Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 52-minute teaching on Mind Training, Ven Thubten Dondrub guides students through the practice of prostration and confession to the thirty-five Buddhas as a method for purifying the mind. He explains the two foundational reasons for purification: to avoid suffering that ripens from negative imprints, and to remove obstacles to enlightenment and benefiting others. Dondrub then details the four opponent powers—regret, reliance on refuge and bodhicitta, remedy through virtuous action, and resolution to avoid future negativity—emphasizing that regret is the most crucial. He walks through the visualization: Śākyamūni Buddha on a throne of elephants with lotus, sun, and moon discs, surrounded by five rows of Buddhas representing the five Dhyāni Buddha families and their purified aggregates, plus eight Medicine Buddhas. The talk covers proper prostration technique, the recitation of Buddha names as a powerful purification method, and concludes with the Sūtra of the Three Heaps and visualization of the Buddhas dissolving into light that enters the practitioner. Intended for students with basic Buddhist familiarity.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2014 01 15 Mind Training 4.mp3
UUID: c4d3b310-5bb3-496e-b692-b88023cf3136
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: Mind Training (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2014-01-15
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 52.4 minutes
Words: ~6,137
So thanks everyone for coming tonight, especially after such an incredibly hot day. Not the best time to do prostrations. But the plan for tonight and the next couple of Wednesdays is to talk about some of the important practices of the tradition and to explain them and then to do them. So some of you were here last night for discovering Buddhism, so I went through the thirty five Buddhas last night. But we’ll just do it again a little bit more detail than than last night.
And then we’ll do a little bit, just a little bit, see how we go with the weather and everything. So as usual, we can do the the the refuge prayer. So if you go to Where is it? Page eighty eight. There’s the refuge bodhicitta prayer.
So we can generate good motivation for being here. So the studying this practice. So this practice of confessing and prostrating to the thirty five Buddhas is for the purpose of purifying the mind. Has everyone got a copy of the Gold Book? We need that.
So there are two basic purposes for purifying the mind. The obvious one is so that we ourselves avoid suffering because if we don’t purify our mind the negative imprints ripen. But as I tried to explain last night, even when these negative imprints aren’t ripening, they’re not having an active effect, but they are obscuring our minds and making it difficult for us to follow the path, achieve enlightenment, and therefore benefit others. So the more we can purify the mind, the more easy it is to follow the path and benefit sentient beings. So this is the real reason for from a Mahāyāna point of view, the real reason to purify the mind is so that we can remove the obstacles to achieving the path, gaining the different realizations that lead to enlightenment.
So we can try and have that bodhicitta motivation for learning this practice tonight, Thinking this again is an offering to all sentient beings. So we think of Śākyamūni Buddha in front of us as our source of refuge, inspiration, and guidance and think of all sentient beings surrounding us. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme assembly. By the merits I create through teaching the Dharma, may I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings. So then we can think that the Buddha now being very pleased with our motivation comes to the crown of our head.
When directly above our crown dissolves into light, that blissful light pours down into us, blessing our mind. So then we can do the nine round breathing exercise just for a very short time to enhance that positive state of mind, helping develop a calmer, clearer, more focused mind so that we can use that mind to concentrate on listening to and thinking about the the Buddhist teachings tonight. Okay, thank you. So sorry if I repeat a lot of what I said last night, but some people weren’t here. But as I was just saying, one thing that’s really emphasized in the Tibetan tradition, and, for example, Lama Zopa, my teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche is emphasizing more and more as the years go by is that is the vital need to purify the mind and and accumulate merit.
So it’s it’s not just a matter of listening to teachings and meditating and so on. But for for us to be able to hear the teachings properly, to understand them properly, to be able to meditate correctly and gain the the authentic experiences. If you think about it, the more, you know, polluted our mind is, if we listen to the teachings with a polluted mind, it’s you know, we’re not gonna get that you know, we’re gonna get confused, not get the right understanding. When we practice with a polluted mind, again, our practice isn’t you know, of course, things will happen, but it’ll be more difficult. So the more we purify our mind, the the easier everything becomes.
The easier to connect to the teachings, to develop faith in them, to understand them, to put them into practice, to have the wish to put them into to gain some real experience from them will increase the more we purify the mind, which means getting rid of all the obstacles to doing all those things, and the more we accumulate merit. So and with the precious human rebirth, we’ve got the optimum chance to purify our mind. And this is something that’s that is strongly emphasized in the Mahāyāna tradition. In the as far as I know, in the Theravāda tradition, there’s not much taught, about how to purify the mind in the sense of getting rid of negative karmic imprints. Of course, there’s the emphasis of purifying the mind in in the sense of getting rid of the delusions, which, of course, that’s the essential thing of for all Buddhist practice.
But in terms of I don’t think there’s anything taught in the Theravāda tradition of how you can get rid of the negative karmic imprints. But in the Mahāyāna tradition, there is. And the practice of the thirty five Buddhas is one of the main ways to do it. So we have the precious human rebirth, the optimum chance to do this, and we have the method to do it. So all the Lamas encourage us to really put effort into purifying our mind while we’ve got the chance.
Because if we don’t, the obvious thing is these negative imprints, if if they’re not purified, will ripen completely as a lot of suffering to ourselves. And, of course, while we’re suffering, there’s a great tendency for us to harm others in all sorts of ways. So that is a great reason to purify. And the other one, of course, is, as I try to say, to get rid of all the obstacles to following the path. Right.
So the main way to purify the mind, as I said, is applying the four opponent powers. Now and that’s we need to apply all of them, apply them as strongly as possible, as sincerely as possible with as much concentration as possible, and continuously regulate, not just one time or twice, but, you know, use this life to apply the four opponent powers just to remind you because we really need to know these. These are the four r’s, which is the regret. So this is the most important one. You know, Milarepa who, you know, had killed thirty six of his close relatives because mom told him to.
He was a good boy, so he did it because they’d cheated the family. So then he developed this incredible regret for what he’d done. And so he said, because of that, he was able to purify his mind. So he should know, and he became a Buddha. So he Milarepa emphasized of the four opponent powers.
I mean, they’re all important, but the single most important one is developing this regret, which is a type of wisdom, whereas guilt is a type of ignorance. It’s a type of delusion. So we need and regret has these two aspects of just simply recognizing that this is a negative thing, you know, really facing the fact that this is negative. It is harmful, non virtuous, and secondly, that the only result of it is suffering. So if we develop that mind, then that will motivate us to avoid negative actions in future.
And the sort of more regret we have, the more this is the case. So that’s the first opponent power. Second one is the power of relying of reliance, which has the two aspects of relying on our refuge. Because if you think about it, all our negative actions are done either because we have no refuge in the triple gem, especially in the understanding of the law and in the law of cause and effect because that is the essential refuge for us. I mean, the Buddha is the ultimate main refuge, but the practical refuge is the teachings and the essential teaching of the Buddha is refuge —
The law of cause and effect. So by reaffirming our refuge, we are reaffirming our commitment to observing the law of cause and effect. And all our negative actions are done either because we have no refuge or we ignore it or we forget it. And that’s why we engage in negative actions. If we reaffirm our refuge, that helps purify things.
And the other aspect of the refuge of the power of reliance is relying on the power of bodhicitta. Because, again, if you think about it, all negative actions are done through following the self-cherishing thought. Yeah. Always putting the sense of me, the wrong sense of me, and the, you know, the wrong view of what cherishing is, you know, well-being is foremost. This tunnel vision, easy happy now mentality of the self-cherishing thought.
And the very opposite to that is bodhicitta. So if we can rely on the power of bodhicitta, not in some abstract way, but trying to cultivate some degree of bodhicitta ourselves, then that helps to purify. Then the third opponent power is relying on the power of remedy of doing a particular virtuous action to counteract it, consciously putting effort into doing something really meaningful to counteract the negative, meaningless, harmful things we’ve done. So this is where the practice of the thirty five Buddhas comes in. That’s the power of remedy.
Also, Vajrasattva is the power of remedy. And the fourth of the opponent powers is having done the remedy to make to apply the power of resolution, is to make that commitment to avoid negative actions as much as possible for however long one thinks one can. Right? So so the the the the practice of the thirty five Buddhas was taught it it comes from one of the sutras. It was taught by the the the lord Buddha himself, and he explained that the four opponent powers can purify any negativity.
And and why there is this particular practice of the thirty five Buddhas is because, I think I’ve tried to explain this before, but at a certain level on the spiritual path, an Ārya Bodhisattva makes these very special vows of what they will accomplish as a Buddha. So these vows done on the basis of someone having very high having bodhicitta, having realized emptiness, having an enormous accumulation of merit. So these vows somehow when that person achieves enlightenment has some great power to bring its its effect. So these thirty five Buddhas are beings who, when they were great bodhisattvas, made these vows that they would particularly help purify the minds of those who relied on them, had faith in them, and called out to them. So somehow, because of that, just by relying on these we can, by visualizing them, particularly reciting their names, prostrating to them, then this can somehow eliminate those negative imprints.
I think I’ve tried to explain this before, but one thing to understand about what purifying means is that once we create a negative karmic imprint, it has a certain potency, is, say, if this jar was full of water, the water represents the full potency of that negative imprint. Right? So if nothing is done, that imprint isn’t purified, then the full potency that imprint will ripen to bring, you know, a hundred percent horrible result. So what purification does is it it reduces the potency of that imprint. It can’t totally eliminate it.
The only thing that can totally eliminate negative imprints from the mind is when we realize emptiness completely. It’s only then that negative imprints are a hundred percent eliminated, and, of course, all the delusions are eliminated completely. But what purification does is it reduces the potency. So if we do a little bit of purification, a little bit of potency is reduced. If we put a lot of effort, then a lot of the potency of the imprint is decreased.
But also what it does is it forces that karma to ripen as a little bit of suffering instead of a huge pile of suffering. So, in the teachings, often says instead of a karmic imprint ripening to cause incredible suffering in the lower realms, it ripens as just one headache when we’re a human being in the time that we’ve purified it. So that’s much better. Or it might actually ripen as some horrible experience from a human point of view, but that’s far better than what it could have ripened as in the future. But it also cleans the mind.
It frees the mind up even though it may result in some physical suffering or, you know, even some mental suffering. Still, it it it is having that effect of cleaning up the mind, making the mind much more light, clear so that it can really function in a in a a more and more positive way. So what yes. So as I mentioned last night there are various traditions of how to visualize the thirty five Buddhas coming from different Lamas who had different visions of these thirty five Buddhas. But as I said, the simplest way to visualize them is this way which Lama Zopa Rinpoche teaches.
So I’m not sure where this tradition comes from, but it’s the one that Lama Zopa Rinpoche encourages us to do, and it is the easiest one. And Rinpoche actually got this thangka painted especially for students. So you don’t these are optional extras, these deities here. Don’t you don’t have to worry about visualizing them. So I won’t explain those.
But so we start off by visualizing Śākyamūni Buddha and then you imagine that from his heart all the other Buddhas manifest. So as I mentioned last night, we visualize a throne and the throne in this case is held up by eight white elephants. There are two at each corner and so they symbolize the pure mind. And if you can, this is sort of an optional extra, is that at the Buddha’s heart you visualize Thousand Arms Chenrezig who is depicted over there Because, you know, reason for visualizing thousand arm Chenrezig being the Buddha of great compassion so that the, you know, the Buddha manifests these all these Buddhas out of great compassion for us so that we can purify our mind. That’s that’s the the meaning, the symbolism of it.
So if if you’re a good visualizer, then you can try and visualize Thousand-Armed Chenrezig at the heart of Śākyamūni Buddha. But we visualize on the throne, there’s the lotus symbolizing the mind of great renunciation, the mind renouncing cyclic existence. Then there’s a sun disc symbolizing wisdom, then the moon disc. Normally, they the the thangka painters rarely paint the sun disc because it’s I think it’s too difficult for them to paint both. But that you should you should imagine there’s the golden sun disc, and then above it, the white moon disc of bodhicitta.
So these are the three principal paths to enlightenment, renunciation, wisdom, bodhicitta, and then the Buddha seated on the moon disc. So then there are these multi colored rays of light and then one visualizes the five rows of Buddhas and also as an optional extra something that Rinpoche encourages us to visualize the eight medicine Buddhas. You can talk about seven medicine Buddhas or eight if you include Śākyamūni Buddha again. Here is the main medicine Buddha, the king of star sapphire light as depicted here in our wonderful Tanga. The five rows of Buddhas, the other thirty four Buddhas, each row are all have this they have the same color, the same hand Mudras.
So they’re all in the aspect of what of what are called the I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the idea of what are called the five Dhyāni Buddhas or the five cosmic Buddhas or the five Buddha families. So this is quite an important concept in Mahāyāna Buddhism and Tantric Buddhism. So the five Dhyāni Buddhas represent the five our five aggregates, which I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that concept. The five aggregates, which is our our our physical form, then our feelings, discriminations, consciousnesses, and compositional factors. So these are called the five aggregates.
So we, right now, as sentient beings, we have five impure contaminated aggregates. But as a Buddha, we we develop five pure aggregates. Anyway, so the first row has six Buddhas. The other four rows have seven in them. So the first row are all blue in color in the same aspect of Śākyamūni Buddha, the same hand Mudra where the right is resting on the right knee with the fingers pointing down.
The left hand is in the meditation posture but without holding a begging bowl. So the and the only difference, as I mentioned last night, is the third of the Buddhas, which is the the king of the king of Naga lords or the king of the lords of no. What is it called? Anyway, the king of Naga Lords. So he has a white neck, a white face, and it’s not very clear there.
Looks like he should have an aura of seven snakes above his head, seven nagas. These Buddhas are all in the aspect of Aksobhya who represents aggregate of consciousness and symbolizes the pure the transformed aspect of anger. In the second row of Buddhas, are all each of the Buddhas is depicted seated on the throne, lotus, sun, and moon. Also, they should be on elephants. They’re not depict oh, yes.
Well, yeah, the elephants are little elephants there. White elephants. Yeah. What is transformed anger is a type of wisdom. Yes.
Yeah. Well, all of the transformed delusions of various types of wisdom. I should know. Which one is it? Can I get back out to you on that?
I knew there was a reason for getting this. Okay. The second row are all white in color. And in this Thangka, they’re depicted with this Mudra, which is the Mudra of Maitreya Buddha and also Lama Tsongkhapa. But don’t it’s wrong.
It’s not the right Mudra. Well, there is a tradition. It is right, but not quite. This is the so this Mudra symbol is the teaching Mudra that the Buddha, when he taught, you know, this is the Mudra of teaching. And this Mudra here symbolizes of having the the actual realization of what you’re teaching.
So in many Tunkas and traditions, the mudra is like that. But Lama Zopa Rinpoche says that the the more accurate correct mudra, which he gets from one of his gurus who is Serkong Rinpoche, one of the great lamas of the Gelugpa tradition who was one of his holiness, the Dalai Lama’s main gurus, very close to his wholeness, says that the the proper mudra is called the mudra of supreme enlightenment, which is where oh, no. Hold it. Left. There’s one left.
Yes. You have it’s it’s like that at the heart. This is called the mudra of supreme enlightenment. So one should try and visualize like that. So the left hand, left top finger, what’s that one called?
Index finger. Index finger inside and and and oh, that’s the index finger also, isn’t it? Yes. That one pointing out. So this is the Mudra of supreme enlightenment.
So that’s the correct one to try and visualize. So this this rose, so there’s seven, a white in color. So they are all in the aspect of Vairochana Buddha. So Vairochana symbolizes the pure form of a Buddha, the pure form aggregate. So that’s why they talk about, for those people doing the seven-point Vairochana posture or the seven-point Vairochana posture, because that’s the way to help purify our posture by sitting correctly in that posture.
So Vairochana symbolizes the the pure pure form aggregate and the transformation of ignorance. So third row, they’re all yellow in color, and the the right hand is resting on the right knee, but with a palm outwards like that, which is in the it’s called the which is same as the mudra of Tārā, green Tārā, which is the mudra of grant of bestowing blessings. And the left hand in the meditation posture. So they’re all yellow in color, and they they rep they’re in the aspect of the the Buddha, Ratnasambhava, who symbolizes the, transformation of the aggregate of feeling, all our feelings, and also the transformation of the delusion of pride. So okay.
If you have any questions, just ask. I’ll try and answer. This one of granting blessings. So the right hand is resting on the knee with palm out. So then the next row, again seven Buddhas, red in color, and they have have the meditation posture, Mudra.
And they’re all in the aspect of Amitābha, Amitābha Buddha. So Amitābha represents the aggregate of discrimination and the purify the transformation of desire. And then the final row, which are all green in color, they are in the aspect of the Buddha Amoghasiddhi and their right hand is in the mudra of granting blessings, granting refuge, granting blessings, I think. Something like that. Anyway, it’s like this.
And the left hand is in the meditation posture. So in all cases, all all of the Buddhas have their left hand in the meditation posture. It’s just the right one that it varies. So Amoghasiddhi represents the transformation of jealousy and is the purified aggregate of compositional factors. So then one can also visualize the medicine Buddhas, the eight medicine Buddhas, who also, when they these beings, when they were Bodhisattvas, also made great vows to help sentient beings to be free of disease and sickness and also to help bring success in activities.
So Lama Zopa Rinpoche points out that many people think that the medicine Buddha are only about healing but they’re also about bringing success. So, if you want success in your life, do medicine Buddha practice Rely on the medicine Buddha It works, it seems. Well, depending on one’s karma also. There’s little there’s little clauses, fine print. Sorry?
Not cleaning. What’s no. No. Sorry. What’s not?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Also.
Yeah. Like, many things. Yes. Healing, purifying, bringing success, lots of stuff. Because these Buddhas made all sorts of vows.
See, if you read like, if you if you’ve done the medicine Buddha Puja, it mentions the vows of each one. What what well, because of what what you what things can happen by relying on that Buddha, connecting to that Buddha. Okay. So these are just dakinis depicted here dancing happily away. So this is basically what we try at the very least, try and visualize the Buddha and the five rows of the other thirty four Buddhas.
If possible, one can also try and visualize the Medicine Buddhas. So ideally, as one’s doing the practice, you try and visualize all the thirty five Buddhas in front of you all the time. Right? Otherwise, what you can try to do if that’s very difficult and and by that, I mean, of course, I don’t think many people, if they’re honest, can do that very well, certainly straight off. But at least you try and imagine that they’re all there or as much as you can.
Yeah. The other the other thing one can try to do is as one is prostrating to the Buddhas and reciting their names, you try and focus, try and visualize the specific Buddha that you’re prostrating to, just the one, you know, that one rather than all thirty five at once. Does that make sense? Yeah. Or if that doesn’t work, at least try and think of as you’re reciting the name of the the different Buddhas, at least try to visualize or have the thought of Śākyamūni Buddha and whatever Buddha’s name you’re reciting and prostrating to, you think, well, Śākyamūni Buddha is is that that Buddha you’re prostrating to is a manifestation of Śākyamūni Buddha.
So it’s okay to visualize just Śākyamūni Buddha. So there are that’s three possibilities. Okay? Is that does that make sense? Sort of?
Right. Try again. You visualize the whole lot. If not, as one no. As you’re prostrating the Buddha, you’ve tried and visualize Śākyamūni Buddha.
As you prostrate to this Buddha, you you try and visualize him. As you prostrate to this Buddha, you try and visualize only this one, then only this one, only this, and forget about the all the others. No. Sorry. What did I say?
No. Yeah. First way is to try and visualize all of the Buddhas as you prostrate to each one. You’re prostrating firstly to Śākyamūni Buddha, but you’re visualizing all of them, focusing on this one. That’s the ideal way.
Second way is you just try and visualize the particular Buddha that you’re prostrating to. Right? Third way is just trying to visualize the Buddha and think that whatever Buddha you’re prostrating to is a manifestation of Śākyamūni Buddha. Right? What else can I say?
Sorry. What? There are seven medicine Buddhas. The the main one is this one, the king of star sapphire light, and the the eighth one is Śākyamūni Buddha. Because without Śākyamūni Buddha we wouldn’t know about the Medicine Buddhas anyway.
We wouldn’t know about any of this. Right. So is everyone familiar with how to actually prostrate? I’ve I have explained it. That’s all clear.
How to prostrate? The meaning. Right? So my teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, explains that when when we’re doing the practice, then we should prostrate very well because we’re prostrating the Buddhas, so we should do it really respectfully. And one thing my teacher emphasizes is that which is what most Tibetans don’t do.
So he says, don’t follow what they do, is that we should stand up completely. Because if you watch if you ever go to a place where lots of Tibetans, especially young Tibetan monks, they can prostrate like crazy but they only stand up a little bit. They don’t fully stand up because it’s easy to get down again, of course. And Rinpoche says this is not correct, this is not respectful. Because the idea of all of this is like, with reciting mantras, doing prostrations, doing mandala offerings, all of these things is is not to do it as quickly as possible, which is what what is what is happening, what most people, most Tibetans do, is they they can do these practices so quickly.
But, of course, unless they have a really clear concentrated mind, there’s no way they’re doing it very well. Right? So the whole purpose, you know, my my teacher emphasizes of doing these things is not to go through the motions and do it quickly and get it over with, but to do it well. If you do one prostration well, it’s much better than doing a hundred or a thousand. Right?
So we we should do it properly. So, you know, respect you’re being really respectful and so standing up properly, putting your feet together properly, and so on. So as I mentioned last night so as one yeah. As you prostrate and recite the name of that Buddha, you think this white light is coming from the Buddhas pouring into you. It’s it’s blissful.
This is again a very important thing to, you know, to emphasize in trying to purify the mind is we’re not trying to punish ourselves for the negative actions we’re we’re doing. We’re trying to purify ourselves. And one way to, you know, is to generate imagine that this light coming from the Buddhas because it’s that light in a sense is all the Buddhas’ good qualities and especially their great compassion for us pouring into us is blissful. Yeah? It’s completely blissful.
It’s not painful. It’s blissful. So the more we can actually generate that that feeling or imagine it, the more we are purifying our mind. And an important aspect of this practice is faith, having faith. The more faith that we can generate in doing it, in in in these Buddhas, if we can have faith that, know, these Buddhas are real, their vows are real, that this practice has been done by thousands and thousands of beings in the past.
They’ve relied on it to purify their minds that if I do it, it will work. So the more faith we have, the more it will work. You know? If we if we if we have no faith in it, it’s not gonna work at all. We have to have some degree of faith.
And by doing it more and more, hopefully, faith in these things will increase. But also knowing that, you know, this is what the lamas relied in, as I tried to say, you pointed out last night, Lama Tsongkhapa, the founder of our tradition, you know, did three and a half million prostrations to these Buddhas. He did a hundred thousand prostrations to each one of them, and he had an actual direct vision of them. The the story goes, which I didn’t elaborate on last night, is that in the original sūtra, you recite the name you just recite the name of the Buddha as you’re prostrating. And this is what Lama Tsongkhapa did because that’s the tradition.
And so eventually, he was able to see all of these Buddhas, not just visualize them, but he actually could see them. You know? They were there. But he couldn’t see their heads. He could see all of their bodies except their heads.
So then so he thought something was wrong with my practice. I have to improve it so I can see their heads. So he added the term Tathāgata, which means Buddha, the one gone to thusness, as an extra form of respect. So he added that at the beginning of before he said the name of the Buddha. And once he did that, he could see all the heads of all the Buddhas.
And as I mentioned last night, the first Buddha who fully appeared to him was the third third one, the the king of Naga lords. I like that story anyway. So now the the tradition in the Gelugpa tradition is to say to the so and so I prostrate. Yeah? Because that’s what Lama Tsongkhapa did.
If it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for him, us, and that means we’ll get to see the heads of the Buddhas as well eventually. Okay. Yeah. So one visualizes this white light blissful white light coming into us, eliminating all the negative negativities which we can think leave our mind in the form of black liquid. It pours out from the lower part of our body, completely disappears.
Even if you can’t do the visualization, the main thing is to think if this is happening that I am purifying. There is no question I am purifying my mind. Especially when your body because we do the full length prostrations when the forehead touches the ground, we imagine if we can that a replica of that Buddha, the particular Buddha we’re prostrating to, just comes out and dissolves into us. That’s super blissful. And then as we start to stand up, which we should try to stand up immediately, our head touches the ground, we think that we are getting out of Samsāra and drawing everyone out of Samsāra as quickly as possible.
So these are the main things to try to think and visualize, to have a sense of what we are trying to purify, which may be everything in general or some very specific things and having that strong faith trying trying to recite the name as many times as possible because just saying the name because that’s calling on the Buddha. That’s making the connection. Yeah. Somehow. So in the Sūtra, it explains that just by saying the name of each Buddha, eons of negative karma are purified.
And I I don’t have it with me, and I don’t it may be in this book which explains it all, but I did receive the commentary from Rinpoche at one point. But each Buddha purifies specific things and for specific periods of times. But in general, this practice can purify any kind of negativity. And as I mentioned last night, it’s it’s there is a tradition of trying of doing a hundred thousand prostrations either in a retreat, which takes about three months if you do it continuously and nothing goes wrong. If you fall knees don’t fall apart and stuff like that.
Or one can do it, you know, just on a daily basis. So that that’s something that’s highly encouraged. Even if one doesn’t do that, it’s still good to try and do this practice as much as possible, especially on a daily basis if one can manage. So, I think yeah. That’s pretty much the method.
So then at the end of that, reciting their names, the practice is set out. It starts on page the motivation starts on page thirty nine. On page forty nine, after having prostrated to the Buddhas and recited their names, there is a sūtra which is called the Sūtra of the Three Heaps which starts on page forty nine.
So one recites that. So it starts, all all you thirty five Buddhas and others as many Tathagatas, arhats, perfectly completed Buddhas as there are existing, sustaining, residing in all the world systems of the ten directions. All you Buddha Bhagawans, please pay attention to me. So at that point, one recites all the negative things one could have done. So at the end of that second paragraph where it says: I will not conceal them, meaning all the negativities, nor hide them and from now on in the future I will abstain and refrain from committing them again.
At that point, it is really good to stop and apply the fourth opponent power, the power of resolution. So at that point, you make a very specific promise in your mind of how long you know, I’m I’m going to avoid this negative action for this period of time, and I’ll avoid this negative action for this period of time. You know, these are negative actions that we, you know, have been doing and we’re trying to stop. So we think of them and think, well, if I really work at it, I can avoid this for a week, six days, five, four, three, two, one day, half a day. For the next hour, I won’t do it.
I promise I won’t do it for one hour. Yeah. Like that. And then you continue this. So this is actually a sūtra called the sūtra of the three heaps, this section here.
So at the end of that, one imagines that the Buddhas then are very happy and they dissolve. So the medicine Buddhas, if you’re visualizing them and saying their names, they dissolve and the into light and the light goes up into the the green Buddhas. They dissolve and the light goes up into the red Buddhas. The light dissolves, goes up into the yellow Buddhas. White Buddhas, light dissolves up into the blue Buddhas.
They dissolve and the light dissolves up into Śākyamūni Buddha. Then the the elephants dissolve up into the throne. The throne dissolves up into the lotus. Oh, no. Sorry.
Then then the Buddha seated on the lotus sun and moon comes to one’s crown, turns around facing same direction, dissolves into light, pours into you. And at that point, especially, one should really try and develop this strong faith concentration. I have definitely purified my mind. No question. I have definitely purified my mind.
And then we dedicate the merit. So that’s the practice. So at the beginning, if we turn to the actual text, page forty two, at the very beginning, Well, the best thing to do to start off is to generate the the first opponent power of refuge. One thinks of the negative actions one’s done in this life, what one probably did in past lives, think, you know, I need to purify this because it’s gonna bring suffering. It’s obscuring my mind.
Well, there there’s probably outages happening all over Adelaide at the moment. That’s true. But we’ve lost our Buddhas. Isn’t that amazing? Just when we want our Buddhas, they’ve gone.
We’ll take a short break.