Dear Norman,
The following practices would be best for you to do:
- 70,000 prostrations while reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas’ names
- 200,000 Vajrasattva mantras
- 9,000 tsa-tsas (the three types of Buddha: Manjushri, Vajrapani, Chenrezig)
- 200,000 guru yoga (migtsema—Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga, counting the migtsema with the meditation)
- 50,000 tong-len—the bodhicitta practice (see explanation below)
- 10 nyung näs
Please write out the Sanghata Sutra. This collects the most merit, as mentioned in the Arya Sanghata Sutra. You should write out the complete text three times in this life. You can write a little bit each day.
Please read the Golden Light Sutra. It would be very good if you can read it twice a month.
For you, water bowls is a major preliminary practice, but you can share it with other people. If there are five or ten people doing the water bowl preliminary practice, you can do it together. The smallest number for you to do is 600,000, but 800,000 came up many times in my divinations. Maybe you can go to a place where there are other people and you can do them together. You set up the offerings together, then everyone offers everything that has been set up and you can count all of them in your number, including the ones the others have set up. When you make water bowl offerings with others, you all do the work setting them up, but when you offer them, every single person counts every single water bowl. So, in this way, you can finish a large number quicker.
When you are working, you can offer and count some water bowls every day. Then, on weekends, etc., you can make time for a retreat to do that. If there is a place to put many water bowls, you can offer them together with some other people. Then, another time, in one year, offer water bowls together with other people. Anyway, according to your karma, this is the number it seems you need to do. Every day when you offer a certain number of water bowls, you can count them, just to add to the number. Then each year, you could do some form of retreat.
If you don’t find other people to help you or if there is no place to offer many water bowls, then you are most welcome to come to my house in Aptos or to the retreat land in Washington: Buddha Amitabha’s Pure Land. There are many water bowls in these places and you can help the other people to offer them. Also, in Aptos, the nuns offer many water bowls and you can help them and count all of them. Usually there are many water bowls offered there every day, big ones and small ones. This way it is easy. So, you can spend some time there: a week, a month, two months, whatever. It is also like that in Washington. You can do that every year—come and spend some time there. This way, it also helps those Sangha members who have the responsibility for the bowls; it gives them less work.
On tong-len preliminary practice
This is a most powerful practice to do. It involves making the requesting prayer together with the meditation of giving and taking. Here, each time when you take the sufferings and the causes of sufferings, including the negative imprints, take all sentient beings’ sufferings, including the delusions and karma, together with the negative imprints, and also the undesirable environments. In the hell realm, there is the ice fire, ice mountain, burning ground, and iron house. The pretas’ environment is a very depressing place with no water, and is so hot and cold. The human environment is a very dirty place full of thorn bushes. You take the environmental sufferings as well in the form of black pollution, and you give them to the ego and destroy the ego—one’s worst enemy. This is the greatest demon that has interfered so far with your being able to achieve enlightenment. It hasn’t allowed you to achieve enlightenment, liberation from samsara, and hasn’t allowed you to enlighten all sentient beings, not even one. In these ways, you can see how one’s own ego is not only an enemy to you but an enemy to all sentient beings.
Also, you collect vast amounts of merit by taking all the sufferings, the causes of suffering, and the undesirable environments. Then, when you give, you collect vast amounts of merit by offering your body as a wish-fulfilling jewel, and by offering your possessions to all sentient beings. However many possessions you have, you give them to sentient beings, and collect that much merit. Because sentient beings are countless, you collect countless merits with each possession you offer.
Then, by giving all the past, present, and future merits—the three times’ merits—you collect so much merit. You give all your future happiness—your present happiness, and from the next minute’s happiness up until enlightenment, including liberation and your realizations—to every single hell being, hungry ghost, animal, human, sura, and asura being. You can see that sentient beings are countless. By giving to each of them, you collect so much merit. If you really knew how much merit you collect, you would faint!
There is a prayer from Nagarjuna’s teachings:
Whatever sufferings there are, may they ripen on me; whatever happiness I have, may it ripen on sentient beings.
With the first part, you do the practice of taking. With the second, you do the practice of giving. Then, you count on the mala (each time you recite the verse). I think, from this practice, you will be blissed out and sentient beings will be blissed out!
Lamrim meditations:
- one month lower
- four months middle
- four months bodhicitta
- three months emptiness
The main deity for your quickest enlightenment is Guhyasamaja. This is the main deity to practice being one with day and night. Then, through this practice, you actually become the deity, which means enlightenment—your body, speech, and mind become the deity’s body, speech, and mind, and through this, you can enlighten all sentient beings. Through this practice, you bring all sentient beings to this deity’s enlightenment. You are able to free all beings from the ocean of samsaric sufferings and bring them to enlightenment.
With much love and prayer...
