
Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Khadro-la, FPMT International Office, Portland, Oregon, USA, June 2012. Photo by Marc Sakamoto.
At the end of April, Rangjung Neljorma Khadro Namsel Drolma (Khadro-la) advised FPMT centers, projects, services and students to engage in specific practices and activities “as much as possible” to support Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s health, including offering Long Life Pujas with the Five Dakinis.
At a 2006 long life puja at Chenrezig Institute, Rinpoche reiterated how a guru becomes a powerful object of merit (or as Rinpoche says, a “powerful one”):
… That means there’s no question any time that by offering to the guru then you collect more merit than having made offerings to numberless Buddha, Dharma, Sangha; numberless statues, stupas, scriptures. [It’s the same] even making offering to the “pores” of the guru. Why? Because the object is more powerful than numberless buddhas.
The power is a dependent-arising. Why the guru is more powerful, most powerful, is a dependent-arising; it’s not independent, that power’s not independent, not truly existent. The minute when you have taken a Dharma connection, even a few syllables of mantra, oral transmission or received two or three verses of teaching with the recognition that oneself is a disciple and that [person] is the guru, then the other person, due to this, becomes the most powerful one in one’s own life, [even] more than any of all those other powerful ones, starting from the parents of this life.
In addition to the long life pujas organized by FPMT centers around the world, students can support the FPMT Long Life Puja Fund which arranges long life pujas for His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Rinpoche annually.
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Ven. Freeman also spoke about Buddhist ideas on vegetarianism; the practices and texts with which he engages; 