Cultivate Love and Compassion

In short, strive from now on to benefit others through your actions of body, speech, and mind. Even if you can’t benefit them, don’t be impolite to them, combative, disdainful toward them, and abandon all deeds and thoughts to harm sentient beings who have all been your kind mother in the past. Great compassion is the very essence of Buddhism. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said, ‘My Dharma tradition is love and compassion.’ This is not at all because he lacks knowledge of other teachings. He says it because it is his main intention to communicate that it is love and compassion which is the very essence of the teachings. If you are someone with love and compassion in your heart you will naturally be happy, not only in future lives, but in this very life. Your life will be as happy as your mind becomes. If your life is happy, then the purpose of taking this good human form has been served. We are now at a borderline when a few people out of the larger society threaten to wreak havoc upon the world; it is obvious to everyone. This can only arise from lack of love and compassion in the heart. It is really sad. Using this good human form for the sake of creating meaningless bad karma is so regrettable. Whether we are considering the long or short term, if we feel very self important, it is the real cause of our own and others’ frustrations. Each day cultivate love and compassion towards sentient beings, meditating on it at east three times a day. Whether or not your meditation on love and compassion immediately benefits others, the main greatest benefit will be to you. The cause of our lack of inner peace is negative thinking. Bodhicitta is the real antidote to uproot negative thinking. If we can abandon negative thinking we can find happiness and peace from now on. This happiness cannot come from outside; it must be found within.

~ Excerpt from book “A Door of Entrance to the Heart Advice Called A Ship Sailing to Liberation. A Commentary to the Heartfelt Advice of Dharma Nectar” by Khenpo Karten Rinpoche  (the electronic version is in Tibetan, we will try to get the full publication online with English translation)

Heart Advise of Dharma Nectar, Chapter 9) ” The tracks left by a Buddhas, past, present, and future. Quintessence of the 84,000 Teachings are the instructions on altruistic Bodhicitta; Don’t forget them, practice them! That is my heart advice.”