Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 105-minute session, Kyabje Rinpoche guides a group through the Lama Chopa, a guru devotion ritual central to Tibetan Buddhist training. After mandala and tea offerings, the core is the Sambodhana prayer—request prayers establishing the guru as embodiment of all teachings. The prayers move through taking refuge, recognizing samsaric suffering, developing compassion for all beings, transforming self-cherishing into altruism through taking and giving, cultivating the six perfections, and advancing through tantric practices including yidam yoga, the clear light and illusory body, and transference of mind at death. Long-life prayers for the guru conclude the practice. Suited to practitioners who have received guru devotion and tantric initiations.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2012-07-23 – KR.mp3
UUID: ec27a388-22b9-49e5-b490-39854f1cbb41
Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche
Collection: Guru Puja – Lama Chopa
Date: 2012-07-23
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~1,562
It’s a long mandala offering. So copying in. 61. What happened? Very good.
We offered already. So we will recite the other prayers. Song to move the dakinis hearts, which is verse 70. Those who are left. Tea offering, which is somewhere.
Okay. Page nine. Somebody has the excess salt. Busy. Excess.
Leftover. Excess. Don’t know why it’s called excess. It’s not excess. Maybe it’s the remainder.
I don’t know why it’s called excess. Tea offering. You can have a sit down. The Sambodhana prayer. It’s at verse 84.
We say it English. Through the power of having made offerings in respectful request to you, O holy and venerable Guru’s supreme field of merit, We seek your blessings as protectors and root of well-being and bliss they may become under your joyful care. Realising how this body of liberties and endowments is far but once, is difficult to obtain, 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 endeavour to practice for various means for abandoning what brings misfortune and accumulating virtuous deeds.
Finally, tossed amidst waves of delusions and karma, plagued by hordes of mighty denizens and three kinds of suffering, we seek a blessing to develop an intense longing to be free from the fathomless ocean of boundless and vicious existence. Having abandoned the mind that views this unbearable prison of cyclic existence as a pleasure grove, we seek a blessing to partake of the treasury of Ārya’s jewels and the three higher trainings and thereby to uphold liberation’s banner. Having considered how all these beautiful beings have been our mothers, have raised us in kindness again and again, we seek your blessings to develop unaffected compassion like that of a loving mother for her precious child. There is no difference between ourselves and others. None of us wishes even the slightest of sufferings nor is even content with the happiness we have.
Realising in this we seek your blessings, that we enhance the bliss and joy of others. This chronic disease of cherishing ourselves is a cause of giving rise to our unsought suffering. Perceiving this, we seek your blessings to blame, begrudge and destroy the monstrous demon of selfishness. The mind that cherishes all mother beings and would secure them in bliss is the gateway leading to infinite virtue. Seeing this, seek your blessings to cherish these beings more than our lives, even should they rise up as our enemies.
In brief, impartial, beings toil only for their own end, while Buddhas worked solely for the welfare of others. With the mind understanding the distinctions between the failings of one and the advantages of the other, we seek our blessings to enable us to equalize and exchange ourselves for others. Since cherishing ourselves is the way to all torment, while cherishing our mothers the foundation of all that is good, we we seek our blessings to make our core practice the yoga of exchanging self for others. And thus, O venerable compassion of Gurus, we seek your blessings as all karmic debts, obstacles sufferings from other beings. May that experience ripen upon us right now.
We may give our happiness and virtue to others and thereby divest all beings in bliss. We seek your blessings that all karmic debts, obstacles and sufferings of other beings. May that experience ripen upon us right now. We may give our happiness and virtue to others and thereby invest all beings in bliss. And thus, O venerable compassionate Gurus, we seek our blessings that all karmic debts, obstacles and sufferings of other beings.
May that experience ripen upon us right now. May we give our happiness and virtue to others and thereby invest all beings in bliss. And thus, O venerable compassionate Guru, we seek your blessings that all karmic debts, obstacles, sufferings of other beings, may that exception write upon us right now. And may give our happiness and virtue to others, and thereby divest all beings in bliss. Should even the environment and the beings therein be filled with their fruits and their karmic debts, and unwished-for sufferings pour down like rain, we seek our blessing to take these miserable conditions as a path by seeing them which causes us to exhaust the results of our negative karma.
In short, no motive may arise, be they good or bad. We seek our blessings to transform them into a path ever enhancing the two bodhicittas. Through the practice of the five forces, the quintessential Mahāyāna Dharma and the instruction of those. May you end this life, the liberties and endowments, infinitely meaningful by putting into practice the advice, commitments and the training of the mind. In order to rescue all beings from the vast seas of existence, seek our blessings to become adept in bodhicitta.
Through pure selfless wish and by love and compassion, through the conventional technique of mounting giving and taking upon the breath. We seek our blessings that we may eagerly endeavour to put into practice the three Mahāyāna moral codes and restrain our minds through pure bodhisattva vows, a single path journeyed by all victorious ones of three times. Seek your blessings to complete the perfection of generosity. There is a guideline teaching for enhancing the mind that gives rise to our detachment, namely transforming our body’s wealth and collection of virtue over three times into the object designed by each and every sentient being. Back to what’s called the leftover salt or the excess salt, which is verse Thank you.
76. 76. Wait. Wait. Wait.
Wait. Wait. We haven’t finished. That was the. And now we offer it.
Number. 2. We seek your blessings to complete the perfection of moral discipline, that working for the sake of sentient beings, enacting virtuous deeds and not transgressing the bounds of the Prātimokṣa, Bodhisattva and Vajrayāna vows in the cost of our lives. Should even the myriad beings of the three realms without exception become angry at us, humiliate, criticise, threaten or even malign us, we seek our blessing 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 Avichi for the sake of one sentient being alone, we seek our blessing to complete the perfection of joyous effort to strive with compassion for supreme enlightenment and not be discouraged. Having abandoned the thoughts of dullness, agitation and mental wandering, we seek your blessings to complete the perfection of meditative concentration through the Samādhi of śamatha and place them upon the nature of reality, which is that all things devoid of true existence.
We We seek your blessings to complete the perfection of wisdom through the space-like yoga of single-pointed placement upon ultimate truth conjoin the ecstasy and great bliss induced by discriminating wisdom analysing suchness. Seek your blessings to perfect Samādhi on illusion by realising how all external phenomena lack true existence yet still appear like a mirage, a dream of the image of a moon on a still lake. saṃsāra and nirvana lack an inner atom of true existence while cause and effect and dependent arising are unfailing. We seek our blessing to discern the import of Nāgārjuna’s thought, which is these two are complementary and not contradictory. And thereupon we seek our blessings as we may cross the labyrinth ocean of tantra through the kindness of our navigator Vajradhāra, as we hold dear in our lives our vows and words of honour are the roots of powerful attainments.
We seek our blessings to cleanse all stains of ordinary appearance and grasping through the first stage yoga of transforming birth, death and bardo into the three bodies of a Buddha 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 central channel of the eight petals of our hearts. Should we not have completed the points of the path from the time of death, we seek our blessings that we will be led to a pure land through either the instructions of applying the five forces or by the forceful means of transference of mind the Guru’s. In short, we seek your blessings as our protector to be cared for by you birth unremittingly throughout all our lives and thus to become your chief disciples holding every secret of your body, speech and mind. O protector, please grant that all be auspicious for us to be amongst your very first circle of disciples wherever you manifest the Buddhahood, and hence all our temporal and ultimate wishes, without exception, be effortlessly and spontaneously fulfilled.
My tibetan has got away with me. The long life prayer of his Holiness, Geshe-la, which is on page 18. And then the prayer of the Buddha Śākyamūni. Next page. Page.
Page. Page. Page. Page. 16.
Page 16. Mandala. Next page 17. The dedication prayers here. Page nine.
Key terms in this teaching
- Avici narme (Tib)
- The lowest level of hell. LYWA
- clear light ö sel (Tib)
- The extremely subtle mind which is directly recognized as the culmination of successful tantric practice, and is also accessible or recognizable to ordinary beings at the time of death. LYWA
- guru devotion
- After finding a fully qualified spiritual teacher and establishing a connection, the disciple trains in devotion using logical reasoning. LYWA
- Guru Puja Lama Chöpa (Tib)
- A special Highest Yoga Tantra guru yoga practice composed by the fourth Panchen Lama, Losang Chökyi Gyaltsen. LYWA
- illusory body gyu lu (Tib)
- A subtle body generated through practice of the completion stage of Highest Yoga Tantra; the cause of the rupakaya. LYWA
- three kayas trikaya (Skt); ku sum (Tib)
- The classification of a buddha's body into three: the dharmakaya (truth body), sambhogakaya (enjoyment body) and nirmanakaya (emanation body). These three bodies are manifestations of the enlightened mind. LYWA
- true existence den par yö pa (Tib)
- The concrete, real existence from its own side that everything appears to possess; in fact, both self and phenomena are empty of true existence. LYWA
- yidam ishtadevata (Skt)
- Literally, "mind-bound." One's own personal, main - or, as Lama Yeshe used to say, favorite - deity for tantric practice. The deity with which a practitioner has the strongest connection. LYWA
Definitions adapted from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive glossary, as taught in the Gelug tradition.