Lama Zopa Rinpoche

egin by achieving a long life, where we can live for hundreds and thousands of years, and
eventually achieve enlightenment.
With Highest Yoga Tantra, however, there is no need to do that. Even though the practices
of the lower tantras are more skillful than those of the Mahayana Paramitayana, the sutra
vehicle, Highest Yoga Tantra is even more skillful than those, and through it we can achieve
full enlightenment, the unified state of Vajradhara, in one brief lifetime of these degenerated
times, with no need to prolong our life. So, because of that, it has the greatest skill.
How can we be happy while others suffer?
As the bodhisattva Thogme Zangpo mentioned in his Thirty-seven Practices of a Bodhisattva,
When your mothers, who’ve loved you since time without beginning,
Are suffering, what use is your own happiness?
Therefore to free limitless living beings
Develop the altruistic intention—
This is the practice of bodhisattvas. 75
Totally ignorant of the cause of happiness and the cause of suffering, we worldly beings
think we’re always working for happiness but in reality we are constantly creating the cause
of suffering. We keep ourselves totally busy, day and night, like ants frantically running
around, up and down trees or whatever. Because our motivation is not even attachment to
future lives but just attachment to this life, every action of our body, speech and mind
becomes negative karma.
In that, we are no different from insects, spiders, crickets, ants and so forth. Our motivation
is identical to theirs. Likewise the billionaire, the zillionaire, the trillionaire—there is no
difference; their motivation is identical. We have all been billionaires, zillionaires, trillionaires,
kings in the god and human realms, Indra and Brahma, numberless times.
We are just like those slugs that come out when it rains. Just like them, we work only for this
life, so every action we do is nonvirtuous. And even if we do collect a little virtue, because
we have so many enemies, anger arises frequently and very easily due to the habituation of
our mind, and whatever merit we might have accumulated is continuously destroyed.
We might intellectually know about merit, thinking, “I’ve done this retreat; I’ve done that
preliminary practice; I’ve studied this and studied that; I’ve done so much, so much,” but, as
I mentioned, our mind is the same as it ever was or even worse. It’s as if we never met the
Dharma. Problems still come. Before they meet the Dharma, some people have very few
negative emotions, but the more they engage in intellectual study of the Dharma, if they
don’t practice, the stronger their negative emotions grow. More pride, anger and so forth
arise, causing constant suffering now and in the future.
So, Thogme Zangpo asks how can we be happy while numberless sentient beings are
suffering? What use is being happy like that? He then says that in order to free others from
the oceans of samsaric suffering we must generate bodhicitta, the practice of the
bodhisattvas.
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