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Lama Zopa Rinpoche blessing water to put in a city park pond to bless the fish and ducks in the pond, Madrid, Spain, October 2018. Photo by Ven. Roger Kunsang.
While teaching in Madrid, Spain, in October 2018, Rinpoche summarized the whole path to enlightenment, emphasizing the importance of the guru. The path also includes developing renunciation, bodhichitta, and an understanding of gross and subtle emptiness, and eventually practicing tantra. Here’s part of this teaching:
When your mind is living in correctly following the virtuous friend, realizing this, you are looking at each guru as all the buddhas, buddhas’ dharmakaya. You are not only looking with devotion and following with devotion, but your actions are fulfilling the wishes and following the advice of the guru.
Each time you follow what the guru advises you, for example, even reciting mantras—each day reciting two thousand or one thousand OM MANI PADME HUM—then each time you recite OM MANI PADME HUM, you become closer to enlightenment. You become closer to enlightenment by reciting OM MANI PADME HUM one time. The guru gave advice to recite every day one thousand mala or two thousand mala, so each time you recite OM MANI PADME HUM, you become closer to enlightenment, closer to being free from samsara, you understand? Then also the number of vows that have been given to you, as you follow the advice, each day, each hour, each minute, you become closer to being free from samsara and closer to enlightenment.
Like Milarepa, even when you are just so busy doing work, for example you are manager or you are a builder or something, but due to the guru’s advice, you are all the time working with the people, talking with the people, walking up and down, with each step you fulfill the guru’s advice and wishes. Then with each step, each action at work you do, you are collecting the most unbelievable merits and purification. Then you’ll more quickly be free from samsara and more quickly achieve enlightenment with each step, each talk you do, because it is according to the guru’s advice, fulfilling the guru’s wishes. When you are talking to the people, workers, it is like that.
Wow, wow, wow. Then you can realize how you are most fortunate. Otherwise you think you are just given work, work, work. …
Hear more from Rinpoche on following the guru and the path to enlightenment in this 12-minute video teaching:
https://youtu.be/FWUN-E2N-2M
Colophon: Excerpted from Lama Zopa Rinpoche teaching in Madrid, Spain, October 28, 2018. Simultaneously transcribed by Ven. Joan Nicell. Lightly edited by Laura Miller, July 2019. (Complete unedited transcript here.)
Find complete videos of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s recent teachings, including teachings from the May-June 2019 Vajrayogini retreat at Institut Vajra Yogini in France:
https://fpmt.org/media/streaming/teachings-of-lama-zopa-rinpoche/
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.