Prepare for Future Lives

Chemotherapy didn’t come out good at all. It’s better to do the treatment there and have the immunotherapy together with puja. That came out best. The puja part is the extensive Medicine Buddha puja once each month at Kopan nunnery. Then Amitabha pure land or [another] pure land!

Regarding staying or returning to the other country you mentioned, you have to break the concept of permanence. Even though there are geshes who are expert in Dharma knowledge and who can explain it so well, they didn’t do any practice—contemplating that life is impermanent, death and also karma. Then they are so afraid at the time of death and they look like a person who has never met Dharma.

All other works have no essence compared to Dharma and thinking many times each day about impermanence and death. Even if there’s no extensive Dharma study done, by understanding the essence of Dharma and the path and by remembering impermanence each day, then there’s no fear at the time of death. By breaking the concept of permanence, so much purification and accumulation of merit gets done. Then we are ready to go to the pure lands.

By reciting three times the Array of Sukhavati Pure Land: A Concise Mahayana Sutra prayer, you can prepare [for death]. Recite this for each other, whoever is available, at the death time. Even before the actual death, but nearing that time and before, read it loudly and let the other person pray to be born there, without clinging to family, wealth and even to this body, because everything is there. It’s most unbelievable, one hundred times better than the deva realm, the worldly god realms. There’s no suffering of pain, no suffering of change and no pervasive compounding suffering at all!

One-pointedly, undistractedly, think of that. If you are able to help each other at the time of death, it’s good if [you are] there, and if not, do it together [beforehand]. Even doing it together, you can help each other.

So, the essence is that attachment to samsaric perfections has no meaning. There’s no meaning to being attached. Since beginningless rebirths we have been attached and it has made no sense, because we have only been suffering since then. We have to understand this.

This Amitabha prayer came from the mouth of Amitabha himself. We need to put strong faith in that, then the benefit comes from that.

That’s my advice, even before I die. And what’s more, you can think of His Holiness the Dalai Lama or if it is helpful you can think of me, the Mickey Mouse sloth.

Prepare more for future lives and don’t get stuck on this life. Otherwise, there’s no difference from those who didn’t meet Dharma, feeling upset and so on.