Practice Advice for Life
Rinpoche gave the following advice to a student about practices to do for his whole life.
Dear Nick,
Here are the practices I advise you to do:
- 100,000 mandala offerings
- 80,000 Dorje Khadro
Recitation of the Vajra Cutter Sutra once a day is the most amazing purification and way of collecting merit. Just doing that creates so much merit that it would make you faint.
Your main deity is Kalachakra. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has given this many times. If he is giving it again, you can travel to receive it later and if not, you can receive it from other Gelugpa lamas. If you want to recite the Kalachakra mantra, I can give you the lung later by phone.
Plan more time for retreat in your life, but before doing this, study the lamrim well. The purpose of life is to have realizations, so study well and meditate in order to have realizations.
Meditation on the lamrim:
- One month on guru devotion
- One month on the precious human rebirth
- One month on its usefulness
Study the lamrim from the beginning to end. When you meet geshes, lamas or older students, study lamrim with them. If you have realizations, meditate on the topic to stabilize them. If there are obstacles, then study more and do six months’ retreat later. When you finish that, repeat the process.
After meditating on the lamrim, live your life with the feeling of the meditation you have generated and the thought to benefit others for the rest of the day.
8,000 special bodhicitta practice of tong-len:
This doesn’t mean just reciting the words, but practicing the meditation. Do the elaborate version at the beginning, or two to three times; then do the condensed version and at the end do the elaborate version.
The condensed version is as follows: all suffering, karma and delusions of sentient beings are taken into our heart and totally destroy the ego and self-cherishing thoughts; take their suffering and its causes. Any problems that we see, for example, a sick person on the road or an animal carrying a heavy load, take the causes and destroy our self-cherishing. Then dedicate all the three times’ merits and all the three times’ happiness and give them to all sentient beings, or do this for each realm.
For one short session, take on the suffering of all beings and think that the self-cherishing thought is our worst enemy.