My very dear Sophie,
For so many years I didn’t see you. Billions, zillions, trillions—there are no words to thank you for your dedication for sentient beings, for the teachings of Buddha and for myself, by serving Maitreya Buddha.
Regarding your infertility, I don’t know how long ago it is since you mentioned it to me, but I checked and my suggestion is to make a Namtose wealth vase, quite a big one, with precious things and materials inside. Include materials from holy places, rich people’s money and things belonging to them, even the dust from outside their houses or from their land and from high lamas also—but not from butchers or prostitutes, and especially not from those who have broken samaya with your gurus, like those who are against His Holiness the Dalai Lama or who practice Dolgyal (Dorje Shugden), which His Holiness advised publicly not to practice.1
So, make a Namtose wealth vase. There’s a text that explains how to make a wealth vase, it describes all the details of how to make one. You might need male iron and female iron—male iron is hard and female iron is soft. I’m not 100 per cent sure, but I remember something like that when we made vases in Nepal and the Aptos house.
So, you have to make the wealth vase by reading the text. The reason I’m telling you to make a wealth vase is that in the past, one family had difficulty making a child and Dagri Rinpoche’s past life told them to make a Namtose wealth vase. So they made it and he blessed it and later they got a child. But this is just something to try. Otherwise it is difficult.
I think generally for you, not having a child is difficult for your mind, and the mind affects the body, so I will make a very simple idea for you. If you can’t have a child, I can be your child. You just need to create the concept. But I’m an old child! Maybe you made me, you made a child that is much older than you! But I can be a worthwhile child to you. [Rinpoche is laughing] I mean the other thing is, how many people are there in this world? Six billion? Maybe, seven billion? So, everybody is your child. Every day there are some old children dying and there are some new children being born. Every day, there are billions of children taking birth and dying.
Okay, that’s all. Then, make prayer—pray to Medicine Buddha and practice reciting the seven Medicine Buddhas’ names. There is one small booklet I translated many, many years ago with Dr. Adrian. Recite the seven Medicine Buddhas’ names and each time you finish reciting the names, make a request to have a child and for any other success you want. What I normally do is after I finish reciting the names and “Please may whatever vows you made in the past be actualized right now,” then I add “And may all my prayers succeed immediately.” So you can do like that.
With much love and prayer...
PS: Many people have the karma to have a child and many people don’t have the karma to have a child. So, the best thing is that they accept that. As it is mentioned by Shantideva, “If there is something you can do, there’s no point worrying. If there’s nothing you can do, there’s no point worrying.” For example, if my house is made of bricks and I want it to be gold, I worry, “Oh, my house is not gold! Oh no, I want it to be gold!” That’s completely stupid; I have to accept it is not gold. Worrying is unnecessary. Your own hallucinated mind and wrong thoughts are torturing you.
Or if there’s 10 dollars in your purse and you wish there were a billion dollars. You cannot see a billion dollars and so you are so worried, unbelievably worried, and then it drives you crazy. Nobody makes you crazy, but you make yourself unhappy by your own mind, because you need to have a billion dollars. So then here, if you apply what Shantideva said in the quotation, then there is no problem.
Then there are people who are physically women who want to be men. They are so unbelievably worried that it makes them sick, but they don’t die. And then there are some people who are physically men but who want to be women and they get so worried.
Notes
1 Read more advice from Lama Zopa Rinpoche on Dorje Shugden. See also the FPMT collection of advice regarding Shugden. [Return to text]
