In Response to Appreciation after Following Rinpoche's Advice The following is an excerpt from Rinpoche's wonderful response to a letter from a student in which the student explained how much benefit was clearly coming from following Rinpoche's advice. The text in italics is the student's letter. “My very dear xxx, Thank you very, very, very much for your kind letter, this is my reply, within some of your original letter. Every day I dedicate much merit that your health will improve to your satisfaction and that everything you wish for will come true. On this auspicious day, I wished to write something to share with you about me, but as you will see you, everything I do is because of you. Thank you Lama. If what you are doing is good, that’s because of your wisdom, your faith and your compassion. Thank you very much. I would like to explain, if you will allow me. I am President of a company that creates medical delivery systems between doctors and the government as well as other insurance companies around the world. WITH YOU AS MY EXAMPLE, I HAVE HELPED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YOUNG, OLD AND PENNILESS PEOPLE FIND AND RECEIVE CARE FROM A DOCTOR. THANK YOU LAMA! That is because your wisdom, compassion and faith opened your heart. Thank you very much. Because of you, I learned how to care for a beautiful Mahayana Buddhist shrine with many thangkas and statues of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. I have photos of the Dalai Lama on my shrines. I am asked to set up shrines for important Buddhist teachers that come to our community. Thank you Lama! WOW! Thank you. Can’t imagine! Because of you, I now have a strong motivation to start an FPMT Center in the area I live. I am in contact with FPMT International Office to help me along the path and I already have several doctors and sponsors as well who want to see an FPMT center manifest within a few years. Thank you very much. Can you imagine how urgent it is to have a Dharma learning center? If you think of the world situation and how much suffering there is—think of all the problems, famine, disease and torture in all those Arab countries like Syria and so forth and in many places in the world; the demonstrations, killing and so forth; then all the new diseases that are coming, diseases the hospital cannot help; as well as tsunamis, the danger of fire, water, air and earthquakes. Sentient beings in the six realms including oneself have unbelievable suffering. They experience the six types of suffering—the general sufferings of samsara; the eight types of suffering; and the three types of suffering—the suffering of pain, the suffering of change and pervasive compounding suffering. Particularly, there is the suffering of the three lower realms: the eight major hot hells, eight major cold hells, four neighboring hells and the ordinary hells. Then there is the particular suffering of the pretas—the unbelievable, unbelievable great suffering of hunger and thirst. Some pretas don’t get food and drink even for 10,000 years. Pretas have outer obscurations, food obscurations and inner obscurations. First of all, they have the suffering of not being able to find food and drink. Then at last they find it, they see food and drink from afar but when they go to get it they can’t walk. They find it so difficult to walk, like a very old person, very shaky, and so unbelievably exhausting. Then there are karmic guardians blocking the way that don’t allow them to pass. Then when they reach it, there’s no food and drink there—it was like a mirage, a hallucination—and they are so disappointed. Unbelievable. They don’t get food for thousands of years. Can you imagine the disappointment? Then even when they do find food and drink it’s all garbage, pus and blood. The other thing is that when they try to take in the food or drink their mouths are so tiny like the eye of a needle. Then even if one drop does go in, the more suffering pretas have one or two knots that make it difficult to swallow, or the food burns them, so there is always the suffering of burning. And then of course even if they find food, there are tens of thousands of pretas, numberless pretas all trying to get it, so the powerful ones take away the food and drink. And for the pretas, even though the moon is cold, for them it’s hot, and where they live it’s like sitting on hot copper. Can you imagine? Because the pretas have so much suffering, I try to make charity of water and food for them. It’s very good to be able to try to do this. Each time you make charity of food 100 billion pretas not only find food but also get liberated from the preta realm—the mantra you recite has that power. I do mostly two types of charity and each one has that benefit, but there are more. So if I am at a place where there’s water—a stream or spring, for example—I do more. Also I try to do the sur offering with burning tsampa but that somehow has more obstacles. If somebody makes a fire the tsampa gets burned but I’m not always able to do the prayer because often I am doing other things at that time, sometimes I’m doing letters or doing more of other things. So there are more obstacles to making the sur offering. The sur offering is making charity to the smell-eaters, the preta spirits. The smell of the burning tsampa is the food but they don’t get the food just by burning the tsampa—you have to also recite a mantra given by the Buddha seven times. Due to the Buddha’s kindness and power, this mantra has the power for them to get so much benefit. One Tibetan man was in prison in Tibet and experienced great hunger there. The prisoners were only given one or two tea momos a day, very, very small about the size of three finger tips. So when they went for peepee they would look for bones in the field outside the house. If they found a dry bone they would put it in the mouth and that would help them, it would bring energy. Also when the Chinese who were looking after the prisoners made kaka, the prisoners would take off the outside of the kaka and inside there were many undigested beans, so they would eat that. And then when the Chinese cooked food in the house next door the prisoners could smell the food and that smell helped to nourish them, it was so useful. Therefore, ever since the Tibetan man left prison he has been doing sur every day because he had a clear experience of hunger and realized how important the smell of food is for these beings. In Taiwan they sell packets of sur ingredients, but it’s not really sur. It is some kind of plant and it doesn’t have the smell of food, it has a plant smell. It’s very sad that many of our Sangha there were buying this and using it. I told them not to use it because it doesn’t smell of food. So you must use tsampa because the sur must have a food smell. If possible mix the tsampa with some butter and also a special ingredient called the Twenty-five Substances. I made some of this in America. Each one of these substances has a specific purpose. If you want to learn more about this Holly can send you the benefits of the twenty-five substances. By doing the sur offering practice, you repay karmic debts to the sentient beings and it helps you to be successful, to be born in a pure land and to pacify obstacles. Then there is the suffering of the animals. One major suffering that animals have is being eaten by one another. You eat one animal and another animal eats you. Also, being extremely foolish. Animals are used by human beings, even those that live with human beings are used for work, and so forth. They have unbelievable, unbelievable suffering. Human beings have five types of suffering of birth. Many of us don’t remember suffering in the mother’s womb and when we were born. I met only one student who remembered coming out of the womb. She’s Arabian. Then there is the suffering of old age; there are five outlines for that, so much suffering. Then, there is so much suffering from sickness and lastly so much suffering from death. Lama Tsongkhapa explained all these sufferings in five outlines. Then there is so much suffering due to meeting undesirable objects and so much suffering due to not finding desirable objects. Much of our life goes into trying to find desirable objects but even when we do find them, we can’t get satisfaction. That’s why even in the West millionaires and billionaires go to prison. After becoming famous rich people, billionaires, trillionaires and zillionaires go to prison because they are still not satisfied. They still do illegal things, like stealing, lying and killing, because they can’t find any satisfaction. It is a huge suffering to become rich but still not be satisfied.