How to Live Your Life with Bodhicitta

My most dear, most kind, most precious, wish-fulfilling one,
Thank you very much for the news that you are going to Lawudo and Kopan. You asked for advice for your life and practice, so this is the best way to collect merit.

In the mornings, if you are not doing it already, you must start doing the bodhicitta motivation practice that I put together, How to Make My Lives Wish-Fulfilling: The Method to Transform a Suffering Life into Happiness. This is for your whole life, blessing your speech and mala. If you are not doing it already, then start now.

This is the most important thing. Basically it’s how to live our life with bodhicitta, to transform our life into the cause of enlightenment, the Mahayana path. We need to achieve buddhahood, so we can free the numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to full enlightenment, buddhahood. This is the most important thing in our life. There is nothing more than this. This is the happiest life.

We can get the idea from that how to live the life with bodhicitta. Even if we don’t have realizations now, we can live with bodhicitta as much as possible, not only when we are listening [to teachings], or reflecting, doing meditation, but even when we are eating, walking, sleeping, doing our job. We should do it all on the basis of bodhicitta as much as possible.

Think, “The purpose of my life is not just to achieve happiness for myself, even ultimate happiness, liberation from samsara. The purpose of my life is to help others, to free the numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering, and not only that, to bring them to peerless happiness, the total cessation of all the obscurations and completion of all the realizations. To do that perfectly, I need to achieve omniscience, therefore I need to actualize the path, therefore I need to purify my defilements and negative karma, and I need to create merit. Therefore, I am going to listen to the teachings, do reflecting meditation, make prostrations, offerings and so forth.”

We can offer our food to Guru, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha before we eat. Also while we are eating, think it is an offering. We can change whatever activity we are doing, like washing, sleeping, going to work, when we begin with bodhicitta motivation like this. Also sleeping yoga, things like that, we can do every activity with bodhicitta.

If you like, there is the book called Bodhisattva Attitude, which is about doing all the actions in daily life with a bodhicitta motivation. You can follow that as much as possible. Do everything in this way as much as possible, then all your different actions become the cause of enlightenment for sentient beings. This is unbelievable. Your life becomes most beneficial for sentient beings and it becomes the happiest life, the most meaningful life, not only for you but for sentient beings.

I am sending you a whole lifetime’s practice, so after finishing the preliminaries you can try to actualize bodhicitta, then you can do generation and completion stage in tantra. Mainly practice generation stage but also completion stage, just to leave an imprint.

Welcome to enlightenment. Pleasure, hardship, everything, is to achieve enlightenment for sentient beings, to free numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsara.

With much love and prayers ...