Advice
for Daily Practice
Lama Zopa Rinpoche
Source : Lama Yeshe Wisdon Archive
When a student asks Lama
Zopa for advice regarding daily practice, Lama Zopa makes individualized
recommendations using this set of instructions and detailed form.
Personal Dharma practice advice for
………………………………………………..
Welcome to the journey to enlightenment.
The purpose of life is to benefit other sentient
beings and the greatest benefit you can offer them is to liberate them from
their suffering and its causes. In order to do that you need to attain
enlightenment and to do that you need to achieve the lam-rim, the gradual path to
enlightenment.
To make that possible, you have to purify all the
negative karma and defilements you have collected over your beginningless rebirths
and accumulate extensive merit. These are the conditions necessary for you to
actualize the path.
Life is like last night’s dream. Don’t
hold on to it as too solid or inherently existent. The following advice on
practice is given with the intention of making your life—this most
precious human life that you have received just this once—as meaningful
as possible. In the past, you have sacrificed your life and died numberless
times creating the cause of suffering in samsara but have almost never sacrificed
your life for the sake of Dharma, especially trying to bring other sentient
beings to enlightenment. So, do as much of what follows as you can, and
don’t worry—be happy.
PRELIMINARY PRACTICES
The purpose doing preliminary practices is for you to
purify obstacles to achieving realizations of the path to enlightenment for the
sake of all sentient beings—defilements, negative karmas and
downfalls—and collect extensive merit. Furthermore, to cause such
realizations to ripen within your mind, you need to receive your guru’s
blessings through the practice of guru yoga.
Therefore, you should base each preliminary practice
on the particular guru yoga that you do, such as the Six-Session Guru Yoga, the Guru Puja [Tib: Lama Chöpa], the Lama Tsong Khapa Guru Yoga [Tib: Ganden Lha Gyäma] and the guru yogas
of various deities, such as the Tara Guru
Yoga. (Copies of these—and many other prayers and
practices—are available through the FPMT Foundation Shop.)
When practicing guru yoga, focus on the guru yoga
meditation at different points of the practice—for example, after
visualizing the merit field or during direct meditation on the lam-rim at the
stanza on guru devotion—in order to develop guru devotion and realize
that the guru is buddha. Meditate on the guru as buddha with the help of
scriptural citations and logic as well as your own personal experience that
supports the mind that sees your guru as all the buddhas and all the buddhas as
your guru.
Refuge …………….
Prostrations …………….
Mandala Offerings …………….
Vajrasattva ……………..
Samaya Vajra …………….
Dorje Khadro (burning offering) ……………..
Water Bowl Offering ……………..
Guru Yoga ……………..
Tsa-tsas:
Deity
……………..……………..
Number ……………..
Deity
……………..……………..
Number ……………..
Deity
……………..……………..
Number ……………..
(What to do with
the tsa-tsas you have made: you can give them as presents for
somebody’s altar; place them on a shelf high on a wall, just below the
ceiling, and offer small lights to each; put them into big statues or stupas as
relics; put them on a mountain in a respectful place protected from the
weather, such as a dry cave; or put them into your local Dharma center’s
tsa-tsa house, which can be a simple stupa, if it has one.)
Heart Sutra ……………..
Diamond Cutter Sutra ……………..
Sanghata Sutra ……………..
Nyung-nä retreat ……………..
Three-year retreat ……………..
OM MANI PADME HUM recitations ……………..
Don’t worry about the large numbers—this
is a plan for life. If you work at a job or are studying, the way to complete
these practices is to do a little each day. Of course, you can get more done in
retreat, which can mean a weekend, seven or fifteen days, a month or two, a
year or more, or even a lifetime. You can do one, two, three or more retreats a
year, according to your convenience. This is just to give you an idea of the
various ways in which you can complete your preliminaries.
When doing preliminary practices in retreat, always
spend the first session concentrating on guru yoga emphasizing guru devotion
meditation. Then do about a half hour of lam-rim meditation. For the rest of
the session—an hour, an hour-and-a-half or two hours: you can decide the
length—do your preliminaries. If you retreat like this, your
preliminaries retreat also becomes a lam-rim retreat: your lam-rim meditations
make your preliminary practices much more powerful for purification and the
accumulation of merit, and your preliminary practices make your lam-rim
meditation extremely effective in quickly transforming your mind into the path
to enlightenment.
In addition to the specific practices given here you
should also meditate on and recite the short or long
Avalokiteshvara mantra, or both, and the Medicine Buddha
mantra as many times as possible every day.
Lam-rim meditation
Base all your lam-rim meditations on guru devotion
and meditate every day for whatever length of time you can—15, 20, 30
minutes or an hour—until you receive stable realizations.
The graduated path of lower scope
……………..
The graduated path of intermediate scope ……………..
The graduated path of highest scope:
Bodhicitta ……………..
Emptiness ……………..
Shiné: object of meditation
……………..
To gain a background understanding of and detailed
information on the lam-rim and how to meditate on it, read Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand,
by Pabongka Rinpoche.
For everyday use, I recommend Essential Nectar, by Geshe Rabten, which
provides instruction on guided daily lam-rim meditation. The other way is to
follow the outline of the The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to
Enlightenment [Lam-rim
Chen-mo] or Liberation in the
Palm of Your Hand. You should memorize the lam-rim outline that you
do, which is what most serious Tibetan lam-rim meditators do. The outline is
the basis of your meditations.
You can meditate daily for fifteen minutes, half an
hour or an hour or two according to your situation in one, two, three or four
sessions a day—decide the duration of each session yourself. The most
important thing is continuity; this really helps. If you meditate a lot one day
then take a few days off, your mind won’t develop continuously. No matter
how much time you spend meditating on the lam-rim every day, it’s all
good. Just don’t stop—meditate every day.
You can rotate the focus of your meditation (as
indicated above) as follows. Spend three months on guru devotion, three months
on the lower scope, three months on the intermediate scope and three months on
the highest scope up to emptiness. Then start over again with guru devotion.
Continue cycling through the lam-rim in this way until you achieve the
realization of each stage.
With guru devotion, continue doing the meditations
daily until you have gained the stable realization of seeing all the buddhas
spontaneously. Then meditate on the lower graduated path, from the precious
human rebirth up to karma, focusing mainly on impermanence and death, which is
the most important meditation because it helps you gain realization of all the
others.
After you have realized renunciation, where you
don’t have even the slightest interest in happiness of this life, no
clinging at all, and seek only the happiness of future lives, liberation or the
happiness of others—which could take weeks, months or years—meditate
on the intermediate path.
Once you have gained spontaneous renunciation of all
of samsara, dedicate your life to realizing bodhicitta, where you don’t
have even the slightest thought seeking your own happiness but want only the
happiness of others. In order to attain enlightenment you should feel like this
day and night.
You should also do a little meditation on emptiness
every day, using any unmistaken text, such as the Heart Sutra or any authentic
mahamudra teaching. In the meantime, continue training your mind in the other
steps of the path to enlightenment. After some time you can try to achieve
tranquil abiding by focusing on the meditation object suggested above.
Reciting a lam-rim prayer every day is the
fundamental daily practice that renders each day of your life most meaningful.
When you recite a lam-rim prayer mindfully from beginning to end your
recitation becomes a direct meditation on the entire path to enlightenment.
This practice leaves imprints, or seeds, of the realizations of the whole path
on your mental continuum. This means that with each recitation you become
closer to enlightenment and, therefore, closer to enlightening all sentient
beings, which is the main goal of your life, the purpose of being alive. This
is unbelievable benefit of doing direct meditation on the lam-rim every day of
your life.
There are various different lam-rim prayers that you
can recite in this way; for example, Lama Tsong Khapa’s Three Principal Aspects of the Path, Foundation of All Good Qualities
and Lines of Experience, and Pabongka
Dechen Nyingpo’s long version of Calling the Guru from Afar. You can
also meditate on any other prayer that contains the essence of the entire path.
If it mentions the practice of tantra at the end, that is particularly good.
The more direct meditations on the whole lam-rim you
do each day the more advantages you receive. If you have received highest yoga
tantra initiation, it’s also good to recite a prayer of the graduated
path of tantra, such as that found at the end of the long Yamantaka and
Vajrayana sadhanas. Again, if you recite it mindfully, it plants the seed of
the entire path on your mind.
Thus there are two different direct, or glance,
meditations: the one on the lam-rim, which is the foundation of the common
path, and the one on the tantric path, which is the extraordinary path.
Practicing these helps prepare your mind for all the realizations of the path,
perhaps in this life but definitely in a future one.
When you meditate on the lam-rim, bring into your
meditation whatever teachings and other information you have learned from
reading other authentic Buddhist texts. This makes your meditation much more
effective. When meditating on guru devotion, for example, you can augment the
outline with whatever you have learned from studying various teachings on guru
devotion. Similarly, you can enrich your meditation on the nature of samsara,
bodhicitta, emptiness and so forth by studying different teachings on these
topics. This makes your meditation more effective.
However, following your guru’s instructions is
what makes your meditation practice most productive in bringing quick
realizations.
During the break times—which means your life
between sessions of sitting meditation, not breaks from Dharma
practice—whether you’re standing, walking, sleeping or doing
anything else, try to live with the experience generated by your morning
lam-rim meditation. Live with a mind transformed by your daily meditation on
guru devotion, impermanence and death, the meaningfulness of this life’s
body, the suffering nature of samsara, bodhicitta or emptiness—whatever
was the main focus of that session.
By doing so, not only do you make your life highly
meaningful during your sessions but also during the rest of the time. This is
mainly because your lam-rim experience gives you a positive attitude and, as a
result, you avoid creating negative actions; you are always careful to practice
Dharma and avoid creating negative karma. Thus all your actions become causes
of liberation and enlightenment and, therefore, the remedy to samsara.
This instruction also to practice in between formal
meditation sessions is extremely important—if you follow it, your
sessions will help make your life during the breaks highly meaningful and
fruitful. This is specifically what Lama Tsong Khapa meant when, in the Foundation of All Good Qualities, he
talked about taking the essence of the precious human body day and night. His
Holiness the Dalai Lama also explained that this verse means that we should
live in the experience generated by our morning meditation and strongly recommended
that we do so.
If you can do this, even your working life will
become meditation. It will be unified with the Dharma and, especially, your
lam-rim meditation. Your mind will always be peaceful and stable, not up and
down; you will have peace, satisfaction and fulfillment in your life and will
be able to benefit others better and more with your positive Dharma mind.
Deity practice
Main deity ……………..
Other deities ……………..
When your mind is ready, take the initiation(s) when
available and train your mind in the practice of the generation stage. You can
do a little completion stage practice just to plant the seed of it, but
initially your main emphasis should be on the generation stage. You might like
to meditate on the completion stage just for fun but you cannot accomplish it
without accomplishing the generation stage. Do that first and then practice the
completion stage.
You should understand that you and I don’t
often have the chance to meet to discuss your practice. So, whether we meet
again in this lifetime or not, you must make your life meaningful with many
years of practice.
Thus your request for practice is done. I have put
off other things—prayers and so forth—to spend time checking all
this for you. Therefore you must consider doing these practices in your life.
Take this advice seriously; otherwise it would have been better that you
hadn’t asked me.
ADDITIONAL DAILY PRACTICES
Prostration to the Thirty-five Buddhas in the morning
If possible, recite and prostrate to the Thirty-five
Buddhas of Confession three times every morning or whenever you can.
That’s 105 prostrations all together.
If you think about it you’ll see how urgently
we need to practice the Thirty-five Buddhas of Confession. Reciting these
buddhas’ names while bringing to mind our past negative karma purifies
that karma. If we don’t purify our negative karma we will not achieve a
perfect human rebirth with eight freedoms and ten richnesses like the one we
have now and will experience the opposite instead: rebirth in the suffering
lower realms. Furthermore, if left unpurified, the negative karma we have
created will increase exponentially within our mind (see below). Therefore it
is extremely important that we purify it.
The express purpose for these Thirty-five
Buddhas’ existence is for sentient beings to purify the various different
negative karmas they have created. Even reciting these buddhas’ names
just once purifies many eons of negative karma; it’s like an atomic bomb
in how extremely quickly and powerfully it destroys negative karma.
Lama Tsong Khapa did many hundreds of thousands of
prostrations with this confession practice to the Thirty-five Buddhas in his
cave at
Therefore the Thirty-five Buddhas practice should be
an essential ingredient of our daily routine. It’s the best thing we can
do in order to be healthy and not have regrets in future.
[See Lama Zopa Rinpoche's Making Life Meaningful and Geshe
Jampa Gyatso’s Everlasting Rain of
Nectar for commentaries on this practice, and a practice booklet is
available from the FPMT Foundation Store.]
Vajrasattva recitation at night
Before you go to bed each night, recite the
Vajrasattva mantra to prevent whatever negative karma you have created that day
from multiplying. If you don’t purify it in this way your negative karma
will keep doubling and re-doubling day by day, week by week, month by month,
and year by year up to the end of your life and even one day’s negative karma
will become as huge and heavy as a mountain—in time, even one atom of
unpurified negative karma can swell to the size of the Earth.
Even though you may not necessarily create
particularly heavy negative karmas, since unpurified negative karma increases
exponentially in this way, even one small negative action can cause you to be
reborn in the lower realms and experience great suffering for many eons. And
because in the lower realms you continually create more and more negative
karma, it is extremely difficult to be reborn back into the upper realms, which
makes it almost impossible for you to practice Dharma. Therefore you must purify your negative karma every
day.
Since practicing the Vajrasattva
recitation-meditation at the end of the day prevents negative karma from
multiplying it is an unbelievably powerful method. It makes your life very
light and easy and keeps you happy and peaceful inside—in your heart and
in your inner life. Furthermore, it purifies not only that day’s negative
karma but also that created in this life from the time you were born and in all
your previous lives as well.
Purifying negative karma makes it much easier to
attain liberation and actualize the path to enlightenment. It also decreases
your suffering and any obstacles that might arise. Purifying negative karma
means that you won’t have to experience the many eons of suffering in the
lower realms that result from not purifying even one negative karma, and you
won’t have to experience again and again without end the four suffering
results that arise from each unpurified negative karma.
The conclusion is that even if you have completed the
preliminary of reciting 100,000 Vajrasattva mantras you can’t just stop,
relax and say, “I’ve finished my Vajrasattva preliminary practice.
Now I don’t have to recite that mantra any more.” You need to keep
doing the long Vajrasattva mantra at least twenty-one times or the short one at
least twenty-eight times a day in order to keep purifying your negative karma
and prevent it from multiplying.
[The mantra and daily practice can be found in Lama
Zopa's Daily Purification: A Short Vajrasattva Practice.]
Medicine Buddha mantra
TADYATHA
The Medicine Buddha mantra is recited for success.
Since we have many problems and want to succeed we need to recite the Medicine
Buddha mantra every day. It can help us eliminate the problems, unhappiness and
suffering we don’t want and gain the success, happiness, inner growth and
realizations of the path that we do.
Lord Buddha told his attendant Ananda that even
animals who hear the Medicine Buddha mantra will never be reborn in the lower
realms. The highly attained Kyabje Chöden Rinpoche, who has completed the
entire path to enlightenment, said recently that if you recite the Medicine
Buddha mantra at the time of death you will be reborn in the pure land.
Therefore, it is to be recited not only for healing but also to benefit people
and animals all the time, whether they’re living or dying.
If you recite the Medicine Buddha mantra every day
you will purify your negative karma and this will help you never to be reborn
in the lower realms. If you don’t purify your negative karma, then when
you die you will be reborn in the lower realms as a hell being, hungry ghost or
animal and will have to suffer again and again without end. Therefore you need
to purify your negative karma right now. If you cannot bear even the present
suffering of the human realm—which is blissful joy compared to that of
the lower realms—how will you be able to bear the intense suffering of
the lower realms, which is unimaginably unbearable, lasts for an incredible
length of time and a billion times worse than all the human sufferings put
together.
Since reciting the Medicine Buddha mantra saves you
from all these sufferings it is much more precious than skies of gold,
diamonds, wish-fulfilling jewels and zillions and zillions of dollars. Material
wealth counts for nothing because it can’t purify negative karma. Even if
you possessed that much wealth, simply reciting or even hearing the Medicine
Buddha mantra just once would be far more precious because it would leave an
imprint of the entire path to enlightenment on your mind, help you gain
realizations of the path, eradicate all your gross and subtle defilements and
cause you to achieve enlightenment.
The Medicine Buddha mantra can help you liberate
numberless sentient beings from the vast oceans of suffering and bring them to
enlightenment, so you should recite it with absolute trust in the Medicine
Buddha, knowing that he will completely take care of your life and heal you in
every way and that he is always with you—in your heart, on your crown and
right there in front of you. There is not one second that the Medicine Buddha
does not see or have compassion for you.
Chenrezig, the Compassionate-Eye Looking One
Short mantra:
Long Mantra: NAMO RATNA TRAYAYA/ NAMAH ARYA JNANA
SAGARA/ VAIROCHANA/ VYUHA RAJAYA/ TATHAGATAYA/ ARHATE/ SAMYAKSAM BUDDHAYA/
NAMAH SARVA TATHAGATEBHYAH/ ARHADBHYAH/ SAMYAKSAM BUDDHEBHYAH/ NAMAH ARYA
AVALOKITESHVARAYA/ BODHISATTVAYA MAHASATTVAYA/ MAHAKARUNIKAYA/ TADYATHA/ OM/
DHARA DHARA/ DHIRI DHIRI/ DHURU DHURU/ ITTI VATTE/ CHALE CHALE/ PRACHALE
PRACHALE/ KUSUME/ KUSUME VARE/ ILI MILI/ CITI JVALAM/ APANAYE SVAHA/
All students, old and new, should practice Chenrezig
(Skt: Avalokiteshvara), the
Compassionate-Eye Looking One. Doing his recitation-meditation brings all
happiness, temporary—the happiness of this and all future lives—and
ultimate—the happiness of liberation and enlightenment—to the
numberless sentient beings, yourself included. Reciting the Chenrezig mantra
brings skies of benefit, especially if you do it with bodhicitta.
The practice and realization of bodhicitta is the
most important thing in life because it fulfils not only your own wishes for
happiness but also those of all other sentient beings—each and every one.
With bodhicitta you can completely dry up the ocean
of samsaric suffering and its cause and achieve liberation and enlightenment
because it helps you gain the wisdom directly realizing emptiness, which
eradicates both gross and subtle defilements.
Bodhicitta is what allows arya bodhisattva to abandon the sufferings of samsara,
including rebirth, old age, sickness and death, just by achieving the
right-seeing path. Even though arhats of the lesser vehicle path have the
wisdom directly realizing emptiness and many other inconceivable qualities,
they still have the remainder of the suffering aggregates.
Bodhicitta is the door to the Mahayana path to
enlightenment and the root of the limitless qualities of the Buddha’s
holy body, speech and mind. The courageous bodhisattvas are able to bear all
the hardships of working for sentient beings, no matter how great they are,
even if it costs them their life. Since bodhisattvas see how beneficial it is
to bear hardship in order to work for others in this way they are not only able
to bear it but experience limitless joy as well. For bodhisattvas, even dying
as a result of working for others is like drinking nectar; doing so, they
experience the delight of a swan plunging into a cool pond on a hot day.
Bodhisattvas abandon the thought of achieving their
own liberation from the ocean of samsaric suffering and its
cause—delusion and karma—as one discards used toilet paper, having
not an atom of interest in it. They have only aversion to gaining the ultimate
happiness of nirvana for themselves alone.
Bodhicitta allows bodhisattvas to complete the
accumulation of the two types of merit—transcendent wisdom and
virtue—and is the cause of their achieving the two holy bodies: rupakaya—the holy body of
form—and dharmakaya—the
holy body of mind—which is the ultimate goal. The sole purpose of
achieving these two holy bodies is to be able to do perfect work for all
sentient beings. Even though there are numberless sentient beings and it can
take three countless great eons to complete the accumulations to bring every
single one to enlightenment, what gives bodhisattvas the determination to do so
is bodhicitta.
No matter how many eons it takes to have one sentient
being generate a single virtuous thought, the bodhisattva will try to make it
happen without being discouraged. In the Ornament
for the Mahayana Sutras, Maitreya said, “In order to ripen
even one virtuous thought, the bodhisattva, the child of the Victorious Ones
whose mind is stabilized in supreme perseverance for highly ripening the
sentient beings, does not get discouraged, even if it takes thousands of ten
million eons.”
So you can see that the determination that drives
bodhisattvas to bear hardship and work continuously for sentient beings comes
from bodhicitta, which itself comes from the root of great compassion. This
root, compassion, fuels the skies of benefit that derive from bodhicitta, like
rocket fuel powers a spaceship or electricity generated by a power station
lights up an entire city.
It is also great compassion that has already brought
numberless sentient beings to enlightenment in the past, brings numberless
sentient beings to enlightenment at present and will bring numberless sentient
beings to enlightenment in future; great compassion that makes numberless
buddhas do perfect, unmistaken work for numberless sentient beings until they
achieve enlightenment; and great compassion that causes all buddhas to have the
omniscient mind and perfect power they need to benefit all sentient beings.
Similarly, your own great compassion will become the
source of peace and happiness of numberless sentient beings—the source of
all their temporary and ultimate happiness—including the beings in this
world and the country where you live, and your own family: parents, companion,
children and, lastly, yourself.
Without compassion in your heart all you have is ego,
which both directly and indirectly harms all sentient beings, including those
in this world and your country, and your own family: parents, companion,
children and yourself. The more you can practice compassion, the greater will be
the peace and happiness in your heart and in your life.
Your compassion is the source of happiness of even
the people and animals you encounter in everyday life. Without compassion there
are personality ego-clashes and many other problems—anger, jealousy and
the like. Without compassion your life is overwhelmed by problems, like a mouse
trapped in a cage and killed, an elephant stuck in the mud and suffocated, a
fly caught in a spider’s web and eaten, or a moth attracted by a flame
and drowned in hot candle wax. Your life is enmeshed in problems and continues
in that way until you die like a moth in a flame. That’s why you need to
practice compassion; compassion is the most important Dharma practice you can
do, the most important meditation for you to practice.
Living and working with compassion is the best thing
you can do. Then, when you experience problems, you can experience them for
others, use them to develop compassion for others. Thus you use your problems
to achieve enlightenment—your problems become the path to enlightenment.
Similarly, when you are sick from cancer or AIDS, for
example, you can experience your illness with compassion, for the sake of other
sentient beings—to bring them all happiness up to and including
enlightenment. Thus your sickness becomes the path to enlightenment.
Therefore, all problems—failed relationships,
illness, business failure, unemployment—become very important and useful,
a special, heroic practice. Before, such experiences were something that you
disliked and were to be abandoned but now, with your practice of compassion,
they become something highly desirable and of the utmost need for the
development of your mind in the path—very powerful and special.
Also, when your life ends, the best way to die is
with compassion. His Holiness the Dalai Lama often says that dying with
bodhicitta is “self-supporting.” You don’t need anybody else
around to help you because you can guide yourself. You’re the leader; you
can lead yourself to the happiness of future lives.
In order to develop great compassion you need to
understand the Buddha’s teachings on how to develop it. But even if you
can recite the teachings on compassion by heart and know how to meditate on
them, that alone is not enough for you to realize them. To do you need the
support of the blessings of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion. In order
to receive these blessings you need to practice his meditation-recitation.
For more on the benefits of this practice, please see
Teachings from the Mani Retreat.
References
Gyatso, Geshe Jampa. Everlasting
Rain of Nectar.
Pabongka Rinpoche. Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.
Translated by Michael Richards.
Rabten, Geshe. The Essential Nectar. Translated and
edited by Martin Willson.
Tsong Khapa, Lama Je. The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to
Enlightenment, Volumes 1, 2 & 3. Lamrim Chenmo Translation
Committee.
Zopa Rinpoche, Lama Thubten.
Teachings from the Mani Retreat.
Originally dictated by Lama Zopa Rinpoche to Ven.
Tsenla, April 1999, and lightly edited between 2000 and 2002 by Ven. Connie
Miller and Ven. Sarah Thresher based on Rinpoche’s modifications and
rearrangements dictated to Ven. Brian, Ven. Tsenla, Ven. Holly and Ven. Sarah.
Final edit by Nick Ribush, 2005.
For further information on how to do the preliminary
practices and to obtain commentaries on them please contact your local FPMT center or visit
the FPMT website.