Refuge

(1) To gain hold of that precious mind, I offer sincerely to you, the Thusly Gone (Buddhas), to the stainless Rare Gem of the hallowed Dharma, and to you, the offspring of the Buddhas, with oceans of good qualities: (2) Whatever flowers and fruits there are and whatever...

Letting Down the Walls toward Learning As we discussed yesterday, what we try to do is to feel open to being of help to others – relating to others directly with the walls down. The walls need to be down not only toward people, but also toward learning things. It’s a similar...

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...

Review of the Main Points of the Lam-rim The lam-rim is divided into three scopes, each with different states of mind that act as pathways enabling us to reach enlightenment. This structure was first formulated by the great eleventh-century Indian master Atisha, who was...

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...

Review We need to set the proper motivation; namely, that we wish to benefit all beings and to achieve a state of enlightenment in order to be able to do so. With this motivation, listen to these teachings on The Foundation for Good Qualities with the sincere wish to put them...

Verses 5 through 8 When we recite the refuge prayer, we have the line, “By the force of my giving and so on…” It’s good to know that we can change this line to suit the occasion. So, if we are prostrating, we can say, “By the positive force of prostrating to the Buddhas and...

Review: Precious Human Life We have been going through the lam-rim graded stages of the path from the point of view of how they help us to develop a healthy sense of self. We have seen how thinking about the precious human rebirth and realizing how fortunate we actually are...

Visualizing the Spiritual Master When it comes to visualizing the objects of safe direction, of refuge, then we visualize the spiritual master in the form of the yidam (the Buddha-figure) or in the form of Shakyamuni Buddha. However, more comfortable here would be in the form...

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...