Negative Thoughts About the Guru
A student wrote to Rinpoche for advice because she found that being close to the gurus and holy beings brought up anxiety and harmful thoughts. Rinpoche had previously advised that she should do 10,000 Dorje Khadro mantras and 300,000 prostrations to the Thirty-five Buddhas. She had completed the Dorje Khadro mantras and had started doing the Thirty-five Buddhas practice, reciting 105 each day with a few prostrations. She was elderly and in poor health.
My very dear one,
Please continue with the prostrations by reciting the names of the Thirty-five Buddhas, and whatever number of prostrations you can do, please continue.
If you have done Vajrayogini retreat, Yamantaka retreat, or any Highest Yoga Tantra retreat with a fire puja (where you completed the number of mantras, etc.), then it is important that you do self-initiation, the long or short one. If you can do the short one every day, that is best, otherwise once a week or once a month. Try that, it is very good. In this way, you purify negative karma and also broken pratimoksha, bodhisattva and tantric vows, especially bodhisattva vows. This purifies the negative karma.
If you can, try to finish the number of prostrations I suggested; that would be very good. If you can, do more. Even bodhisattvas who have very high realizations still do prostrations, so for us, who still have delusions, there is no question that we have to do them. 300,000 is nothing if you think of all the negative karma that we have collected during beginningless rebirths, which has not been purified and not yet experienced. 300,000 is nothing, and bodhisattvas often do seven, eight or nine million, even a zillion. If they can, they do more.
When bad thoughts come, think the lama is Buddha, Chenrezig, an enlightened being, because enlightened beings do exist. There are so many numberless buddhas, including Guru Shakyamuni Buddha, and numberless beings exist who have completed the path. Even now in this world there are many people who have experiences. Immediately try to think that all of this has happened because of the guru, because of the power of actually practicing guru yoga.
With much love and prayers...