How Vajrasattva Practice Purifies Negative Karma

How Vajrasattva Practice Purifies Negative Karma

Date of Advice:
January 2015
Date Posted:
February 2015

A student sought guidance for her practice. Rinpoche gave the following advice.

My dear one,
Your deity is the five-deity Heruka, so it is good to do that practice. Since there is a commitment after taking the initiation, at least you are reading the words, and that makes a big difference, it puts a positive imprint for quick enlightenment.

Do Vajrasattva practice every day. At least recite the short mantra 28 times or the long one 21 times, to stop the negative karma created that day from multiplying. Otherwise if you don’t purify the negative karma, it doubles each day, and after fifteen days the karma of killing a small insect becomes the same as having killed a human being.

Even if you don’t have any story of having killed, if you don’t purify the negative karmas that have been created that day, then each one multiplies and after 15 days it becomes the same as having killed one human being. Then after 18 days each negative karma collected with the body, speech and mind—and there are so many, so many, so many—increases 131,072 times. This was explained by the great enlightened being Pabongka Rinpoche in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.

When you die, each and every one of the negative karmas collected today becomes like the number of dust particles of the mountains. It’s unbelievably, unbelievably heavy, so there is no other way but to go to the lower realms and suffer for eons and eons. The worst lower realm rebirth is in the hells, but there are others. Who knows—you may be born as a chicken that is trapped in a cage and killed for many lifetimes, or as one of those lobsters that is boiled to death in the hotels and so forth. Usually all those fish, chickens and so forth who are killed have been butchers themselves many times in past lives, and so it goes round and round in circles.

If you do Vajrasattva practice, even just reciting the long mantra 21 times or the short mantra 28 times, and especially with the remedy of the four powers, it not only purifies today’s negative karma but also your past negative karma from this life and past lives, so there is no multiplication. Instead there is unbelievable, unbelievable profit. It makes the negative karma so much lighter. Depending on how you purify, and especially if you do the practice with bodhicitta and emptiness, that much incredible negative karma gets purified and you don’t have to experience the suffering result.

Therefore, even if you just do Vajrasattva practice for example, it is said in the teachings by Sakya Pandita that, “A wise person’s negative karma may be big, but it can easily be made small. A foolish person’s negative karma may be small, but it becomes big.” This means that somebody who knows how to do the Vajrasattva purification can make their negative karma weak, but for those who don’t know how to do this, their negative karma will become strong.

With much love and prayer...