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Lama Zopa Rinpoche with Ven. Thubten Tendar offering an incense puja at Dongkarla Lhakhang, Bhutan, June 2016. Photo by Ven. Roger Kunsang.
“In America it sometimes happens that small schoolchildren kill many people. Not only small children but adults as well. This happened last year and, from time to time, it has happened before; suddenly, surprisingly. I’m sure it’s not only in America but in the rest of the world as well,” Lama Zopa Rinpoche teaches in this excerpted from the forthcoming book Sun of Devotion, Stream of Blessings, published by the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.
“For example, in America they have talked for years without ever deciding about the right to have guns. At present, everybody can have a gun, so if your enemy or somebody shoots at you, you can shoot back. That seems to be the ordinary mind in America. And so it has happened many times that even young children have killed many people.
“After such a shooting incident, people talk about it on TV and elsewhere for weeks and weeks and weeks. They wonder how a small child could kill so many people. They talk and talk and talk but there is no solution. Once, after a man had killed many people, they checked for insanity but found he was a normal person, or what they call a ‘normal’ person. He was just doing a normal job and living a normal life, like those who are regarded as sane by the government and other organizations. On that particular day, however, his way of thinking suddenly changed, he got a gun and killed many people. This happened.
“Everybody was very surprised. On CNN, Anderson Cooper demanded to know how this could happen, but at the same time said he knew people wouldn’t have an answer. To his mind there was no answer as to how to stop this kind of killing. I’m sorry to say this but he was wrong, there is a way. If the killer had met the Dharma and listened to the teachings of the Omniscient One, he would know there is a method to transform his mind so that such things wouldn’t happen. The method is to purify past negative karma, the obscurations, not just from this life but also from all the beginningless rebirths; to confess and purify. If he could have purified the obscurations that caused him to change his mind and kill all those people, that negative thought would not have arisen and the shooting would not have happened. People might be shocked at what I’m saying but this is the solution.
“Similarly, if the victims of the shooting had known the practice of purification then the result of being killed would not have happened. This is possible. In that way, both victim and perpetrator need purification.
“There is a method, there is something we can do, and that is to work with the mind, not simply to try to effect change from outside but to transform the mind. It’s a purely mental action. Just working with the mind can do that. But unfortunately, because these people have not met the Dharma, they don’t know the method, the solution.
“That is the reason I want to talk about the mind, about how to transform the mind, to stop thinking in unhealthy, nonvirtuous ways that brings problems to others and ourselves and to transform the mind into a positive way of thinking, to be able to live the happiest, most positive life. …”
Read this excerpt in its entirety in the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive June 2016 E-letter:
https://www.lamayeshe.com/article/e-letter-no-156-june-2016
Sun of Devotion, Stream of Blessings by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, edited by Gordon McDougall, contains teachings Rinpoche gave in the United Kingdom in July 2014. Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive publishes the new free book in August 2016. For more:
https://www.lamayeshe.com/shop/sun-devotion-stream-blessings
More information, photos and updates about FPMT spiritual director Lama Zopa Rinpoche can be found on Rinpoche’s webpage on FPMT.org, including post on Rinpoche’s recent trip to Bhutan.
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