How to Practice Dharma fpmt lineage Series FPMT Lineage is a series of books of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings on the graduated path to enlightenment (lam-rim) drawn from his four decades of discourses on the topic based on his own textbook, The Wish-fulfilling Golden Sun, and several traditional lam-rim texts and in general arranged according to the outline of Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. This series will be the most extensive contemporary lam-rim commentary available and comprises the essence of the FPMT’s education program. The FPMT Lineage Series is dedicated to the long life and perfect health of Lama Zopa Rinpoche, to his continuous teaching activity and to the fulfilment of all his holy wishes. May whoever sees, touches, reads, remembers, or talks or thinks about these books never be reborn in unfortunate circumstances, receive only rebirths in situations conducive to the perfect practice of Dharma, meet only perfectly qualified spiritual guides, quickly develop bodhicitta and immediately attain enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. fpmt lineage series Lama Zopa Rinpoche How to Practice Dharma Teachings on the Eight Worldly Dharmas Edited by Gordon McDougall Series editor Nicholas Ribush Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive • Boston www.LamaYeshe.com A non-profit charitable organization for the benefit of all sentient beings and an affiliate of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition www.fpmt.org First published 2012 Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive PO Box 636 Lincoln MA 01773, USA © Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche 2012 Please do not reproduce any part of this book by any means whatsoever without our permission Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thubten Zopa, Rinpoche, 1945- How to practice dharma : teachings on the eight worldly dharmas / Thubten Zopa ; edited by Gordon McDougall; series editor, Nicholas Ribush. pages cm. — (FPMT lineage series) Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “This book is drawn from Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s graduated path to enlightenment teachings given over a four-decade period, starting from the early 1970s, and deals with the eight worldly dharmas, essentially how craving desire and attachment cause us to create problems and suffering and how to abandon these negative minds in order to find perfect peace and happiness” —Provided by publisher. isbn 978-1-891868-28-3 1. Dharma (Buddhism) 2. Religious life—Buddhism. 3. Thubten Zopa, Rinpoche, 1945- I. McDougall, Gordon, 1948- II. Title. bq4190.t58 2012 294.5’48—dc23 2012020805 ISBN 978-1-891868-28-3 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover and interior photographs by Carol Royce-Wilder: Lama Zopa Rinpoche at Lake Arrowhead, California, 1975 Line drawing by Lama Zopa Rinpoche Designed by Gopa & Ted2 Inc. ♻ Printed in the USA with environmental mindfulness on 30% PCW recycled paper. The following resources have been saved: 21 trees, 618 lbs. of solid waste, 9,742 gallons of water, 2,160 lbs. of greenhouse gases and 9 million BTUs of energy. (papercalculator.org) This book is published by Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive Bringing you the teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche This book is made possible by kind supporters of the Archive who, like you, appreciate how we make these teachings freely available in so many ways, including in our website for instant reading, listening or downloading, and as printed and electronic books. Our website offers immediate access to thousands of pages of teachings and hundreds of audio recordings by some of the greatest lamas of our time. Our photo gallery and our ever-popular books are also freely accessible there. Please help us increase our efforts to spread the Dharma for the happiness and benefit of all beings. You can find out more about becoming a supporter of the Archive and see all we have to offer by visiting our website at http://www.LamaYeshe.com. Thank you so much, and please enjoy this ebook. Contents ., Editor’s Preface xi 1. Discovering the Meaning of Dharma 1 2. The Eight Worldly Dharmas 9 The dissatisfied mind of desire 9 The definition of the eight worldly dharmas 15 The eight worldly dharmas 16 Meditation 28 3. The Nature of Samsara 31 The cow on the precipice 31 Samsara is suffering 39 Meditation 47 4. Seeking Happiness, Getting Suffering 51 Samsaric methods don’t work 51 Relying on the unreliable 60 Meditation 63 5. The Problems Desire Brings 69 Seeking happiness, we create negative karma 69 Harming others with our own needs 74 vi how to practice dharma Dying with a needy mind 82 Meditation 83 6. Mixing Worldly and Holy Dharma 85 Dharma practice is impossible with the eight worldly dharmas 85 Retreating with the eight worldly dharmas 94 The three types of eight worldly dharmas 99 Meditations 101 7. How Worldly Dharma and Holy Dharma Differ 105 The importance of knowing what Dharma is 105 The difference between the eight worldly dharmas and Dharma 107 The importance of motivation 110 Meditation 128 8. Turning Away from Worldly Concern 131 Happiness comes when we renounce the eight worldly dharmas 131 Happiness starts when we renounce this life 144 The power of renouncing the eight worldly dharmas 155 Equalizing the eight worldly dharmas 156 Meditations 164 9. Practicing Pure Dharma 169 The ten innermost jewels 169 Pure Dharma not mouth Dharma 188 Appendix The Ten Innermost Jewels of the Kadampa Geshes. 193 Glossary 197 Bibliography 215 Index 218 Publisher’s Acknowledgments ., I would like to say a little about how the FPMT Lineage Series has come about. My first Kopan course was the third, October-November, 1972. When we arrived we were given a text book, Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s The Wish- Fulfilling Golden Sun of the Mahayana Thought Training, and Rinpoche’s month-long teachings were essentially a commentary on this book. I took fairly sketchy notes but at the end of the course realized that the Golden Sun and Rinpoche’s teachings had changed my life. However, the book was pretty rough, so after the course I asked Rinpoche if I could edit it into better shape. He said that what we had been given was basically a compila- tion of the students’ notes from the previous course and that what he really wanted to do was to rewrite the whole thing from beginning to end and asked me if I would like to help him do that. For six weeks my friend Yeshe Khadro and I spent several hours a day with Rinpoche as he painstakingly revised the entire book. In the evenings she would type up what we had written down and I would then try to edit the manuscript into publishable form. By the time the fourth course arrived in March 1973 the first official edition was ready and Rinpoche taught from that. This time I took better notes than the first time and Brian Beresford’s notes were even better than mine. That summer a few of us went up to Lawudo and while I was there I edited Brian’s notes and mine into a commentary to the Golden Sun. In doing so I realized how much of Rinpoche’s precious teachings we had missed and determined to get more of them down next time. In those days we had no electricity or tape recorders at Kopan, so at the fifth Kopan course, Novem- ber 1973, I plopped myself down right in front of Rinpoche’s throne and viii how to practice dharma basically wrote down every word he said. My notes were a horrible scrawl and I made up abbreviations as I went along, and by the end of the course I’d filled several Indian notebooks with fairly illegible hieroglyphics. Miracu- lously, however, Yeshe Khadro could read it perfectly and dutifully typed it all up. I edited this as well and in early 1974 we printed two volumes of Meditation Course Notes, Rinpoche’s teachings on the Golden Sun from the third, fourth and fifth courses. Looking back, this was the beginning of not only the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive but Wisdom Publications as well. By the time the sixth course arrived in March 1974 we had a primitive little Panasonic tape recorder and unreliable Indian batteries, but this just served as a backup to Sally Barraud, who took the whole course down in shorthand. She typed it up, I edited it, and back in the USA, Pam Cowan typed the stencils. In 1975 we published Meditation Course Notes, Volume 3. All this, and most of the subsequent Kopan courses are now available on the lywa website, LamaYeshe.com. Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche started traveling the world in 1974 and their students began recording and transcribing their teachings wherever they went. By the time the Lamas got back to Kopan for the sev- enth course in November, we had electricity. Thus we began building up our collection of tape recordings and transcripts of our Lamas’ precious teach- ings. Between courses, I did more work with Rinpoche refining the Golden Sun. The last time we worked on it was during the Lamas’ world tour of 1975. Rinpoche stopped using it at Kopan in the late ’70s. The book as it then stood is also available on line. Still, it was always my dream that one day we would publish a series of Rinpoche’s complete teachings on the lam-rim. At first I thought we would base it on the Golden Sun, but when in 1991 Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand was published, its excellent outline became the natural choice, not just because it was available but because Rinpoche based many of his teach- ings on that text. However, the idea languished as there was never enough money to support the transcribers and editors we needed to do the work. In 1996, Rinpoche asked me to establish the lywa as a stand-alone FPMT entity and the idea of a series of his commentaries on the main lam- rim topics again became a possibility. After a couple of failed attempts to finance plans that would allow this to happen, in 2007 we came up with one that worked, thanks to an inexpressibly kind benefactor who offered us a $500,000 matching grant. That allowed us to hire the staff we needed to finally go ahead, especially Gordon McDougall, who has taken the lead