Thanks for Offering Service at the Center

Student: I encountered the Dharma six years ago, upon reading a book by Lama Yeshe. In the teachings, I knew I found my home. I began studying and practicing seriously two years ago, after becoming a volunteer at a FPMT Dharma Center. I am writing to request that I may be your disciple. In my mind and in my heart, you are the perfect teacher and guide. You embody the Dharma to perfection. I admire how you skillfully and completely benefit so many sentient beings, countless and of all kinds, through your perfect qualities, actions, teachings and prayers.

Rinpoche's response

My most dear one,
Thank you for your email, I understand what you are expressing and what you want. I am very sorry, I am not perfect as you say. I wish to be perfect, probably that will take eons for me to be perfect. Of course I am not perfect as you mentioned, but yes, I accept to help you.

A billion, zillion thanks from my heart to you for serving at the center. That is, as you know, to benefit sentient beings and the teachings of the Buddha. It is to benefit all sentient beings, not just people in __, but numberless hell beings, hungry ghosts, numberless animals, human beings, suras, asura beings and numberless intermediate state beings, and to benefit the teachings of the Buddha. This is our main aim in life.

[The purpose of] the center is not only to free the numberless hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, human beings, suras, asuras and intermediate state beings from the oceans of samsaric sufferings. So this contains the suffering of pain, which includes being under the control of karma and delusion, and the suffering of rebirth, old age, sickness and death and so forth. This includes the oceans of samsaric temporary pleasures , which look like pleasure, but in reality are suffering. For ordinary beings with a hallucinated mind it looks like pleasure, but it is only suffering.

That’s why however much you try to increase samsaric pleasure, for hours and days and weeks and years, it never really increases, but Dharma happiness increases up to realizations and you can complete it. Then there is the happiness of future lives;  that means until you are free from samsara’s bondage of delusion and karma. That can be for so many, so many numberless lives, or a billion, zillion eons, we can’t say, or it can be after one life, or it can also be in this life for some people.

Then to be free from the oceans of samsaric sufferings, where the two sufferings—the suffering of change and the suffering of pain—come from. Then there is pervasive compounded suffering. If you don’t become free from that, then you don’t become free from the other two sufferings. This is the main suffering that Buddhists try to be free from and of course, to bring [all sentient beings] to the sorrowless state, to be free forever from the oceans of samsaric sufferings and then to bring them to peerless happiness—the total elimination of obscurations and completion of all the realizations, the state of omniscient mind.

I am attaching the Daily Meditation book. This is what you should do first thing in the morning when you wake up. 

With much love and prayers...