The words of Lama Zopa Rinpoche:
Why do we exert so much effort to survive every day, every hour, every minute, every second? Why do we spend so much money taking care of this body, checking our health every year to see if there’s anything wrong and, if there is, undergoing expensive treatment? Why do we spend so much money on food, clothing and shelter—on the many things we need to survive and be healthy? Why do we do all those billions of exercises to keep our bodies healthy?
All these expenses and activities have meaning only if we have compassion within us. Compassion for others makes everything we do—spending money, studying, working, exercising, looking after our health—meaningful.
If, on the other hand, our hearts lack compassion, our lives become empty. All those expenses, all that effort, all those long hours on the job are totally devoid of meaning and we find no fulfillment in our everyday lives. Without compassion, the thought of benefiting others, our hearts remain unfulfilled and it is very difficult for us to find satisfaction in whatever we do. No matter how much external wealth we have, if our hearts lack compassion, they are always empty; hollow inside.
If you check carefully, you will see that no matter how many things you have or how hard you try to achieve them, if there’s no compassion in your heart, you never feel quite right. There’s no peace in your heart, and deep within, you always feel that there’s something missing.
The best way to give meaning to your life is to make it beneficial for others by having compassion for them. That’s also the best way to find peace, happiness, fulfillment and satisfaction in your own life. But compassion for others does not only bring you peace and happiness right now, every moment of your present life. Living your life for others also offers you the best possible future. And even at that most critical juncture, the end of your life, when your consciousness separates from your body, compassion makes your death happy, peaceful and satisfying. Moreover, your peaceful, happy death, makes others happy too. Your friends and family can rejoice. You become an inspiration, an example of hope and courage. They see that their own deaths could also be happy.
In this book, Lama Zopa Rinpoche explains how we can practice Dharma, the true cause of happiness, twenty-four hours a day. For most of us, it is extremely important to know how to do this. Our busy lives do not allow us the luxury of many hours’ formal study and practice each day. We have to work, eat, sleep, fulfill family and societal obligations, entertain ourselves and so forth—activities that are not normally considered to be spiritual pursuits. Who has time to meditate?
However, as Rinpoche points out again and again, Dharma is not just what you do but the way that you do it. Motivation is key. It’s our mental attitude and not so much the action itself that determines whether what we do is positive, the cause of happiness, or negative, the cause of suffering. Therefore, if we know how to use our mind properly, everything we do can become a Dharma action, good karma, meritorious, positive. In these teachings, then, Rinpoche clarifies how we should use our minds so that we can make everything we do the true cause of happiness.
But that’s not all. There are different degrees of happiness, the highest being that of enlightenment; buddhahood itself. That is what we must strive for, but not for ourselves alone. We must aim for the enlightenment of all sentient beings; we must endeavor to bring the highest degree of happiness to every single living being. To work with compassion for the enlightenment of all sentient beings is the purpose of our lives, and to direct everything we do towards this goal is how we can make our lives as meaningful as they can possibly be.
Such motivation is called bodhicitta, and in this book, Lama Zopa Rinpoche describes how we can motivate our every action with bodhicitta, the true cause of ultimate happiness for all sentient beings. To live by bodhicitta is to live a truly meaningful life. Thank you, Rinpoche, for your never-ending kindness in being a perfect example of bodhicitta in action and for constantly teaching us the importance of this. May you live long for the benefit of all sentient beings.
The first talk, ‘‘The Purpose of Life,’’ was given in New York City, August, 1999, at the request of Geshe Michael Roach, during a three-day series of teachings by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The other teachings in this booklet form the essence of a full-length book in preparation, which will explain in more detail how to make our daily lives meaningful and will contain details of specific practices that Rinpoche recommends we do. These include making light offerings, liberating animals and offering water to Dzambhala and the pretas, current versions of which may be found in Rinpoche’s recently published book, Teachings from the Vajrasattva Retreat.
I would like to thank Su Hung and Wendy Cook for their help with the New York talk, many other people, including Vens. Yeshe Khadro, Ailsa Cameron and Connie Miller and Linda Gatter for their help with the other material, as well as Mark Gatter and Carol Maglitta for designing this book.
For those of us who have been able to attend His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s teachings on Kamalashila’s Gom-rim these past few days, this is a most precious, unbelievably fortunate time. It is just incredible that we have the karma to be able to see the Buddha of Compassion in human form. Thus, not only can we communicate with this living manifestation of the enlightened mind but we can also receive teachings on a path that without doubt, without any question, liberates us from both the ocean of samsaric suffering and its cause—karma, which are actions motivated by delusion, and the delusions themselves, the disturbing, obscuring thoughts whose continuity has no beginning. Even if we cannot practice every single thing that His Holiness has taught these past few days, just hearing his teachings leaves positive imprints on our mental continua, and sooner or later, these imprints will definitely liberate us from the ocean of samsaric suffering and its cause and bring us to full enlightenment, the peerless happiness of buddhahood. In these teachings, His Holiness has been talking about compassion. What is the purpose of our lives? Why do we live?
Why do we exert so much effort to survive every day, every hour, every minute, every second? Why do we spend so much money taking care of this body, checking our health every year to see if there’s anything wrong and, if there is, undergoing expensive treatment? Why do we spend so much money on food, clothing and shelter—on the many things we need to survive and be healthy? Why do we do all those billions of exercises to keep our bodies healthy?
All these expenses and activities have meaning only if we have compassion within us. Compassion for others makes everything we do—spending money, studying, working, exercizing, looking after our health—meaningful.
If, on the other hand, our hearts lack compassion, our lives become empty. All those expenses, all that effort, all those long hours on the job are totally devoid of meaning and we find no fulfillment in our everyday lives. Without compassion, the thought of benefiting others, our hearts remain unfulfilled and it is very difficult for us to find satisfaction in whatever we do. No matter how much external wealth we have, if our hearts lack compassion, they are always empty; hollow inside.
If you check carefully, you will see that no matter how many things you have or how hard you try to achieve them, if there’s no compassion in your heart, you never feel quite right. There’s no peace in your heart, and deep within, you always feel that there’s something missing.
The best way to give meaning to your life is to make it beneficial for others by having compassion for them. That’s also the best way to find peace, happiness, fulfillment and satisfaction in your own life. But compassion for others does not only bring you peace and happiness right now, every moment of your present life. Living your life for others also offers you the best possible future. And even at that most critical juncture, the end of your life, when your consciousness separates from your body, compassion makes your death happy, peaceful and satisfying. Moreover, your peaceful, happy death, makes others happy too. Your friends and family can rejoice. You become an inspiration, an example of hope and courage. They see that their own deaths could also be happy.
Even if you have realized the wisdom directly perceiving the very nature of phenomena—the ultimate nature of the I and mind—if you have no compassion, no good heart, the most you can achieve is simply the nirvana of the Lesser Vehicle path, the sorrowless state for yourself alone; you cannot achieve full enlightenment. You still have the hallucination of the dualistic view. There are still subtle negative imprints on your mental continuum that prevent you from seeing directly all existence, the emptiness of all phenomena—all absolute and conventional truths together.
Dedicate the merits collected tonight by listening to and explaining the Dharma, and all the past, present and future merit collected by yourselves and others as well, for the Buddha of Compassion, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and all other holy beings to have stable lives, for all their holy wishes to succeed immediately and for the sangha—the sangha in general and the Western sangha in particular—to be able to complete their scriptural understanding and realizations of the whole path in this very lifetime by receiving all the conditions necessary to do so.
Dedicate for Geshe Michael Roach to have a long life and for all his wishes to succeed immediately, for all the students who are studying here also to have long lives and to be able to completely actualize Lama Tsong Khapa’s stainless path of unified sutra and tantra in this very lifetime and for their Arizona retreat center and all other projects to succeed immediately by receiving everything necessary to do so. Pray for everyone who comes onto that land, from that moment on, to never ever again be reborn in the lower realms, to be immediately liberated from all disease, spirit harm, negative karma and all defilement, to be able to find unshakable faith in refuge and karma, and to be able to actualize bodhicitta, realize emptiness, and achieve enlightenment as quickly as possible.
Please dedicate for the five-hundred-foot Maitreya Buddha statue in Bodhgaya to be completed without any obstacles and to be most beneficial for all sentient beings by causing them to generate bodhicitta in their minds and achieve enlightenment as quickly as possible.
Next, I would like to thank Geshe-la and his students from the bottom of my heart for their sponsoring a silver-paged copy of the Diamond Sutra adorned with gold, diamonds and rubies for inclusion in the five-hundred-foot Maitreya Buddha statue.
According to Vajrayana, statues are normally filled with mantras. But this statue is five-hundred-feet high—it would be like filling the whole sky with mantras, it’s so huge. Therefore, our idea is to make different temples inside the statue. There will be a Twenty-one Taras temple, a Medicine Buddha temple, a Sixteen Arhats temple and so forth. There will be various temples dedicated exclusively in that way. At the heart of the statue will be a temple containing Buddha’s and many other relics, so that people can prostrate, circumambulate and make offerings to them. I would like there to be another temple containing all Lord Buddha’s Prajnaparamita teachings, written with gold ink on special paper. I have already started writing The Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Verses using gold from Nepal. Even while traveling, I keep writing. At the rate I’m going, it’s going to take me a few more years to finish. This temple will also contain other texts, such as the Heart Sutra, written in gold and silver and decorated with coral, pearls and other precious stones, for people to prostrate to, circumambulate, make light and water bowl offerings to and rejoice over.
Anyway, I don’t want to keep on talking, but there is just one more thing I want to say. The sutra text Condensed Precious Qualities says—and I’m not going to quote it verbatim but just explain the meaning—that if you fill world systems equal in number to the grains of sand in the Ganges, that huge long Indian river, with stupas made not of bricks and mortar but of the seven types of precious substances and containing Buddha’s relics, and then all the sentient beings living in that vast number of world systems make offerings to those precious stupas, the great merit thus generated is still inferior to that created by writing even in black ink just one Prajnaparamitatext. Therefore, your sponsoring a silver and gold edition of the Diamond Sutra adorned with jewels is unbelievably meritorious. So, I just wanted to point that out and rejoice in your great merit.
Whenever I write another bit of this Prajnaparamita text, I try my best to dedicate the merit to world peace, and pray, ‘‘Wherever this text may be—in whatever universe, world or area—may there be no war, disease or natural disaster such as fire, flood, earthquake and so forth, and may everybody there realize bodhicitta, the good heart, enjoy perfect peace and happiness, and as quickly as possible realize the wisdom directly perceiving emptiness, cease all their defilements and achieve enlightenment.’’
Due to the past, present and future merit collected by ourselves and all the buddhas, bodhisattvas and other sentient beings, which are totally nonexistent from their own side, may the I, which is totally nonexistent from its own side, achieve Guru Shakyamuni Buddha’s enlightenment, which is also totally nonexistent from its own side, and lead all sentient beings, who are also totally nonexistent from their own side, to that enlightenment, which is also totally nonexistent from its own side, by myself alone, who is also totally nonexistent from its own side.
Finally, please dedicate that you, your family members and all other sentient beings may completely actualize Lama Tsong Khapa’s stainless path of unified sutra and tantra in this very lifetime and be able to meet this teaching in all lifetimes and cause it to flourish and spread in all directions.
This teaching was given in the East Village, New York City, on 13 August, 1999, at the request of Geshe Michael Roach and his students, on the auspicious occasion of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s visit to New York.
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