Sangha Practice Advice

Student: My mother very much wants me to live with her and take care of her in her old age. Is this more important than doing retreat or teaching?

Rinpoche: It is more beneficial to benefit many beings by teaching or practicing Dharma.

Student: I don’t feel comfortable teaching tantra (or even sutra really). I do not wish to be a guru and, according to what I understand, when one teaches tantra, immediately the guru-disciple relationship is formed. If I teach tantra to someone and then that person develops a negative mind towards me or treats me with disrespect, then this is unfortunate karma for both of us.

Rinpoche: If you do not give initiations or commentary, but just answer questions and lead discussions, then this does not create that special guru-disciple relationship.

Just live and teach and do what you think is best to benefit beings through the Dharma. Just do that for some time, a few years. That is all. It is not like a retreat; you don’t have to do it for a specific amount of time. Just live life and do what you see is best.

Student: I have a plan to do the 108 springs retreat (Chöd).

Rinpoche: It would be extremely beneficial for you to live, do retreat, and teach in that place. Not only do Chöd, but do Sur, and give charity to the spirits in the water practice.

My very dear Anila,
Thank you very much for your kind letter.

If you have good experiences with Vajrasattva it means you have karma with Vajrasattva, also that Vajrasattva is blessing you with these experiences.

When you have some bliss then you can make an offering of this to the merit field, the gurus, and the guru puja merit field.

Also, when you experience bliss, think the “I,” action, object, and appearance are empty, merely labeled by the mind, so they are empty. Or, you can make an offering of the bliss, with a mind of bodhicitta, and experience the bliss together with emptiness.

Regarding your question about Manjrushri, it is very good that you have a clear visualization of Manjrushri. It is very good to practice meditation, especially with guru yoga. This will help you to develop all wisdom and realize emptiness. So, make strong prayers to Manjrushri.

It is very important that you continue to do Vajrasattva practice every day.

According to my observations, it would be very good for you to recite 400,000 Vajrasattva mantras. You can do this in three ways: in retreat, strictly; four separate retreats of 100,000 mantras each time; do Vajrasattva practice while you are working, by doing a session in the morning and in the evening, then on weekends doing two days of four sessions; or within the year doing a week retreat now and then (as well as doing morning and evening sessions). If you do it while working, you have to keep the continuity of doing a session every day until you complete the amount of mantras. Or you can do half a day of Vajrasattva practice and half a day of work.

Please enjoy your life with devotion. You are extremely fortunate to have these realizations and experience bliss. It means you can have realizations, so you are very lucky.

With much love and prayers...

With regard to your meditation, you can train your mind in the generation stage until you sees all gurus as Buddha and all buddhas as the guru. Do this until you have very strong, stable devotion – not the devotion that arises after just a few hours or a few days, but devotion that arises spontaneously from the heart. You must work every day on guru devotion. This should be your fundamental practice.

In addition to that, until you feel that all the aims of this life are not important and you have no wish to acquire these—good reputation, comforts, material goods, happiness in this life—until the understanding arises that death can happen any moment, any day, and therefore the aims of this life have no meaning and are nonsense and childish, until these understandings arise in your heart spontaneously, until you achieve these realizations, you should meditate on the general lower path of the lamrim, the path of the lower capability being.

When you feel about samsara in the same way that prisoners feel about prison, day and night naturally wanting to be free, with an intense will to get out; when you feel as if your naked body is sitting on a thorn bush; when you feel as if you are in a nest of poisonous snakes; when you feel as if you are on fire; when you feel in these ways that samsara is unbearable and you don’t have the slightest attraction to samsaric pleasures, even in your dreams, but only the wish to be free spontaneously arises in your heart day and night, then you have realized renunciation in your mind.

You should also meditate on the true cause of suffering, the shortcomings of samsara, delusion, and karma. Also, meditate on the three, four, and six types of general sufferings of samsara, the twelve links, and the sufferings of the individual samsaric realms.

One should come to feel toward others as a mother feels toward her beloved child, that child is the most precious one in her heart—whatever problem the child has, even if the child were drowning or in a fire, the mother herself would jump in and rescue the child by herself alone. Meditate until that strong stable feeling arises simultaneously from the bottom of your heart toward all sentient beings without exception, not only wishing sentient beings to be free but wishing by yourself alone to free all sentient beings from suffering and achieve full enlightenment for all sentient beings.

For that purpose, we achieve enlightenment. This thought needs to arise spontaneously and effortlessly day and night, all the time. This is refuge, and you must meditate on bodhicitta until you gain this realization. Finally, the unmistaken realization of emptiness is when you can see subtle dependent arising and emptiness as one object, when you can see that things exist as labels depending on their base and on thought.

When you have the realization that anytime you want to see yourself as the deity in the mandala, it automatically happens that you do so without the slightest effort, this is the generation stage, as explained by Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche. Everything, every detail, is very clear. This also entails being able to concentrate for hours without a single thought entering, such as attachment or scattering thoughts.

This is how to go about meditating on these realizations. Without realizations of renunciation, you cannot attain bodhicitta realizations. Therefore, one needs to work on attaining renunciation, practicing analytical meditations on renunciation, bodhicitta, emptiness, guru devotion, and the generation stage. This is what you can do from now on.

You can do as many of these meditations as you can each day.