day before bed, either one mala or 21 mantras. Especially if you have taken a highest Tantra initiation, it is very important to do this to purify vices.
• Samaya Vajra: 500,000. This is an easy one because the mantra is very short. This is a very powerful practice to purify one’s degenerate samaya and vows to one’s gurus.
• Dorje Khadro (burning offering): 500
• Guru Yoga: Continue daily to do Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga
• Tsa-Tsas Deity: Three types of Buddha: Chenrezig, Manjrushri and Vajrapani (it is on one mould); Number: 800
• Recite the longest mantra of Chenrezig with tonglen meditation: the special bodhicitta practice of taking and giving.

Lamrim Meditations

• Guru Devotion: Five months
• Graduated path common to the lower capable being: three months
• Graduated path common to the middle capable being: four months
• Graduated path common to the higher capable being:
  • Bodhicitta: one month
  • Emptiness: three months

Do this complete set three times then practice the lamrim meditations until you achieve realizations, starting with guru devotion, the graduated path common to the lower capable being, middle capable being, bodhicitta, and then emptiness.

My very dear Nina,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. As you asked for purification practices, I checked, and according to my divinations it comes out for you to do the following:

• 20,000 Mitukpa mantras.

If you have not received the Mitukpa initiation, then please visualize Mitukpa in front of you. As you recite the mantra beams of nectar are emitted, enter your body, and purify all your sickness, negative karma, harm from spirits, and defilements.

A condensed way to do the practice is to recite refuge and bodhicitta, the four immeasurables, the seven limb prayer, the mandala offering, and one lamrim prayer, then visualize Mitukpa in front of you. Beams are emitted, enter your body and mind, and purify your negative karma and defilements. Mainly focus on the purification of all the negativities you have collected since beginningless rebirths. Also, as you recite the mantra you can visualize all sentient beings are in your heart sitting on a moon disc, which is on top of a lotus. As you recite the mantra, beams of nectar enter you and purify all the beings of the six realms who are in your heart. Sometimes you can focus more on purifying yourself and sometimes on purifying other sentient beings. You can do this a little each day. You can also do some in retreat or do a few sessions over a weekend.

It also came out very good for you to do 200,000 prostrations by reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas’ names. This is extremely good.

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

With much love and prayers...