Lama Zopa Rinpoche

odhisattva again and again in future lives. So, it’s not only by teaching that these great lamas
benefit sentient beings. But so many people think that they’re of benefit because of Dolgyal.
The conclusion is that Dolgyal wants to harm others. He himself has no guru connection
with His Holiness because he broke his samaya in the past, so he wants to make other
people like that. He is harming Buddhism—particularly Lama Tsongkhapa’s teachings—and
harming the world.
Even though we might have learned the words of Dharma well by studying the scriptures,
we can still make big mistakes in our practice by not correctly following our virtuous friend
and even criticizing him. We might be experts in all the extremely difficult texts but because
we have not done proper analysis we can easily believe things like that.
In that way Dolgyal particularly tries to harm Lama Tsongkhapa’s teachings and create
disharmony within Lama Tsongkhapa’s tradition. He is very sectarian; very, very sectarian.
He wants to cause disharmony between the Tibetan Buddhist traditions, the Nyingma,
Kagyü, Sakya and Gelug. To not make a connection with the other traditions, to not take
teachings from them, is very sectarian; it brings great disharmony. Lama Tsongkhapa took
the full ordination vows from the eighth Karmapa, Mikyö Dorje, and he took different
teachings from lamas of the other traditions.
We must investigate any guru we want to follow
The root of enlightenment is correctly devoting to the virtuous friend. If that is done well, it
brings every success up to enlightenment, to be able to free all sentient beings from the
oceans of samsaric suffering and bring them to full enlightenment. If the root is wrong, if we
are mistaken in how we devote to the virtuous friend, then there is no success and there is
great suffering in this life and from life to life, for hundreds of thousands, or even millions
of lives. For example, we have to experience the unbearable suffering of the inexhaustible
hell realm for an intermediate eon. 77
But even then our karma is not finished. Even when this world ends, even when this world
becomes empty, which after a great eon it will, we must be born in the hell realm of another
universe. There are numberless universes and in those universes there are hell realms, so we
will be born there and suffer until our karma has finished.
Even in recent times it has happened that Dolgyal has caused incredible danger, particularly
to Lama Tsongkhapa’s teachings. For instance, many disciples have become angry or
developed heresy to their guru, so he creates harm like this. In one second they have
destroyed their ability to attain enlightenment, their realizations, their merit. Although I
haven’t yet seen it with my own eyes, I have heard that the scriptures say that heresy toward
the guru destroys hundreds of thousands of eons of merit.
The lam-rim outline is a bit different. It says that if we get angry with our guru, for however
many seconds we are angry with him, we have to be reborn and suffer in the lower realms
for that many eons. There is a contradiction in this outline. What I mentioned was that if we
are not a bodhisattva and we get angry with a bodhisattva for one second, we destroy one
thousand eons of virtue created by cherishing sentient beings and making offerings to the
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