Lama Zopa Rinpoche

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Chapter 1. Taking Care of the Mind Thank you very much, everybody I’ve met in this life and in past lives. The reason we are gathered here is because we have met in past lives or past times. So, to all of you, my brothers and sisters, thank you very much for coming and I offer you my best wishes. What are we going to talk about? I think the most important thing in the world is to realize how all our happiness and problems come from our mind—all our hour-to-hour happiness and problems, minute-to-minute happiness and problems, second-to-second happiness and problems come from our mind. Sometimes in certain situations in our life we are able to recognize that thinking one way brings peace to others and ourselves whereas thinking another way brings harm. The way we act with others in any situation determines the outcome. Understanding this shows us that we have total freedom in our hands—freedom to stop problems and freedom to bring peace and happiness to others and ourselves. Even when great anger arises, we can be aware there is a choice. Our usually uncontrollable self-cherishing thought arises, bringing self-concern, anger, pride and so forth, but sometimes that can make us aware that there is a choice. We can choose. We always have the choice of bringing either happiness or suffering to another person, but because of our anger, the wish to hurt, we generally choose wrong. This clearly proves that our mind is the creator of all our day-to-day life’s problems and happiness. Seeing how this life’s problems and happiness come from our mind, we can go beyond that and see that all the suffering we have experienced and will experience throughout all our lifetimes comes from the mind, including the heavier suffering of the animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings. Everything we have experienced in the past and will experience in the future comes from the mind. Samsara is Sanskrit for cyclic existence or circling, and nirvana is Sanskrit for the ultimate, blissful state of peace for ourselves, the total cessation of all the oceans of samsaric suffering. Both samsara and nirvana come from our mind. Enlightenment is the peerless happiness, the state of omniscient mind. The Tibetan term, sang-gyä, means exactly this, the total cessation of all obscurations and the completion of all realizations. Enlightenment also comes from our mind. It does not come from anywhere else, from temples or anywhere outside. It comes from our mind. Every day, every minute, we have either happiness or problems. If we can learn to think in a better way our problems will disappear and we’ll have peace and happiness in our life. But when we don’t change the way we think, problems fill our entire life, day and night. Then we have to go to see psychologists and doctors. Seeing all these specialists makes our life very expensive! On top of the food and household expenses we generally incur there are all these extra expensive doctors’ fees, probably thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars! Life is so expensive because we don’t know how to take care of our mind, we don’t know how to take care of our life. 9
Actually, Dharma practice, meditation—there are many different names—is the best psychology for the healthiest mind. And the healthiest mind allows us to have the healthiest body. This is impossible if we don’t care for our mind, treating it like garbage, throwing it in the bin. Failing to take care of our mind always brings unpleasant results, creating many worries, many problems, one after the other. No sooner have we solved one problem than another arises, on and on, our whole life getting worse and worse. Out of control, we receive more and more bills, incur more and more debt, over and over again. Like that, our whole life passes. The key to happiness is the mind. With the mind, we can switch our life to suffering or we can switch it to happiness, just as we change television channels, choosing to watch programs about fighting and war, or peaceful things, like the nature programs people seem to enjoy. Experiencing happiness or suffering depends entirely on what we do with our mind. Taking care of the mind, taking care of life, means meditating. Practicing meditation should be just that—taking care of our mind, taking care of our life, taking care of ourselves. This is what I’d like to talk about. I don’t know Buddhism well but I can say a few words about what I’m a little bit familiar with. The method to transform the mind Leaving aside the various higher levels of happiness we can obtain in this life and the happiness beyond this life, most people don’t know that even this life’s mundane happiness comes entirely from the mind. All they consider is this life, which might seem long now but is, in reality, very, very short. This becomes very apparent at the moment of death. After having had this human body with all its comforts and pleasures—car, house, family and so forth—when the moment of death arrives everything is gone. One minute we have it and the next it’s gone. This is what we will experience as we die because during our life we never meditated; we failed to make use of this most important psychology to make our mind positive and healthy. This is what the Buddha taught in his fundamental teaching on the four noble truths, the main focus of the Hinayana: true suffering, true cause of suffering, true cessation of suffering and its cause and the true path that leads to the cessation of suffering and its cause. Within this fundamental teaching of the Buddha are the teachings on impermanence and death. As long as we remain unaware of impermanence—not so much gross impermanence but mainly subtle impermanence—we will experience problems with our life, relationships and so forth. In the same way that most people do not understand the mind, they also do not understand death. Yet it is vital to understand what happens at death so that when we are actually in the death process we can be happy. Although we are still not free from death, by knowing about it we can make it most beneficial for ourselves and all the other living beings, who also have to experience the suffering of death. 10
Page 2 and 3: SUN OF DEVOTION, STREAM OF BLESSING
Page 4 and 5: The Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive Bring
Page 6 and 7: 6. The Guru Is the Most Powerful Ob
Page 8 and 9: Editor’s Preface This book is the
Page 12 and 13: We still have to experience death b
Page 14 and 15: In a well-cultivated field, whateve
Page 16 and 17: What a pleasant life we human being
Page 18 and 19: enefit the teachings of the Buddha
Page 20 and 21: Among those fifty-one secondary min
Page 22 and 23: means the cessation of all the gros
Page 24 and 25: Padmasambhava’s ways of diagnosin
Page 26 and 27: Practicing Dharma is subduing our m
Page 28 and 29: from life to life, we will be able
Page 30 and 31: In A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s W
Page 32 and 33: said, that allows them to develop i
Page 34 and 35: contained in the Tengyur, a collect
Page 36 and 37: Thus the misconceptions about Buddh
Page 38 and 39: Not understanding this specific emp
Page 40 and 41: Cutter Sutra eventually does. Then
Page 42 and 43: There are sentient beings who are a
Page 44 and 45: vase, the neck is not the vase, the
Page 46 and 47: 4. The freedom of not being born as
Page 48 and 49: sentient beings, not only to the ti
Page 50 and 51: If Milarepa could do that after kil
Page 52 and 53: All of us, believers or nonbeliever
Page 54 and 55: The need for refuge in our life Per
Page 56 and 57: ▶abstaining from telling lies ▶
Page 58 and 59: Otherwise they come into the kitche
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Our life is so important, so precio
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Even though our mind, or the other
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We will realize this as we are abou
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The emptiness of the Z I want to en
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the greatest problem that affluent
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Without a guru, we cannot be free f
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This is mentioned in Pabongka Deche
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particles of dust of the earth. Eve
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human mother. If we were to sacrifi
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Buddhism came from the Buddha, from
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obscurations but also the obscurati
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Chapter 7. A Talk about Dolgyal Rec
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seemed to like us and we were able
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very crowded. That’s how we lived
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him about the bum-pa, the vase. Thi
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A key element of guru devotion prac
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who helped with his education, his
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In short, practicing Dolgyal is har
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Khadro-la and earthquakes Although
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esult of negative karma is rebirth
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Publicly she is like an ordinary pe
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There are other quotations but that
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Once in Nepal I dreamed of a small
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is the kind root guru. Then it star
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It is as the quote says, Before the
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The importance of guru devotion Pad
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So now, this is a real story. At Bu
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them perfectly—and even if he has
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Practicing Dharma is more important
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memorize them but then forgot them
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egin by achieving a long life, wher
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Chapter 10. Seeing the Guru as a Bu
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The monks did that, but of course,
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uddhas. That is also mentioned in t
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person without head. I don’t know
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Those meditators who have achieved
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When I was in Tibet I visited Tsurp
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Why should they be called kon-chog
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that it is his mistake. It is like
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Chapter 11. More Precious than a Wi
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patience, perseverance, meditation
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dust of this earth can be counted,
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we were once crossing a short bridg
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There are so many animals. There ar
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Whether or not we eat animals is in
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Having been born at a time when the
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We must prepare for the next life T
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There is no sentient being we have
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Probably many people think that ren
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Chapter 12. Cutting the Root of Sam
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Because things appear to us not as
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161
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This is all karma. What the Buddha
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numberless suffering sentient being
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By seeing that person as a wish-gra
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light more and some illusory body.
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to achieve enlightenment. The other
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together is the transcendental wisd
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Then you make a promise to generate
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eings who also need the Medicine Bu
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Focus on the deity’s holy body th
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End Notes 1. Or his. Rather than us
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30. Khedrub Sang ye Yeshe (1525-91)
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64. In other teachings Rinpoche has
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97. These are the three ways to und
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Where and when these teachings were
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Gyatso, Tenzin, the Fourteenth Dala
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———. How to Practice Dharma:
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If you, dear reader, would like to
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Other available teachings by Lama Y
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Our further development similarly d
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The Foundation for the Preservation
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Dedication Through the merit create
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About Gordon McDougall Gordon McDou
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