FPMT News Around the World
Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Nalanda Monastery, France, October 2011. Photo by Philippe Garric.
In his letter for the entire FPMT community published in the Annual Review 2011: Cherishing Life, Lama Zopa Rinpoche connects his experience of manifesting a stroke to learning the lam-rim and understanding karma. As Rinpoche explains, “karma is expandable – even if what is created is very small, the result is expandable. For example, according to King Ashoka’s life story, when he was a child playing in the sand, he offered a handful of sand to the Buddha, but he visualized that it was gold and he actually received the merit of having actually offered gold in Buddha’s beggar bowl. In his next life, he was born as a Dharma King, he was very wealthy and was able to build ten million stupas in one day. So that is amazing, amazing, amazing, unbelievable merits he was able to collect. So this is the same in regards to negative karma.
“This means it is very important to abandon even small negative karma as much as possible and to practice even small good karma as much as possible. To really put effort in this way,” Rinpoche writes.
Rinpoche has often given advice on karma, some of which can be found at the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive. FPMT’s Discovering Buddhism program also offers a module on karma, which has been recently made available on FPMT’s YouTube channel.
Rinpoche’s Annual Review letter is meant to be read as widely as possible and is available in English, Chinese, French, Italian and Spanish.