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Lama Zopa Rinpoche teaching in Munich, Germany, November 2018. Photo by Ven. Lobsang Sherab.
Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive recently published The Path to Ultimate Happiness, an ebook of teachings given by Lama Zopa Rinpoche during the 42nd Kopan lamrim course. In this book, Rinpoche discusses our potential to bring benefit and happiness, including full enlightenment, to all sentient beings. Here’s a short excerpt:
This life is very short. We can’t really tell how many years we have left or how many months, how many weeks, how many days, how many hours, minutes, or seconds. There are a certain number of seconds, a certain number of breaths from right at this minute up to the time of our death, and those breaths are constantly running out; they are going very fast. There are a certain number of seconds from right now until death, and they are finishing very fast. Whatever is left over is constantly finishing very fast as we go toward death.
We can’t really tell who will die next in this world. A child who has just come out of womb—or even in the womb—can die without the opportunity to grow up. So many sentient beings die in their childhood, so many when they become middle-aged, and of course there is no question of when they become old.
We really can’t tell. Within another ten or twenty years, and certainly within another fifty years, many of us here will be gone. Can we be certain that we will still be OK for another year? It’s difficult to say, even regarding our own wellbeing.
Excerpted from The Path to Ultimate Happiness, teachings given by Lama Zopa Rinpoche during the 42nd Kopan lamrim course in 2009 at Kopan Monastery, Nepal, lightly edited by Gordon McDougall and Sandra Smith.
In the new ebook The Path to Ultimate Happiness, Rinpoche explains the lamrim, the stages of the path to enlightenment, teaches extensively on emptiness and the good heart, and gives commentaries on sur practice, the Offering Cloud Mantra, and other prayers and practices.
You can order The Path to Ultimate Happiness from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive or the FPMT Foundation Store:
https://www.lamayeshe.com/shop/path-ultimate-happiness-ebook
https://shop.fpmt.org/-The-Path-to-Ultimate-Happiness-eBook-PDF-_p_3134.html
Watch Lama Zopa Rinpoche teach LIVE during his visit to Switzerland, November 13, 16-18! For links to live video streams:
https://fpmt.org/media/streaming/lama-zopa-rinpoche-live/
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.