Precious Human Life

Verses 1 through 7 Taking Advantage of Being in a Holy Place As I explained yesterday, we are at a special place here where the Buddha manifested his enlightenment and where many enlightened beings have been. Nagarjuna and his two spiritual sons, for instance, and many...

Making Life Meaningful Now we will continue with the text. We are on the second verse. (2) Listen with a clear (mind), O fortunate one, whose mind would rely on the path pleasing to the Triumphant through being unattached to the pleasures of compulsive existence and eager to...

The Difficulty of Obtaining a Precious Human Rebirth and How to Take Best Advantage of It It is important to think in the beginning about the difficulty of obtaining a precious human rebirth with all its respites from situations preventing Dharma practice and all its...

Reaffirming the Motivation We need to have a proper motivation for listening to the teachings; otherwise we will miss an opportunity to build up a great deal of positive force and to incorporate this teaching in our mental continuum. We try not to be motivated by wanting...

The Rarity of a Precious Human Life In our first discussion, we spoke about how this precious human rebirth that we all have is a perfect working basis for our Dharma practice. This working basis is complete with all of the eighteen qualities: the respites and the enrichments....

Three Types of Spiritual Persons To continue with the text, the next verse reads:  (2) Since (practitioners) come to have small, intermediate, and supreme (scopes), they are known as the three types of spiritual persons. I shall therefore write about these specific divisions,...

Fear of Death and Lower Realms I wanted to ask something about fear. Rinpoche said that we can develop fear for states of rebirth that can come to us after death. I was thinking that fear is suffering too. Are we making ourselves suffer for something that may or may not happen...

There are three emotional states that we need to develop as our motivation for refuge, for going in this safe direction. They are usually called fear, belief or confidence and compassion. The main issue is learning how to put them together in a way that they mean something and...

Review of the Importance of Working to Gain Precious Human Rebirths in the Future  In the previous session, we spoke about the person of initial scope or initial motivation. The verse in the text stated: (3) Anyone who takes keen interest in himself or herself (achieving), by...

A Precious Human Rebirth It is very important to appreciate the fact that we have a precious human body as a working basis and that it enjoys all the various respites from all the difficult situations with no chance to practice and that it also has the enriching factors of...