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Lama Zopa Rinpoche: Life Practice Advice
One of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s highest priorities was responding to students’ inquiries on daily practice and preliminary practice advice from him. For 25+ years, Rinpoche refined this advice, referring to it as “Life Practices.”
This advice always followed a general structure, but was also specific to each student. As Rinpoche is no longer able to provide this personal correspondence to each student, we created a page of Rinpoche’s most essential life practice advice, based off thousands of letters Rinpoche offered to students for nearly three decades.
By following this advice, students can feel confident they are receiving Rinpoche’s personal guidance and blessing on their path to enlightenment. As Rinpoche often said in his letters to students receiving practice advice:
“Rejoice! This is a happy thing, to get these practices, to benefit every sentient being, to free every sentient being from the oceans of samsaric sufferings and to bring them to enlightenment. So for that reason this advice is for you to achieve enlightenment.”
Essential Daily Practices
“The conclusion is for everyone to practice the lamrim, which is the heart of the Dharma. Especially try to put all their effort to live with a bodhicitta motivation, in particular, to be kind to others, which is the most essential practice. They should aim to have the realization of bodhicitta as their main goal – of course, based on guru devotion.”
Life Preliminary Practices
In addition to Essential Daily Practices, Rinpoche’s advice to students is a recommendation for some or all of the following Life Preliminary Practices, according to Rinpoche’s observation. These are done to collect merit and purify negative karma in order to create the conditions to achieve lamrim realizations followed by the tantric realizations. One can practice tantra before lamrim realizations for the imprints, but one must purify and collect merit to achieve the realizations. The usual number to accumulate for each of the nine standard preliminary practices is 100,000. As Rinpoche is no longer able to offer advice on specific numbers to complete for each student, one could accumulate 100,000 of each one.
“You have received an extremely rare, precious human body just this once. Not only that, you have received a perfect human rebirth, which is rarer still. This perfect human rebirth gives you the incredible opportunity to experience happiness in your present and future lives—such as rebirth in a pure land where you can become enlightened very quickly; or to again find a perfect human rebirth, meet a perfectly qualified guru, receive Mahayana teachings, train your mind on the path, and achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. By doing these practices you create the merit to enjoy a long life, find happiness, get whatever you need now and in future lives, eradicate all mistaken states of mind, gain all realizations, and attain the ultimate happiness of liberation from samsara and full enlightenment.” Read the complete Life Preliminary Practice advice.
You can find Rinpoche’s advice, teachings and commentaries, and practice materials on the Preliminary Practices below.
The Nine Standard Preliminary Practices in the Gelug Tradition
Additional Preliminary Practices
These following additional preliminary practices were unique to Lama Zopa Rinpoche, and Rinpoche emphasized them for students to deepen their practice of purification and creating merit, and to develop bodhicitta realizations.
Useful practice materials:
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