Your Life Has Become an Inspiration

My most dear, most kind, most precious, wish fulfilling one,
I heard that you have incredible zeal and perseverance and you are reciting prayers and doing virtuous practice every day for ten hours. Even reciting the Diamond Cutter Sutra every day is incredibly good. As I mentioned, that leaves many positive imprints for you to quickly realize emptiness, the absolute truth, the ultimate truth of I and phenomena. This is the cause of quickly becoming free from the oceans of suffering of samsara, that which we have been experiencing from beginningless rebirths.

I don’t know what other things you are doing, but this is incredibly worthwhile, and if it is done with bodhicitta you collect inconceivable, more than skies of merit, and you are able to remove both the gross and subtle obscurations. Then your mind becomes the omniscient mind, Buddha’s holy mind. Fantastic!

To tell you the truth, your life has become an inspiration even for me. I’m not joking. Thank you very much. It will be inspiring for so many people to practice Dharma, to practice the lamrim, the graduated path of the three capable beings. There is the graduated path of the lower capable being, to not be reborn in the lower realms and to get a higher rebirth; the graduated path of the middle capable being, to become free from samsara and to achieve nirvana forever; and not only that, the graduated path of the higher capable being, to become free from the lower nirvana, to achieve great nirvana, the total cessation of obscurations and completion of all realizations.

Here I am offering you advice for your lifetime practice, which is lamrim, then gradually you can practice tantra.

Your personal deity is Heruka, a Highest Yoga Tantra deity. Without practicing tantra, only practicing Mahayana sutra takes three countless great eons to achieve enlightenment. To complete the merit of wisdom and merit of virtue, the cause of dharmakaya and rupakaya, Buddha’s holy body and mind, by only practicing Mahayana sutra it takes three countless great eons. Therefore, we need to practice tantra.

Sentient beings take so long to become free from samsara and to achieve enlightenment, so we need to practice tantra. It’s unbelievable. That’s why we need to practice Mahayana tantra. By practicing the lower tantras, like Kriya Tantra, Charya Tantra and Yoga Tantra, we can achieve enlightenment in one life, because this is such a skillful method compared with what is mentioned in the sutra path. According to the sutra path, we have to first achieve a very long life, like a thousand years, then in that way we can achieve enlightenment in one life. So for sentient beings to become free from the oceans of suffering of samsara and to achieve enlightenment it still takes a long time. We can’t wait that long.

When we have incredible compassion there is the need to practice Highest Yoga Tantra, which has higher skills of method and wisdom. By practicing that, we can achieve full enlightenment in a very brief lifetime of this degenerate time. Therefore, for you to practice Highest Yoga Tantra, Heruka came out.

After you finish studying lamrim you can do the deity retreat. There is an enabling short retreat and there is a long three-year retreat you can do. If you are able to do it, there’s also the long retreat. Of course, generally it’s a lifetime practice, trying our best to achieve the deity, not just doing it for three years, then forgetting the deity. Not like that. Not having anything to do with the deity—not like that.

Heruka has Luipa, the outer mandala, which is a common practice in the Lower Tantric College and the Upper Tantric College. It’s very common to give the initiation and for people to practice this. There is also Five-Deity Heruka, so you need to take this initiation, then you can do the sadhana. There is also the Heruka Body Mandala, which is much more special. My suggestion is for you to do that in the future. You can learn that gradually, but at the moment, focus on lamrim. 

For you it came out very good to study the Lamrim Chenmo, Lama Tsongkhapa’s great commentary on the graduated path to enlightenment. It became elaborate because of the sections on calm abiding meditation, mental quiescence and right view, higher seeing, which is called special insight. Lama Tsongkhapa negated all the wrong views, many wrong views, then he explained the right view at the end. It is so good to learn this. However much you have read other lamrim texts, when you read Lama Tsongkhapa's teachings in the Lamrim Chenmo, you will think “I should have read this a long time ago, as the first thing.” It’s like you get that kind of thought.

The way Lama Tsongkhapa taught and wrote is depthless and so profound, so extensive, for us to understand Dharma. I think once you have studied Lamrim Chenmo, it’s also good to read Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand by Pabongka Rinpoche, the great Heruka yogi. As a basis, a meditation guide, you can use the outline in the Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand or The Essential Nectar. That shows the lamrim, but it’s not too short; it’s a little bit elaborate. It’s good to use one of these texts as a meditation guide, once you know the commentary.

If the main text for your study is Lamrim Chenmo then read it three times. Otherwise, if the main text for your study is Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand you should read it four times from beginning to end. Read it mindfully, because when you read it mindfully it becomes like meditation, so it helps you to actualize path to enlightenment. Once you achieve enlightenment you are able liberate numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to full enlightenment, peerless happiness.

To actualize the path to enlightenment we need to purify our negative karma and collect merit, therefore we need to practice the preliminaries.

Tonglen practice: 80,000 times.

Dorje Khadro (Skt: Vajra Daka) fire puja: 300,000 times. This is extremely powerful. It’s Lama Tsongkhapa’s golden Dharma. You don’t have to purify only your own negative karma; you can purify all sentient beings’ negative karma by absorbing it into the blessed black sesame seeds which are shaped like a scorpion on the plate. Think all sentient beings’ negative karma and obscurations absorb into that—the numberless hell beings, numberless pretas, numberless animals, numberless human beings, including your family, your friends, enemies and strangers, all the sura and asura beings, and all the intermediate stage beings. So like that, you offer all the negative karma and obscurations into the deity’s holy mouth.

This not only purifies you, it helps all the sentient beings, causing all their problems to be purified, including the virus disease [COVID19]. It’s a really, really good way to benefit sentient beings.

Tsa tsas: 400,000. Make small Lama Tsongkhapa tsa tsas, as well as a bigger one that comes from Domo Geshe Rinpoche. It’s a very beautiful Lama Tsongkhapa that people can put on their altar or in a stupa, for example, a Kadampa stupa and any other kind of stupa. Those tsa tsas that we put outside or inside can be used for circumambulation, for ourselves, our animals and our friends. We can go around the holy objects to create the cause of enlightenment for numberless sentient beings, if possible.

I will send you some pictures of the stupas at my Aptos house so you know how they are used for circumambulation after you make them. They are for everybody in the family to circumambulate, even for us to do so. We have them in Aptos, inside the house and outside, around the stupas we built, a little bit like Borobudur but smaller.

Chenrezig tsa tsas: We have a very beautiful Chenrezig tsa tsa here and at the Kopan Nunnery and Tsum Nunnery. There is Chenrezig and below it are Manjushri and Vajrapani. We can make a mold of that for the tsa tsas, because it is another very beautiful one. Share the total number of tsa tsas amongst these images.

Water bowl offerings: 100,000. You can offer water bowls in your house, if you can do it there. You can also offer with other people who need to do water bowl offerings; you can offer with people who also need to do the practice.

Many families in Singapore have household staff and at one student’s house the staff have been cleaning and offering water bowls for years. They do it very well. In many houses the staff help by doing the actual offering. The homeowners don’t do it so much but their staff make the offerings like that. So you can have a housekeeper or domestic worker doing it. You can explain the practice to them and they can make the offering. There’s one family in Singapore that has two domestic workers who have been offering water bowls for a long time. One worker had an arm problem; she couldn’t bend it or something, but by offering water bowls to Medicine Buddha she recovered from that.

You can do the water bowls in that way, or another way is at Kopan Nunnery where maybe a group of six or seven people, along with the nuns, offer thousands of water bowls. Even though you don’t offer them by yourself—you offer only a little and many people make the water bowl offerings at the same time —because you offer them together as a group, you can count [the total number], even if they are actually offered by other people. You can offer like this and in this way you’ll finish the number, like one hundred thousand, very quickly.

Regarding tsa tsas, normally if a large statue or stupa is built, the tsa tsas can go inside, because you need to fill the statue or stupa up with different mantras and holy objects. So that’s one way to use the tsa tsas. The other way to use the tsa tsas is to build a simple stupa like a throne, a square house, khambu tsekpa, and you put them inside, piled up nicely. Then people can circumambulate around the stupa to purify their negative karma and obscurations collected from beginningless rebirths. It is amazing, amazing! You can make the stupa any size, big or small, depending on how many tsa tsas you have. You can do also like that.

There are many different ways to use the tsa tsas. Also other people can have them in their house, so they can be put around a table which is set up nicely, then people can go around to purify their negative karma and collect merit and do prayers while they are going around. So the tsa tsas can be used like that, in different people’s houses, or you can build a stupa house or an actual stupa, so people can go around it. You can even take animals around it, so everybody creates the cause for enlightenment, for example, even the ants and the mosquitos. Whatever you find in the house you can put in a paper box and take the animals around the stupa.

The Singapore center made a paper box to pick up the insects in the house and take them around the holy objects. If there are a lot of insects, you can put them in a plastic bag and take them around the stupa. So many hundreds of thousands of insects or ants, whatever, like those insects and worms that are sold at the shop to feed the family’s pets, for their food. In this way, all of them create the cause of enlightenment; however many times you take them around. It’s unbelievably beneficial for them. That means, by the way, they are helping you to achieve enlightenment.

Those who cannot manage this or who do not have the money to make tsa tsas can print photos of the deities, the buddhas. They can print many photos and also do the water tsa tsas, putting the mold in the water. Of course, if you can manage tsa tsas, there is unbelievable merit.

You need to recite the Long-life Sutra because in my observation you seem to have life obstacles for this year and next year. So recite the Long-life Sutra sixty times. This doesn’t mean doing it only for yourself; there’s a whole motivation. If you have received a great tantra initiation, like the Chenrezig great initiation, you can do the White Tara practice for your long life.

You are most welcome to enlightenment for sentient beings. You don’t have to start everything at the same time. From these practices, you can read the Long-life Sutra once or twice—whatever you can do, you should start. Also start reading the lamrim and with that, maybe do one or two preliminary practices. You can do the practice slowly, slowly. You don’t have to worry; you don’t have to do everything in one day. Whenever there’s something you need to discuss with me, I’m always very happy to be in contact with you. So you can ask me questions; you can send me questions.

With much love and prayers ...