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Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Khen Rinpoche Geshe Chonyi with the staff of Kopan Monastery, Nepal, June 2020. Photo by Ven. Lobsang Sherab.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche continues his video teachings on thought transformation from Kopan Monastery in Nepal. Here is a summary of the most recent teaching:
Rinpoche begins this explaining that each Sangha person has been a hero for as long as they have been ordained because they conquer the delusions. Sangha must recognize that they are incredibly brave. Since beginningless rebirths we have been slaves to the delusions. Now as Sangha, you face the delusions. By meeting the Dharma you have found a way to defeat the delusions, which have caused suffering since beginningless rebirths.
You think you are alone in the world, but you never are. There are numberless buddhas and bodhisattvas with you, and they are happy with you. Buddhas and bodhisattvas have a hundred thousand times more compassion for you than you have for yourself.
If you practice good karma, abandon negative karma, and live in the vows this will bring all the success and happiness in life. You have to work at this. You have to abandon the cause of suffering and create the cause of happiness. Dharma practice is to defeat delusions—this is important to and remember.
Attachment to others’ bodies is due to habituation from beginningless samsara. The attachment did not come from the side of the object, but from your mind. Depending on how someone treats you, your mind changes in regard to them. You discriminate based on whether they love and praise you or criticize and not like you. All of that is from your side. Beautiful and ugly come from your mind, not from the side of the object.
Only the person who harms you and gets angry at you gives you the chance to practice the perfection of patience. By practicing patience you can overcome anger and not only achieve liberation from samsara, but you are able to achieve enlightenment with infinite qualities of the holy body, speech, and mind so you can do perfect work for sentient beings. So you can see that this person who is your “enemy” is so unbelievably kind and incredibly precious.
You can go crazy with attachment to people’s bodies because you never think about what is inside: the veins, bones, and flesh. Even outer skin is nothing to be attached to if you look closely at it. In reality, the human body is like a meat shop in India or Nepal, where the bodies are hanging with everything that is on the inside hanging out.
From this, you give up a higher rebirth, nirvana, and enlightenment, and bringing numberless sentient beings to enlightenment for a few seconds of pleasure. You yourself created attachment, therefore freedom from it is in your hands. It is also important to meditate on the suffering of change to overcome attachment. What you call pleasure is labeled by the mind. The negative imprint left on the mental continuum by ignorance projects real pleasure and then real pleasure appears. Then, the wrong concept believing it to be real pleasure causes you to be continuously reborn in samsara. Truly existent pleasure is a total hallucination, like taking drugs and seeing things that aren’t there. Attachment cheats you like honey on the blade of a sword.
We invite you to go deeper into the topics presented here, plus many others, by watching Rinpoche’s video and reading the full transcript of Rinpoche’s teaching.
Watch Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teaching “Attachment to Pleasure Cheats You“:
https://youtu.be/nQy7JBj1GRM
- Read the transcript of Rinpoche’s teaching
- Dedication verses for COVID-19 Crisis Teachings
Watch more from the video series Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Teachings on Thought Transformation during the Time of COVID-19 and find links to videos in translation, transcripts, MP3s, additional practice advice, and more:
https://fpmt.org/fpmt/announcements/resources-for-coronavirus-pandemic/advice-from-lama-zopa-rinpoche-for-coronavirus/
Practice advice from our teachers, Dharma study-from-home opportunities, and more can be found on the page “Resources for the Coronavirus Pandemic.”
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.