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The core group of lama who have completed more than forty fire pujas for purification and healing. From left, Abbot of Mindroling Monastery, Khadro-la, Mingyur Rinpoche, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, abbot of Shechen Monastery, Nepal, July 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:
Lama Zopa Rinpoche begins this teaching explaining that lojong involves utilizing happiness and suffering on the path to enlightenment. In this way, everything one experiences is an opportunity for thought transformation.
This virus is teaching us about karma, but we don’t recognize this due to ignorance. We think suffering and happiness come from outside the mind, but if you understand karma, you know that it all comes from the mind. While you are a human being, this is the only chance to understand karma—not as a hell being, preta, or animal.
Even though we don’t like suffering, we run toward it and destroy happiness because sentient beings are totally ignorant of the cause of suffering and the cause of happiness. You are born as a human being this one time but then use the human capacity, mind, and intelligence in the wrong way to cause so much harm. We can use the present difficult situation in the world to develop compassion and to try to become better human beings, not harm the world and others, and at least bring happiness and peace to ourselves instead of becoming crazy. You are responsible to free the numberless sentient beings in the numberless universes, including the mosquito buzzing around in your ear!
You are still suffering in samsara because you didn’t change your mind into bodhichitta like Buddha did. Because you have Buddha nature, you have the potential to become an enlightened being. However, we live our lives running toward offering service to the self-cherishing thought, which is your worst enemy. Because of this we have been suffering from beginningless time up to now.
After meeting the Dharma you may study, do retreat, and learn many things, but sometimes nothing happens to your mind, and it may even become worse! When your mind is weak and you listen to the Dharma but can’t grasp words or understand the meaning, rely on the power of the holy merit field: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha in many different aspects. The main essence, the highest merit field is the guru. By depending on the special merit field, strive in the pure path to liberation and the state of omniscience.
If you don’t collect merit with outer and inner offerings, nothing will happen to your mind. The most important thing is to make offerings with a motivation possessed by bodhichitta, transformed in bodhichitta.
Don’t waste your human body, which has the eight freedoms and the ten richnesses. Make it meaningful. The essence is to create the cause for every single transmigratory being to achieve liberation and the state of omniscience, to achieve enlightenment for that. Happiness, the benefits, the realizations, the happiness within samsara, liberation, enlightenment—everything has to come from your mind.
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 “If You Don’t Collect Merits Nothing Will Happen in Your Mind“:
https://youtu.be/j41TSWp8XfU
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.