Quotations and Sayings

If you have a good heart, especially bodhicitta, it stops the suffering of your family and all sentient beings, and brings happiness to everyone, up to enlightenment.

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The way to solve the problems in your life is to cherish others.

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If you cherish others as you cherish yourself, then everyone will treat you in the same way as they treat themselves.

Numberless buddhas and bodhisattvas love every sentient being, every ant, every mosquito, every one of us. Numberless buddhas and bodhisattvas love you.

1. May the mainland Chinese government realize that His Holiness Dalai Lama is the embodiment of all the buddhas, be totally devoted to his holy wishes, and invite His Holiness to China. May billions of Chinese see His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s face and hear his Buddhadharma. May they totally enjoy the happiness of Dharma and may they offer Tibet back to the Tibetan people. May His Holiness Dalai Lama be the religious and political leader and establish Buddhadharma, so that there will be millions more bodhisattvas than before. May that help to spread Buddhadharma in the world and may people have the opportunity to achieve enlightenment.

2. May we continue forever to offer service to the monasteries that preserve and spread Dharma, offering salaries to all the teachers who educate and offering all the expenses for the geshes’ examinations and the Jamyang Kunche debate. May special offerings be given to the monks who memorize thousands of texts and expand and spread the Dharma. May the monasteries produce more realized and learned pure good-hearted teachers, spread Dharma all over the world and bring all sentient beings to enlightenment.

3. May we be able to build stupas and scriptures, especially the two very large Maitreya Buddha statues, to purify sentient beings’ karma and defilements, and bring them to enlightenment as quickly as possible. May we especially generate love and kindness and bodhicitta, and bring sentient beings to enlightenment as quickly as possible. May all the funding be found immediately.

4. May Dharma books produced by the organization be most beneficial for sentient beings, not only by reading or doing practice, but by keeping them in the house, seeing and touching them. Just by that, may all their holy wishes succeed immediately according to holy Dharma.

5. May all the suffering of sentient beings be healed and may their negative karma be purified immediately. May they immediately actualize the path of guru devotion, the three principal aspects of the path, the two stages and the unified state of Vajradhara in this lifetime. May everybody immediately abandon thoughts of harming others and only become a source of happiness to others.

6. May all the hospice patients who joined the FPMT purify the negative karma accumulated from beginningless rebirth immediately. May they die with compassion for sentient beings, and faith in the Buddhadharma, with no fear of death and may they be extremely happy. May they be born in a pure land and get enlightened. May they receive a perfect body, meet a perfect teacher and achieve enlightenment.

7. May Geshe Sopa Rinpoche and all the gurus have a long life.

You should be like the guru and your mind the disciple, or you should be like the police and protect your mind. You know what is right and beneficial based on what is beneficial for yourself and others.

The most happy thing in my life, the most fulfilling thing, is to work for and to benefit sentient beings. Even just the mere thought to cause happiness for sentient beings, to benefit them, to free them from suffering—this is the BEST offering to all the Buddhas and bodhisattvas, the best puja, this is what pleases their holy minds most.

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One must practice with the bodhisattva attitude every day. People can't see your mind, what people see is a manifestation of your attitude in your actions of body and speech. Pay attention to your attitude all the time, guard it as if you are the police, or like a nanny cares for a child, like a bodyguard, or like you are the guru and your mind is your disciple.

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The office is a place for Dharma practice. When one goes to the office, dealing with people, one has to recognize it's a place to practice lamrim, the three principles of the path, tantra, and the six paramitas. The six paramitas fit very well with daily life—they offer protection for you. Everything is there.

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When you recognize your problem comes from your concept or your concept is the problem, you don't blame others

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The essence of collecting the most extensive merit in your daily life is through the attitude of always keeping your motivation in bodhicitta, the thought to benefit all sentient beings. The more sentient beings you think about, the more merit you collect.

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Try to think, whatever you do, 24 hours a day, of sentient beings: when you chant mantras, eat, go to sleep, go to work, and when you are talking; if you can, keep your mind in that thought.

Then, with every action you collect numberless merits. Not only do you have a happy, satisfying, fulfilling life every day and every moment, but, especially, it is the best thing for the future, and not only liberation from samsara, but enlightenment.

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If you are suffering, use it as the cause to bring happiness to others. This way, whatever kind of life experience you have, you use it on the path. There is no interruption to Dharma practice and one’s life is most beneficial.

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Each one of us is responsible for all other living beings’ happiness besides our own. As a result, your loving kindness is the most wish-fulfilling thing in life, more precious than anything else in the world. That makes for a most satisfying, fulfilling life.

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Whatever problem one experiences, one can think about the benefits of problems and how they are beneficial for one’s own life, to develop one’s mind in compassion, to develop loving kindness, patience, wisdom, and all the positive qualities for the path to liberation.

By thinking of the benefits, one develops this precious quality, this most healthy positive way of thinking that brings happiness, and that stops you from harming yourself and harming others.

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Use problems as ornaments, seeing them as extremely precious, because they make you achieve enlightenment quickly, by getting you to achieve bodhicitta. Experience these problems on behalf of all sentient beings, giving all happiness to sentient beings. This is the ornament.

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Dedicating your life to achieving lamrim realizations, with the goal of liberating numberless beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bringing them to enlightenment is what I regard as the most important thing in the world.

It would be wonderful if you could recognize that your own attachment is the cause of every single problem that you experience. Problems with your husband, wife, children, society, authorities, everybody; having a bad reputation; your friends not liking you; people talking badly about you; hating your teacher, your lama, or your priest; all this truly comes from your own attachment. You can really check up…

We Westerners always have to blame something external when things go wrong, "I'm not happy, so I'd better change this." We're always trying to change the world around us instead of recognizing that it's our own attachment that we have to change. 
   — Lama Yeshe
   From Every Problem on Earth Comes From Attachment 

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My approach is to expose your ego so that you can see it for what it is. Therefore, I try to provoke your ego. There’s nothing diplomatic about this tactic. We’ve been diplomatic for countless lives, always trying to avoid confrontation, never meeting our problems face to face. That’s not my style. I like to meet problems head on, and that’s what I want you to do, too.
   — Lama Yeshe
   From Questions and Answers in Ego, Attachment and Liberation

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You must recognize that your real enemy, the thief who steals your happiness, is the inner thief, the one inside your mind, the one you have cherished since beginningless time. Therefore, make the strong determination to throw him out and to never let him back in.
   — Lama Yeshe
   From Developing Equilibrium