When Problems Interfere with Practice

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

All that you are experiencing is due to past karma. It is still very good to continue to practice Lion-face Dakini, and also, if you can, recite the White Umbrella prayer. You should also perform Medicine Buddha puja three times and you can practice it with other people.

It would be very good if you could recite the Arya Sanghata Sutra four times and the Sutra of Golden Light five times. Read whatever you can each day until you complete the recitations.

Also, you can take the Eight Mahayana Precepts [see Rinpoche's Direct and Unmistaken Method] twice each month. This is very powerful for purifying past negative karma, as well as for collecting merit, so that you can have a good rebirth in your next life, when death comes, which can happen at any time. So, this would be extremely good.

Regarding reading the two sutras, this is a very important way to collect extensive merits. Also, reading these two sutras becomes a very powerful purification practice. If you read even just two or three words of the Arya Sanghata Sutra, it purifies the five uninterrupted karmas (killing your father, killing your mother, killing an arhat, drawing blood from a Buddha, and causing a schism in the Sangha community). Even hearing just two or three words from this sutra is very powerful purification, so reading the whole sutra is much greater. Also, by reading these two sutras you collect so much merit, for your health, long life, protection, and so on. But most importantly, you collect extensive merit that purifies negative karma and defilements, so that you can achieve the path as quickly as possible, liberate many sentient beings from unimaginable sufferings, and bring them to enlightenment as quickly as possible—especially the sentient beings who are connected to you, so that they can meet the Dharma, be free from samsara, and achieve enlightenment.

It is very good if you can do a little lamrim meditation each day, on the lamrim outlines, especially focusing on impermanence, death, and bodhicitta. You can follow the outlines of the two ways to generate bodhicitta. For one week focus mainly on death and impermanence, and then the next week on bodhicitta. Do this for some time.

Purifying negative karma is one way to not experience problems. The other solution is to collect extensive merit, so that you can have fewer problems and experience more success and happiness. When things are difficult in your life, this is the result of past negative karma. Whether you experience this as suffering or happiness depends on how you look at the situation. If you look at it as pleasure then it becomes pleasure and happiness. The suffering is transformed into happiness. This depends on your thinking differently from how you normally think.

It is good to think in the way it is explained in the Guru Puja, in the lamrim section:

Should even the environment and the beings therein
Be filled with the fruits of their karmic debts
And unwished for sufferings pour down like rain
We seek your blessings to take these miserable conditions as a path
By seeing them as causes to exhaust the results of our negative karma.

In this way you are looking at the problems as purifying past negative karma. The first way to think when you encounter problems is to think that they are finishing your past negative karma.

As Kadampa Geshe Kharag Gomchung says:

Even the present little suffering finishes past negative karma,
And one will have happiness in the future,
Therefore look at the suffering as happiness.

Always remember this quotation, whenever you have difficulties.

Another way is to look at the problems and suffering in your life as positive. One way they can become positive is when you experience sufferings on behalf of other sentient beings. Do the tong-len practice of taking other sentient beings’ suffering on yourself, as your own suffering. Take the suffering into your heart, onto your ego, and think that it destroys your ego, which becomes non-existent. Think also that your emotional I or ego I—the one that cherishes the ego—also becomes non-existent. Then meditate on that emptiness. This way tong-len becomes not only a means to develop bodhicitta but also to develop emptiness. Do this practice regularly, and then, from time to time, think, “I am experiencing this suffering, these difficulties and problems, on behalf of all sentient beings. May they have all happiness, up to enlightenment.”

When you take on others’ suffering, the idea is that they experience all happiness up to enlightenment. When you live your life with this attitude as much as possible, then whatever negative problem occurs only appears to you as an incredible opportunity. This also depends on how strongly you recollect how very kind and precious sentient beings are to you, and how much they are suffering. Through this, one feels their unbearable suffering.

In this way, every second that you experience suffering for others, you collect merit as vast as the sky, and purify eons of negative karma. Each time, you become closer to enlightenment and closer to enlightening other sentient beings.

This is the way to develop bodhicitta. By experiencing suffering for others, one can see that this is the happiest life. There is no happier life than this in the world.

When you are experiencing difficulties or problems in your life, normally you label the problem as a problem, and then you experience suffering, because of the way phenomena appear, including the I, action, and objects. Even though the way an object (as well as the I and action) exists is to exist in mere name—merely imputed by the mind—it doesn’t appear to us in that way. Its appearance is totally opposite to how it is in reality. It appears to be not merely labeled by the mind. It appears as real, and existing from its own side. This is a complete hallucination. This is the object to be refuted. If you look at this as an hallucination, or as the object to be refuted, you decide in your heart that the problem is empty or an hallucination. Because of that, suddenly you don’t see it as a problem in your life.

Usually, when there is an hallucinated appearance, a truly existent appearance, you make your mind believe in the hallucinated appearance, that it is reality. Then, on that basis, other exaggerations occur, and you see the appearances as bad, or you label them bad, and then they become a basis for anger to arise.

Another thing we do is exaggerate the base and label an object as beautiful, and from that attraction arises, or some other delusion. From that hallucinated base, other delusions arise, such as jealousy and so forth, and this is how one’s problems come from own one’s mind. Knowing this, you know immediately what to do—how to switch your way of thinking to looking at the situation as an hallucination, as empty. In this way, you can stop problems in your mind by meditating on emptiness.

You mentioned in your letter how the problems come from within your mind. First, suffering comes from your mind because the cause is karma: one’s own mental factors and a negative intention. This means your mind can stop the suffering by purifying the cause of the suffering. Your mind can experience happiness and success, because your mind can create the causes: the good karma.

For example, if you practice covetousness, it causes you to experience failure. But if you rejoice in others’ good fortune, and in good things that happen to others, that becomes the cause of your great success.

If you experience envy or jealousy, not wanting others to have happiness, realizations, material wealth, or good friends, thinking this way becomes the cause to experience failure.

From this, you can see how everything comes from your mind. All happiness and success comes from your mind. It depends on what label you put on experience and then your believing in that label, whether it is “happiness” or “problem.” Therefore, you can see, as it is mentioned in the lamrim teachings on thought transformation in the Guru Puja, always keep your mind in a state of happiness, only putting a positive label on phenomena.

As I mentioned before, by doing this you will eliminate your past negative karma and then you will have a better life and future happiness. Transform your mind with bodhicitta. This brings happiness based on the thought of experiencing suffering for others.

If you are able, do what Geshe Jampa Gyatso advised, applying effort without letting your mind fall into laziness or distraction due to pleasure. As you saw before, without Dharma practice, your life will become miserable, and when you practice Dharma, it brings so much satisfaction and fulfillment.

You are in my prayers. Be happy. It looks like you need a more fixed schedule for the different practices that you are doing. This keeps you strong, so you have a stable, happy mind.

With much love and prayers...