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Lama Zopa Rinpoche giving a teaching to students attending the three-month Vajrasattva retreat at Kopan Monastery, Nepal, April 2022. Photo by Ven. Lobsang Sherab.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave this teaching to students attending the three-month Vajrasattva retreat at Kopan Monastery in Nepal on April 27, 2022. Here’s a summary of Rinpoche’s teaching. You can find the video of the teaching and a link to the transcript below.
If you want to know the truth of the world, the truth of yourself, and if you want to be free from the oceans of samsaric suffering, then you have to know the root cause of suffering, Lama Zopa Rinpoche explains. The world is full of things that are a waste of time. If you don’t know what is right or wrong, your meditation will not amount to anything, and you can waste so much of this life. You need to meet the correct teachings and that depends on merit. And you have to have faith and make correction prayers and dedications. Otherwise, it’s difficult. You could meet Buddhism but fall into eternalism or nihilism.
Rinpoche offers the retreatants a brief history of how the first month-long Kopan Course began (14:37 in the video). There have been fifty-two courses since this first course in 1971.
Generating bodhicitta when listening to the teachings is unbelievable. Even if we don’t have realizations, listening to the teachings with a bodhicitta motivation and offering them to numberless sentient beings is unbelievable. This means we listen to the teachings and dedicate to every hell being, every hungry ghost, every animal, including every ant and mosquito. So we listen to the teachings for them—not only to free them from samsara and bring them to nirvana, but for their ultimate happiness, the total cessation of obscurations and the completion of realizations.
Rinpoche leads the group in offering coffee and cake, including the Clouds of Offering Mantra (48:08 in the video).
Rinpoche continues the teaching, saying that it is so important to understand what the I is. All problems go away when we understand this, Rinpoche assures us. But when we believe in the hallucinated appearance of the I, so many problems arise. Because we don’t know the cause of happiness, due to ignorance, we destroy the cause as if it was an outside enemy. In fact, we rush to create the cause of suffering—like a fisherman who desires happiness and rushes to catch fish for money or pleasure, and due to that killing gets reborn as a fish and gets killed in future lives. Abandoning nonvirtue is the source of happiness. If we can abandon killing, for example, even a mosquito in our room, this becomes the source of happiness for us, and also so much happiness for the beings we don’t harm. In addition, the best protection from being killed is to stop killing.
Rinpoche explains the four parts of completing the action of killing (1:17:12 in the video), discusses the purification practice utilizing the four powers (1:43:19 in the video), and offers some stories of those who have committed the heavy negative karma of killing and how they purified these mistakes.
We invite you to go deeper into the topics presented here, plus many others, by watching Rinpoche’s video or reading the full transcript of Rinpoche’s teaching.
Watch Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teaching “Abandoning Nonvirtue Is a Source of Happiness for You”:
Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave four teachings to students attending the 2022 Vajrasattva retreat: an introductory teaching on March 30 and three subsequent teachings on April 26–28. We will release the concluding teaching soon. You can find them on our page “Teachings for 2022 Vajrasattva Retreatants at Kopan Monastery.”
Find links to resources to support your Vajrasattva practice in the Foundation Store.
This summary of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teaching is by Carina Rumrill, based on the live transcript by Ven. Joan Nicell and checked by Laura Haughey, with editorial input and additions by Laura Miller. This summary is meant to highlight key topics presented by Rinpoche in the recorded video and is not intended to serve as a full representation of Rinpoche’s teaching, which is best received through watching the video and/or reading the full transcript.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche is the spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), a Tibetan Buddhist organization dedicated to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation and community service.