Lama Zopa Rinpoche watching the live webcast of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Avolokiteshvara empowerment, Kopan Monastery, Nepal, May 2020

Lama Zopa Rinpoche continues his video teachings from Kopan Monastery in Nepal. Here is a summary of the most recent teaching:

Lama Zopa Rinpoche begins this teaching explaining how his current video teaching series from Kopan Monastery started, due to the virus and having to stay in one place rather than traveling the world to give teachings. He thanks everyone who has been listening to the teachings on video and reminds us that the general idea of these teachings is lojong (thought transformation).

Due to old habits, we can spend our whole life distracted by attachment, anger, ignorance, pride, jealousy, and all the delusions, thus wasting our precious and perfect human life. But now, Rinpoche explains, we have the opportunity to learn Dharma through the internet without needing to travel.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is giving live teachings online (including for Saka Dawa). Many other great teachers are also teaching online. This is a chance to receive the Dharma thanks to technology without having to spend money on travel. Technology can bring great benefit but, of course, also great harm and can be a waste of time, depending on how you use it.

The antidote to wasting our lives is to practice pure Dharma, meaning without attachment to the eight worldly concerns, without grasping to the pleasures of this life. To renounce that is to practice pure Dharma. We can do this by meditating on the lamrim, especially the graduated path of a lower capable being, which is renunciation of this life and the pleasures and happiness of this life—to see these as suffering and the causes of suffering.

Attachment to the pleasures of this life not only makes your life meaningless, it also creates negative karma. Since beginningless rebirths we have been following attachment; that’s how strong the habit is. To break this habit, we must meditate on perfect human rebirth and its usefulness, and how it is difficult to find again. We have to remember death and impermanence, which defeats the enemy of attachment to the pleasures of this life. Meditating on impermanence and death is not just for beginners.  

Those who haven’t met Dharma, don’t realize they are wasting their lives under the control of attachment, clinging to the pleasures of this life. If you use technology in the wrong way, you can totally waste your life and the lives of others. Even if you think it is enjoyment to spend so much time on technology (such as the iPad), if done with a poisonous mind, with attachment, anger, your “enjoyment” is not enjoyment at all because actions arising from ignorance, anger, and attachment are non-virtue, and necessarily create negative karma.

Every day, every minute, every second you have the freedom to achieve happiness by thinking in a positive way. You can change, no matter how “bad” you are. We can use Milarepa’s life as inspiration for this. By following the guru’s advice, one can say goodbye to samsara.

To generate compassion, you need to know the suffering of the six-realms sentient beings. For example, pretas, a type of being, have bodies that are dry, and they can’t find food or drink for tens of thousands of years. Due to their karma, even if they see water, or green plants, their gaze dries the water up and makes it disappear. They have mouths the size of the eye of a needle, but stomachs as big as a mountain. Even if they do receive food or drink, it cannot fill up their stomachs. There is also a second type of preta, which has flames coming from its mouth. A third type of preta has knots in its neck. The pretas all have unmanageable, unbearable suffering. Rinpoche makes charity to the three different types of pretas.

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 “How to Avoid Wasting Your Life and the Sufferings of Pretas“:
https://youtu.be/YKNAayMudMA

• Read the transcript of Rinpoche’s teaching “How to Avoid Wasting Your Life and the Sufferings of Pretas.”
• Rinpoche mentions Medicine Buddha practice, which can be found in A Brief Meditation-Recitation on Guru Medicine Buddha
• Rinpoche also refers to the practice Offering Water Charity to the Pretas
• Dedication verses for COVID-19 Crisis Teachings

Watch His Holiness the Dalai Lama LIVE!

Watch a live webcast of His Holiness the Dalai Lama leading a ceremony for cultivating the awakening mind from his residence in Dharamsala, HP, India on June 5, 2020, beginning at 9:00 a.m. IST. (This is 4:30 a.m. BST on June 5 in London, UK; and 8:30 p.m. PDT on June 4 in Los Angeles, California, US. Other times can be found using Time Zone Converter.)  People are requested to please follow social distancing rules while viewing the live webcast. 

For links to the live webcast, live translations in thirteen languages, the schedule of upcoming webcasts, and more:
https://www.dalailama.com/live

Find more advice and video teachings by Lama Zopa Rinpoche from Kopan Monastery during the coronavirus pandemic and also links to videos in translation, transcripts, MP3s, 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.