Student:  I heard that if you have studied the five great treatises in past lives it’s not necessary to go through extensive studies of them in order to attain realizations, and that by just studying and meditating on the lamrim you can traverse

Student:Dear Lama Zopa,I wanted to send you my best wishes for the year 2008, but I didn’t have your address with me.

My very dear Tim,How are you? I hope you are very well. Please chant some OM MANI PADME HUM mantras and do some Medicine Buddha practice.

Rinpoche sent the following advice to a young student who had been offering service for a number of years at a center in India. She was very devoted, but wrote saying her mind had become very hard and dry, and she was unable to have any feeling in her practice, so she was requesting to resign and then to meditate on the lamrim for one to two years.

Please read well the different lamrim texts such as Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, the Lamrim Chenmo, and the different lamrim texts that His Holiness the Dalai Lama has written on.

My very dear Linda,

My very dear Gillian,Thank you very much for your kind letter.

The most important thing you can do in your life is to practice the lamrim; that’s the most important thing to focus on. But that doesn’t mean only practicing meditation.

A new student in Australia wrote asking for advice on practices to do. Rinpoche advised the following.

My dear Keith,Thank you very much for your kind letter. I am sorry for the delay.When you hear the Buddhadharma, teachings, and when you practice, if you feel it is very familiar and easy, then it means you met the Buddhadharma in the past.