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Lama Zopa Rinpoche shopping for flower offerings, Boudhanath, Nepal, July 2021. 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 video reminding listeners that while this teaching is being given specifically for ordained Sangha, anyone is welcome to take the advice offered.
If you haven’t spent your life with a good heart and a positive mind, Rinpoche warns, and instead spend your life trying this and that until life finishes, then you will go to the lower realms. There are many wrong views available to you in this life. You have to check the quality of these views carefully, the same way you check the quality of clothing or food before you purchase it.
Rinpoche then recounts several stories, including about the building of Lama Yeshe’s stupa at Tushita Meditation Centre, Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche, and Serkong Dorje Chang.
Rinpoche reminds us of the motivation for listening to the teachings—to free the numberless sentient beings from oceans of samsaric sufferings and bring them to enlightenment by oneself alone. Therefore, you think of how you must achieve the state of omniscience to do that. Therefore, you are listening to the teachings.
Being attached to sex has not freed you from the oceans of samsaric suffering, Rinpoche observes. Since beginningless times, every sentient being has been one’s own husband, wife, children, and so forth. You have cheated yourself by thinking that the pleasures of this life that you experience are new. You believe you are meeting someone for the first time.
By learning Dharma, you can recognize right and wrong concepts. Usually in the world, any suffering is attributed to outside influences: animals, insects, other people. Rinpoche explains that this is from not knowing Dharma. Learning about Dharma is learning about your life, your mind, and your concepts. It is learning what is the right mind and what is the wrong mind, so you can stop having the wrong mind. Then you can have a healthy, beneficial, harmless, and right life, and have all the good things right up to perfect enlightenment.
You have been totally deceived by your attachment and wrong concepts since beginningless rebirths. Therefore, there is nothing to be attached to. It’s all a hallucination! Since there is nothing to be attached to, you should renounce samsara. Samsaric happiness is only suffering; this is the heart of Buddhism.
You experience suffering until your negative karma finishes, Rinpoche explains. Even great pain in the human realm is nothing compared to a small suffering in the hell realm.
Rinpoche then shares the four suffering results of sexual misconduct:
- The Ripened-Aspect Result of Sexual Misconduct: This means a rebirth in the lower realms.
- The Possessed Result of Sexual Misconduct: You are born as a human being but the environment is muddy, dirty, unhealthy, and has contagious diseases and viruses. Even if we just spend five minutes in a place like this, that is the result of past sexual misconduct.
- Experiencing the Result Similar to the Cause of Sexual Misconduct: However you harmed others, you experience others doing this type of harm to you.
- Creating the Cause Similar to the Result: This is done due to habituation with the past negative karma of sexual misconduct. Even if you think an action is bad, you do it uncontrollably. By engaging in nonvirtue, you become habituated to it, and do it again and again. This is the same for stealing, telling lies, killing—any negative behavior you’re engaged in.
Buddha’s Teachings on Our Lives card
Even in lay life you can abandon sexual misconduct. There are five lay vows one can take to help abstain from negative actions such as sexual misconduct. In this teaching we are discussing the purpose to become Sangha.
Rinpoche then recites the Phagpa Chulung Rolpai Do Mantra: OṂ HANU PHASHA BHARA HE YE SVĀHĀ. He explains that each time you see this mantra, it purifies your negative karma, one hundred thousand eons!
Rinpoche also holds up the Buddha’s Teachings on Our Lives card and explains that this is so important to have in a room in one’s home, even in the bathroom.
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 “Being Attached to Sex Has Not Freed You from the Oceans of Samsaric Sufferings”:
https://youtu.be/Lmw-Tzymu08
- Read the transcript of Rinpoche’s teaching
- You can download the cards Rinpoche mentioned in the teaching from the Foundation Store: Phagpa Chulung Rolpai Do Mantra and Six Syllables of Clairvoyance Mantra PDF and Buddha’s Teachings on Our Lives PDF.
- Find Rinpoche’s Teachings on Thought Transformation translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, and Russian
- 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 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.