Rinpoche laughing during a video teaching, Kopan Monastery, Nepal, August 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 continues offering teachings specifically intended for ordained Sangha, but everyone is welcome to benefit from Rinpoche’s advice. He begins this video teaching by reminding us that we have received this perfect human rebirth with the freedom to practice Dharma qualified by the eight freedoms and ten richnesses. This rebirth is extremely rare and precious. Even having the first freedom of not being born in hell is most precious.

It is important to understand your own samsaric suffering. If you don’t, you can’t generate compassion for all sentient beings. You must view being in samsara as being in the center of a fire. You have to feel all of your suffering as unbearable, not as pleasure. From that, great compassion for every sentient being comes. From that, bodhichitta arises—the thought to free all beings from oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to enlightenment. For that, we need omniscience and enlightenment for ourselves. No one achieves enlightenment without saying goodbye to samsara.

This life is amazing, but it can stop at any time. Right now there are numberless beings dying in the mother’s womb, as babies, as children, in middle age, in old age; one’s breathing can stop at any time. It is like a bubble in water or lightning in the sky.

Rinpoche then discusses the power of holy objects and the benefits of building statues, stupas, and temples. Often building statues and temples doesn’t make sense to Westerners. They think it is too expensive and a waste of money, Rinpoche explains, because they don’t understand the benefits.

Rinpoche quotes from and gives commentary on Sutra Requested by King Prasenajit:

According to however many subtle atoms
Stupas or statues of the Bhagavan have,
For that many lifetimes the human beings who construct them
Will definitely attain wheel-turning king in the deva realm above ground.

They will experience all the supreme grounds
Of perfect concentration of the form and formless realms
And, at the end, they will attain the state of a buddha,
Which is free from the sufferings of birth, aging, and so forth.

Even the creatures killed under the feet of people building a temple will not fall into the lower realms. The teachings of Pandita Nagkyi Rinchen say:

The sentient beings touched by the smoke from preparing food and drink for those making
a place for the Three Rare Sublime Ones to abide and also the creatures killed under the
feet of the workers will not fall into the abodes of the three lower realms.

Even looking at a drawing of a buddha when you are angry causes you to gradually see ten million buddhas. From White Lotus Sutra:

Even if with an angry mind you look
At a drawing of a buddha’s body on a stone wall,
Gradually you will see ten million buddhas.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama said that the real stupa is the realizations of the path to enlightenment within you. You need to dedicate yourself to actualizing the lamrim. No matter how much practice, prostrations, and mantras you do, the main path is listening, reflecting, and meditating on the lamrim.

You cannot receive the blessings of the buddhas without a guru. From Dütsii Nyingpo, Essential Nectar:

Even if the beams of the sun are so hot,
Without a magnifying glass they cannot produce fire.
Like that, also the Buddha’s blessings
Cannot be received without a guru.

Like that, by pleasing the guru,
You please all the buddhas.

The guru is the channel through which the ten-direction buddhas guide you and speak to you. You should serve the guru with the mindfulness that the guru is the channel for all the buddhas. The guru is not just someone who gives you a Dharma education. That is a very ordinary view. Without strong guru devotion, heresy and anger arise in relation to the guru, and you create the heaviest negative karma among the negative karmas. Because the essence is pleasing the guru, you need to concentrate on that in everyday life. By pleasing the guru, negative karmas get burned in one second!

Some people spend their whole lives meditating without an object because they don’t have a correct guru. After some time, your mind becomes dull. In this world it is very difficult to meet a perfect guru. For those that do not have the merit to meet a perfect guru and receive perfect teachings, and who have so much suffering and are going on the wrong path, you can develop compassion for them.

You also cannot achieve enlightenment without bodhichitta. As much as possible, do everything with bodhichitta. Even if you don’t have a realization of bodhichitta, but have a bodhichitta motivation, everything you do becomes a cause for enlightenment. By making requests to your guru with firm devotion, you develop realizations.

In order to achieve enlightenment in a brief lifetime, you need to practice highest yoga tantra because otherwise you lose the opportunity. Then, to be able to develop compassion, to be able to develop the graduated path to enlightenment, you need to purify the obstacles, obscurations, and negative karma, and collect the necessary conditions and merit.

The essence of the practice is persevering in the higher training of morality. You should take the individual liberation vow as your heart practice. Morality is the heart practice. You cannot practice Dharma separately from keeping your promised morality. You should keep the three vows that you have taken: the individual liberation vow, the bodhisattva vows, and the tantric vows.

Where you go in your future life depends on your present actions. You can tell what types of actions you did in the past by looking at your current life, and where you will go next life depends on today.

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 “There Is Nothing More Sublime Than Practicing the Higher Training of Morality”:

• Read the transcript of Rinpoche’s teaching
• Prayer for the Flourishing of Je Tsongkhapa’s Teachings PDF
• Find resources to support your study of lamrim
• Learn more about FPMT’s Holy Objects Fund
• Find Rinpoche’s Teachings on Thought Transformation translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, and Russian
• Dedication verses

Watch more from the video series Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Teachings on Thought Transformation 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.