Ngondro Preliminary Practice

dzogchen

Lama Jigme Rinpoche is offering many services and teachings for the benefit of all sentient beings. Rinpoche offers: spiritual healing, divination, house blessings, spiritual advice, Buddhist teachings and much more. Rinpoche teaches based on the “The Great Perfection” or “Dzogchen”. Your motivation for learning and practicing from Rinpoche must have a pure perception, devotion, a strong effort, and as well as compassion to free all sentient beings from their suffering and the roots of suffering. If you have motivation to help only yourself, it will not be good for you and it will not be good for everyone around you. When you do things for others without expectations, then your wishes will be fulfilled, whereas if you have motivation to do things for money or a better life, you will have problems having your wishes fulfilled. You have to cultivate this motivation to free all sentient beings, it will be good for you automatically. If you can think this way it will be good for you and good for others.

One of Rinpoche’s core teachings are based on the preliminary practice of Longchen Nyingthig Ngondro (The Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse). Rinpoche advises that a student practice this teaching until they have pure motivation. Once a person has been purified from their negative karma and had their merits cultivated, then they can begin deeper Buddhist subjects like meditation. To begin meditation without going through the foundation of preliminary practices and without having enough merits from your present lives and past lives can cause both illness and problems with our mind and body. That is why it is so important to have an experienced teacher like Rinpoche who can teach us the Ngondro, meditation, and otherwise.

So, before doing anything spiritual or anything in daily life, warm heartedness as your motivation is important. To have these qualities of motivation strong in yourself is important. Advanced meditation is considered a Wisdom Level Teaching, which means you have to have the merit in order to sustain it.

“Well how do I achieve all this merit you ask?” The vast amounts of merit you need to engage in higher level meditation from Rinpoche is accumulated through preliminary practices.

Rinpoche requires five preliminary practices which are:

1) 100,000 recitations of the Refuge Prayer

2) 100,000 recitations of the Bodhichitta Prayer

3) 100,000 recitations of the Vajrasattva Mantra

4) 100,000 Mandala offerings

5) 100,000 prostrations during Guru Yoga practice

A person without his preliminary practices who does two hours worth of meditation will not achieve the same amount of realization from a person who does one minute of meditation with his preliminaries completed. So, after your two hours of meditation with no experience or results, doubt and problems with the mind will begin to set in, which is very dangerous to your practice. That is why it is important to take the steps that have been laid out for you which includes preliminary practices. A foundation and the basics are most important. We need the support from our merit from our present lives and past lives for success in our practice.