Lama Zopa Rinpoche with views of Annapurna and the Himalayan Mountains, Pokhara, Nepal, December 2021. Photo by Ven. Roger Kunsang.

We can engage in many beneficial activities with our perfect human rebirth. Those activities include generating the four immeasurable thoughts, overcoming self-cherishing, living life with a good heart, and cherishing others. Here are short summaries of Rinpoche’s teachings on these beneficial activities from “The Time to Practice is Now,” a detailed overview of the 2020 Thought Transformation Teachings given by Rinpoche. A short video of Rinpoche teaching on this topic follows the excerpt.

We Can Use Our Perfect Human Rebirth to Generate the Four Immeasurable Thoughts

This perfect human rebirth is so precious because it can be used to practice the four immeasurable thoughts. The merit of practicing each of the four immeasurable thoughts—immeasurable equanimity, immeasurable loving kindness, immeasurable compassion, and immeasurable joy—is so huge that it doesn’t fit in the sky. Rinpoche advises us to not just recite the words of the prayer for generating the four immeasurable thoughts—while thinking of eating pizza or going to the beach!—but to actually meditate on them. To illustrate the benefits of doing so, Rinpoche talks extensively about the benefits of generating immeasurable loving kindness. For example, King of Concentration Sutra says that the merit of generating loving kindness far exceeds the merit of making unimaginable offerings to all the supreme holy beings in ten million billion universes! Meditation on the four immeasurables combined with doing tonglen is especially amazing.

We Can Use Our Perfect Human Rebirth to Overcome Self-Cherishing

This perfect human rebirth is also so precious because we can use it to overcome our self-cherishing thought, our selfish mind, and generate loving kindness, compassion, and bodhicitta. This is much more meaningful than living our life under the control of delusions and causing harm to sentient beings. Usually when someone harms us, our solution is to harm them back, and because of this, we continuously receive harm. The self-cherishing thought that thinks, “I am most important, my happiness is most important,” is a total hallucination. It is like drinking poison while believing it is nectar and only causes us to harm ourselves and others.

The self-cherishing mind is also like a rock. We have to make it soft like cotton—full of loving-kindness and great compassion for others—which leads to bodhicitta. In addition, the self-cherishing mind is like a dictator which only thinks about our own happiness and our own power. We don’t want anyone to harm us or be displeased with us. Because of that, if someone harms, insults, or criticizes us, we get so upset because the self-cherishing mind didn’t get what it wanted. This self-cherishing is the real enemy because all of the suffering of samsara from beginningless rebirths up until now comes from thinking in this way. Together with self-grasping, it has prevented us from achieving even one realization of the path to enlightenment and from liberating even one single sentient being from samsara.

Living our life controlled by the self-cherishing thought, anger, attachment, and the root of samsara—the ignorance holding the I as real—has cheated us. We think of “me, me, me” and work only for ourselves, but all of our happiness comes from sentient beings. Also, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, in whom we take refuge, come from sentient beings. Therefore, we should see all sentient beings as dear and use this precious opportunity of a human life to abandon self-cherishing and strengthen the mind that cherishes others more than ourselves.

We Can Use Our Perfect Human Rebirth to Live Life with a Good Heart and Cherish Others

It is so important to live our life with a good heart, not harming sentient beings and only benefiting them. First we come to realize that everyone’s happiness is as important as our own; and next we come to realize that their happiness is more important than our own.

There are many benefits of using our precious human rebirth to cherish others. If we want happiness, it has to come from our mind, Rinpoche explains. Buddha defeated a million maras by meditating on loving-kindness. If we practice loving-kindness, if we practice bodhicitta, this is the best protection from life’s dangers. If we don’t want suffering—don’t harm others! If a person dedicates their life and offers service with a good heart to everyone, not in a forced way but happily and sincerely, then everything appears to that person as happy, everything appears as good. Therefore, it is also in our own self-interest to cherish others.

Generating loving kindness and compassion, and avoiding the self-cherishing mind is also unbelievably important for our health. With a good heart, we can achieve success for ourselves and others. We can cease all the wrong concepts and delusions,

Watch the Essential Extract “You Get Skies of Merits by Meditating on Immeasurable Loving Kindness”:

In this short video Essential Extract, Lama Zopa Rinpoche explains that our perfect human rebirth is precious because we can use it to generate loving kindness. Rinpoche then recites the short prayer for generating loving kindness and explains its significance. As Rinpoche says, “Even generating loving kindness just for a very short time, a few seconds or a minute, wow, wow, wow, amazing, amazing, wow, wow, the benefits, the merits that you get, wow, wow.” However, if we don’t understand this, we won’t like doing prayers and instead will spend our life involved in negative karma.

Read the transcript of this video extract from Rinpoche’s teaching:
https://fpmt.box.com/s/dfc9e1a70z2rqmmbhh7dufeddfl22cl7

You can find more blogs with short video clips from Rinpoche’s teaching as well as the complete collection of these “Essential Extracts” videos on FPMT.org.

Read more on this topic in Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s book The Perfect Human Rebirth: Freedom and Richness on the Path to Enlightenment, published by Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive (LamaYeshe.com). You can find the four immeasurable thoughts in the Daily Prayers booklet, available in ebook and PDF format in the Foundation Store (shop.fpmt.org).

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.