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One of the retreat cabins at Milarepa Center, Vermont, USA.
Describing the significance of one of his Vast Visions for the FPMT organization, supporting practice and realizations, Lama Zopa Rinpoche said, “Anybody who dedicates their life to achieving lamrim realizations with the goal to liberate numberless beings from the oceans of samsaric suffering and to bring to enlightenment, this is what I regard as the most important thing in the world.” In Rinpoche’s book, Heart Advice for Retreat, he further explains:
“What is the importance of doing retreat? Why do people need to do retreat? It is not simply to be quiet, to have a break from one’s family. Instead, there are very crucial reasons for doing retreat, very urgent reasons.
“One simple reason is happiness. The peace and happiness of parents, for example, depend upon their children’s having affection and compassion towards them. And the children’s peace and happiness depend upon their parent’s affection and compassion. The same is true for couples or partners: each member’s peace, happiness, and success depend upon the compassion and kindness of the other person. For teachers and students as well, their peace and happiness depend upon one another.
“On a larger scale, the relationship between the leader of a country and its population also depends upon their cultivation of a proper attitude, a good heart, and compassion. And if one person is avoiding bringing problems such as violence to a country or even to the whole world, that too depends upon his or her development of compassion, loving kindness, and a good heart. …”
In 2006, Rinpoche wrote a letter to a student who had been engaged in retreat for fifteen months. One excerpt reads:
“You are making the best progress in your retreat because you are seeing lam-rim more and more deeply. This means your retreat is benefiting your mind. You have developed a very deep realization of how terrible samsara is. You understand it is nothing but suffering. You know you have experienced rebirth in samsara numberless times and continuing to reincarnate in this samsara is incredibly unbearable and disgusting.
“This sort of realization is very important. We need to experience the suffering of samsara as unbearable and totally in the nature of suffering – not only the suffering of pain and the suffering of change, but also pervasive compounded suffering. This means the aggregates themselves are in the very nature of suffering.
“Not only is samsara in the nature of suffering, but what we perceive as happiness often results from committing negative actions. These negative actions plant seeds of delusion in our minds. More delusion arises from that seed, and more negative karma arises from that delusion. In this way, we constantly create the cause of compounded suffering.” Please read the whole letter.
FPMT retreat centers span the globe in a variety of beautiful locations and several centers also offer the opportunity to do Buddhist retreats in the heart of the city. These centers offer everything from intensive meditation on Tibetan Buddhist practices to a relaxing environment for reflection and discovery. Please explore the many retreat facilities and opportunities available to you at FPMT centers worldwide.
Download Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Heart Advice for Retreat.
Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), is a Tibetan Buddhist organization dedicated to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation and community service.