Practices to Benefit This Life and Future Lives

My most dear, most kind, most precious, wish-fulfilling one,
Thank you very much for your question and email. What you are asking is really the most important, most important thing in your life and not only in this life but up to enlightenment, the total cessation of all the obscurations and completion of all the realizations. When you achieve this you are able to free the numberless sentient beings from oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to peerless happiness, the state of omniscience.

What you should do now is study Lama Tsongkhapa’s Middle Length Lamrim so you can understand well the whole path taught by the Buddha. This is the main lamrim you should study. Read it four times from beginning to end.

Mark the things you don’t understand with orange color as an offering, like painting a Buddha statue or thangka, or like offering color or robes to holy objects, etc. In other words, mark the text in a respectful way. Don’t mark the texts with black ink. Marking texts in a disrespectful way creates negative karma and is a cause to be born in the lower realms. One professor who is very good in Buddhist philosophy, said that in the past he often marked manuscripts with black color right over the letters. This created the cause to be born in the lower realms many times.

Also you can write down all the questions you have, everything you don’t know, in a book and discuss these afterwards with the geshes or Western students who have done very good study in the Basic and Masters Program. If there is someone who has studied well, then they can help. It will be very good if you can do this.

The main practice you should do at the moment is Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga. There is a commentary I gave many years ago that you can read. [This is also available from FPMT Foundation Store.] 

There are also the guru devotion teachings, which are in Heart of the Path.

Doing this practice will help for this life and all future lives happiness, for liberation and up to full enlightenment—including bringing all sentient beings to peerless happiness by yourself in the future. If you have received a Highest Yoga Tantra initiation, like Hayagriva, Kalachakra, Yamantaka or Heruka, there are secret meditations you can do when you are doing the meditation.

• 20,000: Prostrations by reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas. The explanation and commentary, The Preliminary Practice of Prostrations, is available from FPMT Foundation Store. 
• 100,000: Vajrasattva for purification.
• 100,000: Mandala offerings to collect extensive merit. Again, you will have to study the commentary. Do the long mandala two or three times and then do the short one many times and count that.

This is what you should do now, and in the future you can do the preliminary practices. Normally we do prostrations, Vajrasattva and mandala offerings as daily practices, but what I’m telling you now is how many of these are to be done as your preliminary practices. Not many preliminary practices came out for you in my observation, so you have very few of them to do.

Do effortful meditation on the lamrim outline, starting with guru devotion, correctly devoting to the virtuous friend, then effortless meditation. Do some meditation on emptiness every day.  

Go slowly, slowly. I’m giving you your life practices now but don’t worry, you can do the Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga practice now and the preliminary practices later.

With much love and prayers...