Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute recording from a 1987 enthronement ceremony, a teacher leads participants through the Lam Rim prayer — a foundational Tibetan Buddhist practice that cultivates renunciation, compassion, and the determination to achieve enlightenment for all beings. The prayer moves systematically through key stages of the path: recognizing the rarity and preciousness of human birth, taking refuge from fear of lower realms, developing urgency to escape saṃsāra, abandoning self-cherishing in favour of benefiting others, and committing to the six perfections and tantric practice. After the main recitation, the teacher offers a dedication of merit, directing accumulated virtues toward the long life of Lama Osel, the spiritual development of all students and sangha at the centre, and the swift liberation of all sentient beings. The recording captures both formal liturgy and the teacher’s spontaneous guidance on how the practice should be applied.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 Enthronement.mp3
UUID: 912ee31a-6e71-4919-a5c6-d28cd59f4205
Teacher: Buddha House Misc
Collection: Enthronement of Lama Osel (Buddha House Misc)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.4 minutes
Words: ~1,695
It is what? It’s some offering mandala. I thought this can be used. This can be used. Just passed.
Just passed out. Internal mother like a brilliant snow mountain, the shining constellation of signs. So those who want to take the can come quickly. So those who want to take the blessings, you need to come down. Oh, you can come.
Okay. Now little lamrim prayer. Okay? Lamrim prayer from Lam Rim Chen Mo into English. Realizing how this body of liberties and endowments is found but once, is difficult to obtain, and is easily lost, we seek your blessings to partake of its essence, make it worthwhile, and not be distracted by the meaningless affairs of this life.
Aghast at the searing blaze of suffering in the lower realms, we take heartfelt refuge in the three precious gems and seek your blessings that we may eagerly endeavor to practice the various means, preventing what is bound to bring misfortune and accumulating in virtuous deeds. Violently tossed amidst waves of delusions and karma, preyed upon by hordes of worldly demigods, the three kinds of suffering, we seek your blessings to develop an intense longing to be free from this monstrous ocean of boundless and vicious existence. Having abandoned the mind of self-cherishing, this unbearable dungeon of cyclic existence is but a pleasure grove. We seek your blessings to partake of the treasure of the Aryas’ jewel of the three higher trainings and thereby uphold liberation’s banner. Having considered how all these pitiful beings have been our mothers and have raised us in kindness again and again, we seek your blessings to develop unaffected compassion like that of a loving mother for a precious child.
There is no difference between ourselves and others. No one wishes even the slightest suffering or is ever content with the happiness he has. Realizing this, we seek your blessings that we may enhance the bliss and joy of others. This chronic disease of cherishing ourselves is the source giving rise to our unsought suffering. Perceiving this, we seek your blessings to blame, resent, and destroy the monstrous demon of selfishness. The mind that cherishes all mother beings and would ensue them bliss, together leading to infinite virtue.
Seeing this, we seek your blessings to cherish these beings more than our lives, even should they rise up against us as our enemies. In brief, infantile beings labor only for their own ends, while Buddhas work solely for the welfare of others, with the mind understanding the distinction between the faults of one and the qualities of the other. We seek your blessings to enable us to realize and exchange ourselves for others. Since cherishing ourselves is the doorway to all torment, while cherishing our mothers the foundation of all that is good, we seek your blessings to make our core practice the yoga of exchanging self for others. Thus, O venerable compassionate Gurus, we seek your blessing that all karmic debts, obstacles and sufferings of mother beings without exception ripen upon us right now, and that we may give over our happiness and virtues to others and thereby invest all beings with bliss.
Should even the environment and the beings therein be filled with the fruits of their karmic debts and unwished-for sufferings pour down like rain, we seek your blessings to take these miserable conditions as a path by seeing them as causes to exhaust the results of our negative karma. In short, that we may adapt it to our meditation by the skillful means of the four acts of practice. May we render this life of liberties and endowments infinitely meaningful by putting into practice the advice and the commitment of the training of the mind, the commitment to lead all beings from the immense ocean of saṃsāra. We seek your blessings to become a great bodhisattva, yourselves skilled, proficient, conjoined with the visualization technique of mounting giving and taking upon the breath.
We seek your blessings that we may eagerly endeavor to put into practice the three Mahāyāna moral codes and restrain our mindstreams with pure bodhisattva vows, the single path journeyed by all victorious ones of three times. We pause here. Transforming our body’s wealth and collection of virtue of our three times by each and every sentient being, we seek your blessings to complete the perfection of the moral disciplines of working for the sake of sentient beings, enacting virtuous deeds and not transgressing the bounds of the Prātimokṣa, bodhicitta vows even at the cost of our lives. Should even the myriad beings of the three realms without exception become angry, abuse us, humiliate, criticize, threaten, or even kill us, we seek your blessings to complete the perfection of patience, not to be distraught but to work for their benefit in response to their harm. Even if we must remain for an ocean of eons in the fiery hells of Avici, even for the sake of each sentient being, we seek your blessings to complete the perfection of joyous effort, to strive with compassion for supreme enlightenment and not be discouraged.
Having abandoned the force of dullness, agitation and mental wandering, we seek your blessings to complete the perfection of meditative concentration through the Samādhi of single-pointed placement upon the nature of reality that all things devoid of true existence. We seek your blessings to complete the perfection of wisdom through the space-like yoga, a single-minded placement upon ultimate truth, conjoined with the ecstasy of great bliss induced, discriminating wisdom, analyzing suchness. We seek your blessings to perfect Samādhi on illusion by realizing how all external and internal phenomena lack true existence yet still appear, like a mirage, a dream, or the image of the moon in a pool. Since saṃsāra and nirvana, lacking even an atom of true existence, are cause and effect and dependent arising and non-contradictory, we seek your blessings to discern the import of Nāgārjuna’s thought that these two may appear in agreement and not in mutual contradiction.
And thereupon we seek your blessings that we may cross the labyrinth ocean of tantra through the kindness of our navigator Vajradhāra, and to hold more dear than our lives our vows and words of honor, which are the roots of powerful attainments. We seek your blessings to purge all stains of ordinary appearance and grasping through the first stage yoga of transforming birth, death, and the bardo into the three Buddha bodies so that whatever may appear arises as the body of a yidam. We seek your blessings to actualize in this life the path of unity of the clear light and illusory body which arises from placing your feet, O protector, at the very center of the central channel of the eight-petaled lotus of our hearts. Should we not have completed the points of the path at the time of death, we seek your blessings that we may be led to a pure land through either the instructions of applying the five forces or by the forceful means of enlightenment, the guru’s transference of mind. In short, we seek your blessings, O protector, to be cared for by you, birth to birth, remembering you throughout all our lives, and thus to become your true disciples, holding every secret of your body, speech, mind.
O protector, please grant that all be auspicious for us to be amongst your very first circle of disciples wherever you manifest Buddhahood, and hence, all our temporal and ultimate wishes without exception be effortless and spontaneously fulfilled. Having thus been entrusted to you, O supreme gurus, pray grant this request in order to bless us by alighting on the crown of our heads and once again set your radiant feet firmly at the lotus of our hearts. We haven’t done that. What should we do? Auspicious.
Before the auspicious prayer. Yeah. Before dedication. Is different. All the merits accumulated, all three time merits accumulated by themselves, by sentient beings, and then into enlightenment is achieved in all the lifetimes. All these merits accumulated in three times by oneself, by all other sentient beings, and especially this in this hour, by doing the long life puja.
That all the director, all the members, all the students, you know, all the human beings who come here, who come to the center, the Buddha center who come here, and yeah, even the creatures, I don’t know, who come here at the center. All then, including Rinpoches and all sentient beings, in the lifetime certain to never separate, to never separate away from the pure conduct that is praised by all the Buddhas.
And Lama Osel himself to be the virtuous teacher, direct, you know, teacher in all the lifetimes and guide. To never separate away from the unmistaken pure sūtra and tantra path. To never separate away from this path and by himself being a direct guru. And able to, to the center, able to all the members, all the organizers, all the students and then able to spread the purity of the Buddha, purity of the Dharma, Sangha, then in the mind of all the sentient beings and freed, quickly freed them from all the sufferings and lead to the full enlightenment. And to receive all the necessary conditions without any, to continue there. Also, the teachings for the sentient beings.