Preliminary Practices by the Zillion

By Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Students sometimes ask why gurus like Lama Zopa Rinpoche give out practices which can “run into the zillions!” The purpose of doing these practices (which can be hundreds of thousands of mantras, or prostrations, or mandala offerings, or Dorje Khadro fire offerings, or water bowl offerings, etc.) is for us to not only purify the obstacles that could prevent us from achieving realizations on the path to enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings – defilements, negative karmas, and downfalls – but also to collect extensive merit. Furthermore, to cause such realizations to ripen within your mind, you need to receive your guru’s blessings through the practice of guru yoga.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche explains:

Don’t worry about the large numbers – this is a plan for life. If you work at a job or are studying, the way to complete these practices is to do a little each day. Of course, you can get more done in retreat, which can mean a weekend, seven or fifteen days, a month or two, a year or more, or even a lifetime. You can do one, two, three or more retreats a year, according to your convenience. This is just to give you an idea of the various ways in which you can complete your preliminaries.

By doing these practices, you will create merit for a long life and happiness now and in future lives, whatever you need; then liberation from samsara, ultimate happiness and full enlightenment – all this can be achieved. You can achieve cessation of all the mistakes of the mind, and complete all the realizations; you can cause happiness in this life for so many other living beings; you can cause all the happiness of their future lives; cause liberation from samsara and ultimate happiness; cause numberless sentient beings to achieve full enlightenment.

The wealth of the deva realm is nothing compared to this precious human body. Every second, you can achieve all these things. If you don’t get to practice Dharma, then each second all of this is lost, all these profound benefits. It is like having lost limitless skies of billions of dollars, gold, diamonds, even wish-granting jewels. Even if all that wealth were lost, it would be nothing compared to wasting this most precious human body. Even to waste one second is a great loss.

We have achieved all the qualities – clairvoyance, psychic powers, the eight siddhis, common powers, etc. – numberless times in the past, but they did not free us from the suffering of samsara, because we did not cease the cause of the suffering. This is because we have not achieved the realizations of the Lam-Rim, the graduated path to enlightenment. We have to actualize the Four Noble Truths. We need to develop renunciation of what is suffering, realizing that all samsara’s perfections are really suffering and seeking liberation from this, constantly, day and night, by seeing that samsara is in the nature of suffering; finding no attraction to samsaric happiness for even one second.

When doing preliminary practices in retreat, always spend the first session concentrating on guru yoga, emphasizing guru devotion meditation. Then do about a half hour of lam-rim meditation. For the rest of the session – an hour, and hour-and-a-half or two hours: you can decide the length – do your preliminaries. If you retreat like this, your preliminaries retreat also becomes a lam-rim retreat: your lam-rim mediations make your preliminary practice much more powerful for purification and the accumulation of merit, and your preliminary practices make your lam-rim meditation extremely effective in quickly transforming your mind into the path to enlightenment.

In addition to the specific practices given here you should also meditate on and recite the short¹ or long² Avalokiteshvara mantra, or both, and the Medicine Buddha mantra³ as many times as possible every day.

Only the five path to liberation (the path of accumulation, path of preparation, path of seeing, path of meditation, and the path of no more learning) cease all the defilements – the distracted thoughts and obstacles, including the seeds – making it impossible to be reborn again; impossible to experience all the suffering, sickness, relationship problems, and death. As long as we don’t realize the four noble truths, and complete the path that I just mentioned, we will have to suffer in samsara without end, as it didn’t have a beginning.

The reason I give all these numbers of preliminary practice and meditations on the Lam-Rim is to complete the works for self – ceasing the defilements, the mistakes of the mind, and completing all the realizations – to be able to do perfect works for numberless sentient beings, so they can actualize the path and achieve enlightenment. For that we need to purify the obstacles, negative karma and defilements, and create the necessary conditions, the merits. Then we need to receive blessings from the guru; for that we need to practice guru yoga. That is why these practices are given, to purify the mind and to collect merit.

If you do the practices with bodhichitta, you purify many eons of negative karma each day be practicing. Life is very short. Not only can death happen at any time; death can happen any day, any hour, any minute or second. So we must do our best to engage in beneficial actions, practicing Dharma; living life with bodhichitta motivation, which is the cause to achieve enlightenment, besides meditating on the path which leads to bodhichitta; then meditating on emptiness, learning about emptiness, to develop the wisdom that directly ceases all the defilements; living our daily life with those meditations as well as correct devotion to the virtuous friend, guru devotion. This is the essence of Dharma practice.

Remember, it is your guru’s instructions that enable you to make your practice most productive and to gain quick realizations. During break time, during life between your sitting meditations – not breaks from your Dharma practice – while you’re standing, walking, or sleeping, you should try to live your life with the experience that you generated in your morning meditation.

I know I don’t get to meet you all very often to discuss what practices you are doing. That is the reason I give them all at once, so you know what to focus on, so you have something to do for quite a number of years. Do whatever you can, but remember preliminaries are not just to be done one time, and then not again. Even eighth and tenth-level bodhisattvas, who have vast amounts of qualities, continue with the preliminaries, performing them with countless manifest bodies. Even one so close to enlightenment is still performing preliminaries. You need to create merit and do purification to achieve enlightenment.

[Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s general advice for those who are unsure about which practices to focus on: Prostrations to the Thirty-five Buddhas in the morning; one or more guru yoga practices (Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga, Shakyamuni Buddha, and/or Lama Chopa) combined with Lam-Rim (circling through each topic continuously until you receive stable realizations); Vajrasattva at night; Chenrezig to develop compassion; and Medicine Buddha for the success of all your wishes.]

1. OM MANI PADME HUM

2. NAMO RATNA TRAYAYA / NAMAH ARYA JÑANA SAGARA / VAIROCHANA VYUHARAJAYA / TATHAGATAYA / ARHATE SAMYAK SAMBUDDHAYA / NAMAH SARVA TATHAGATABHYAH / ARHATEBHYAH / SAMYAK SAMBUDDHEBHYAH / NAMAH ARYA AVALOKITESHVARAYA / BODHISATTVAYA / MAHASATTVAYA / MAHAKARUNIKAYA / TADYATHA / OM DHARA DHARA / DHIRI DHIRI / DHURU DHURU / ITTI VATTE / CHALE CHALE / PRACHALE PRACHALE / KUSUME KUSUME VARE / ILI MILI / CHITI JVALAM / APANAYE SVAHA

3. TADYATHA OM BEKANDZE BEKANDZE MAHABEKANDZE BEKANDZE RANDZA SAMUDGATE SOHA

This advice is based on Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s advice “Reasons for Preliminary Practice,” which is available along with other advice from Rinpoche at the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

Find more preliminary practice resources on the Foundation Store.

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