When you go shopping, if you buy something for someone else, think sincerely of the other person’s happiness and offer the gift without attachment clinging to your own happiness. If you are buying something for your own use, think, ‘‘I’m the servant of all sentient beings. My job is to free them from all suffering and lead them to enlightenment. Therefore, even though I am using this object, ultimately, it is for them.’’ This is the way to use the things you buy—with the thought that you are the servant of others and that whatever you enjoy is ultimately for them.
If you shop with bodhicitta, not only do you avoid creating negative karma, but you also create the cause of supreme enlightenment for yourself and all sentient beings. If you shop with renunciation, you create the cause of happiness. If you shop with meditation on emptiness, by cutting the root of ignorance, you create the cause of liberation from samsara. Shopping with bodhicitta is best, because it brings you to enlightenment. Partying with bodhicitta
When you give a party, think, ‘‘I am responsible for the happiness of all sentient beings. The purpose of my life is to free all sentient beings from suffering and lead them to all happiness, especially the peerless happiness of full enlightenment. This is my universal responsibility. To succeed in this I must first reach enlightenment myself, therefore I am going to do the Dharma practice of offering food and drink to others.’’
If you throw a party for only your own happiness, with ego and attachment, the evil thought of the eight worldly dharmas, clinging to the comfort of this life, your motivation is completely negative and the entire event becomes completely non-virtuous. No matter how many thousands of guests you entertain, all you do is create negative karma, countless causes for rebirth in the lower realms. If, however, your motivation for having a party and offering food and drink to others is a Dharma motivation from one of the three levels of virtue, it all becomes the cause of happiness.
Not only when you’re giving a party, but even when you offer food and drink to others in the course of normal daily life, if you visualize them as manifestations of your guru and think that you are making an offering to him, you accumulate the most extensive merit. If you visualize the people to whom you are offering the food and drink as the deity to whom you pray, you are practicing tantra and creating unbelievable merit, much more than you would with simple charity. In this way, even if you give a person something quite small, like a glass of water or a piece of candy, you have made an incredibly successful business transaction, the result of which is unceasing happiness. Furthermore, if you and the person to whom you are giving the water or candy are both disciples of the same guru and you remember him at that time, the merit you create is greater than that of making offerings to the numberless buddhas of the three times and the ten directions. Thus, everything becomes the cause of enlightenment; you have made the greatest possible profit out of that. No matter how little money you spent, the end result is not only enlightenment and, of course, all the other happinesses that lead up to it, but also you have avoided creating negative karma, the cause of samsara and the lower realms.