Virtue and Reality Method and Wisdom in the Practice of Dharma

by Thubten Zopa

This book contains methods for transforming everyday actions into the cause of enlightenment, anger into patience, and the ordinary view of phenomena as inherently existent into the wisdom realizing emptiness.


It also includes several meditations led by Rinpoche, although everything in the book is a topic for meditation.

Genres: Buddhism, Nonfiction, Religion

101 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche (Tibetan: ཐུབ་བསྟན་བཟོད་པ་, Wylie: Thub-bstan Bzod-pa, often published as Lama Zopa Rinpoche, the spiritual director of The Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, is held to be the reincarnation of the Sherpa Nyingma yogi Kunsang Yeshe, the Lawudo Lama. Rinpoche was born in 1946 in Thami, not far from the cave Lawudo, in the Mount Everest region of Nepal, where his predecessor meditated for the last twenty years of his life. While his predecessor had belonged to the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, the Lawudo Lama himself had been a great master of the complete tantric teachings of the Nyingma tradition.

Rinpoche left Thami when he was about 4 years old and was put in a Monastery that was very close to the border of Nepal and Tibet. Rinpoche stayed at this Monastery for several years until he went to Tibet and took getsul ordination in 1958, and continued his studies in Domo Geshe's monastery in Phagri, Tibet.

In 1959 Rinpoche escaped from Tibet and continued his studies in Sera Jhe monastery in Buxa Duar, in the north of India. This is where the Indian Government housed the monks from Sera, Ganden and Drepung Monasteries who wanted to continue their studies, along with monks from the other sects. It was at Bux a Duar that Rinpoche became the disciple of Geshe Rabten Rinpoche and then of Lama Thubten Yeshe. Frida Bedi then invited him to join her school for incarnate lamas in Dalhousie where they were given the chance to learn English for 6 months. Upon the completion returned to Buxa Duar and his studies.

Lama Yeshe and Zopa Rinpoche's contact with Westerners began in 1965 in Darjeeling, when they met Princess Zina Rachevsky from Russia. She became the Lamas' first Western student. In 1969 they founded the Nepal Mahayana Gompa Center at Kopan, above Boudhnath Stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal. At the insistence of Zina Rachevsky the Lamas started to teach courses on Buddhism for Westerns at Kopan.

In 1971 Rinpoche took gelong ordination from His Holiness Ling Rinpoche in Bodh Gaya. By 1975, twelve centers had started. In 1976, the growing worldwide organization was named by Lama Yeshe 'the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition'(FPMT). The FPMT is an organization devoted to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation and service.

There are 147 FPMT centers and projects worldwide as of March 2007.

FPMT currently has 8 standard Buddhist education programs that are taught in many of the centers. Two of these, the Masters Program and the Basic Program are committed courses of 6 and 5 years of study respectively. Based on the great philosophical texts studied in the monasteries of Tibet, FPMT holds to rigid standards of translation and has a passion for authentic texts to ensure that complete accuracy of the meaning found within these profound texts is not forfeited in the transmission from East to West.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche has many other projects around the world; one of the most important is the 500ft Maitreya Statue that Rinpoche is building in Bodh Gaya that will include schools, hospitals and other social projects such as Leprosy clinics (these social projects are already in existence and have been functioning for the last
15 years). Some of the other projects that Rinpoche has founded are Sera Jhe food fund – which offers breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday to 2700 monks. The Lama Tsong Khapa Teacher Fund offers an allowance to the
main 100 teachers in the Gelukpa tradition from various monasteries. Rinpoche also has a number of other funds that are for building holy objects, such as Stupas, prayer wheels etc. Rinpoche has a very strong interest in collecting texts from all the different traditions.

Reviews

[David Gross · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thubten Zopa is part of the same Gelug-pa branch of Tibetan Buddhism as the Dalai Lama. This book is an edited transcript of talks he gave at an American center of his Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition. It suffers some from that format, not being as well-organized or verbally precise as you might expect from a written book.

How should you live so as to live best, and with the least suffering and most fulfillment? Extreme altruism is the answer Zopa recommends, in the form of bodhicitta. He recommends you meditate on this as your purpose in life: "I, myself alone, am responsible for bringing happiness to all sentient beings and freeing them from all suffering and its cause. I am personally responsible for the happiness of each and every sentient being."

By "every sentient being" he doesn't just mean the people around you, but animals also, and "hungry ghosts", and "worldly gods", and people who are between life-and-death in a sort of reincarnation purgatory pupa stage. You're responsible for them all. No pressure.

By dedicating yourself to the happiness and liberation of others, you help them and also help yourself by lessening your egocentrism and the illusion of the enduring self that leads to suffering. Along with altruism, freeing yourself from this illusion of permanent, enduring things like the self is the second big element of Zopa's program.

The self, ego, or "I" is a label that we attach for convenience to an aggregate of experienced phenomena. But having attached it, we tend to assume that it has its own separate existence: that it's more than just a label but is a thing all its own. It's kind of like how we give names to hurricanes and then say "Hurricane Sandy is moving up the coast... Sandy has 155-mile-per-hour winds" -- what we mean is that there is a set of phenomena like winds going on that we have labeled Sandy, but it would be a mistake to think that there is really an entity called Sandy that has winds. The ego, Zopa says, is kind of like that. But unlike with hurricanes where the error of personifying it is fairly obvious, with the ego we commonly make this error, and then we pile on a bunch of additional illusions as a result, and this causes all sorts of grief and pathology.

Unfortunately, the process of getting out of that labyrinth seems to be fraught with difficulty. Zopa alludes to various levels of teaching, each of which seem to have multiple sub-levels, at which you have to do things like discard five gross errors and 108 subtle errors, and so forth, and then you may find that you were in the wrong sect all along and you have to transfer over to the right one to finally polish off your enlightenment. "Anyway, there are many details of these paths and many texts describing them... In the great Tibetan monasteries... the monks study many root texts and commentaries that detail the five paths and so forth. They memorize, debate, and meditate for thirty or forty years. It's a bit like one person trying to learn all the parts of an airplane and how they function together so that it can fly safely."

If you don't have thirty or forty years, is there anything you can work on that's a bit more appropriate to those of us in the short-attention-span set? How about forbearance (or patience as he calls it)? There's a lot to be gained from learning how not to get discombobulated by people who are being difficult. For this Zopa recommends a sort of ju-jitsu in which you come to think of the difficult person as a guru who is teaching you patience. Instead of seeing them as someone who is being a jerk and trying to ruin your day, see them as someone who is sacrificing their own mental stability in order to provide you with exercises to strengthen your patience.

Ask yourself, "Where did I learn this patience that I practice? I learned it from those who have been angry at me... Therefore, all the peace and happiness that I enjoy in this and future lives as a result of my practice of patience has come from the angry person... Because of this person I am able to accomplish the perfection of patience, the other perfections, and thereby complete the bodhisattva's path and attain full enlightenment... How kind this person is! How much benefit this person has given me!"

Zopa also includes a section on how to cultivate compassion. In summary: 1) renounce samsara (illusion), which involves study and meditation; 2) diligently practice non-harm, as a sort of fake-it-till-you-make-it form of compassion; 3) get a blessing from Avalokiteshvara (Quan Yin / Kannon / Chenrezig), the boddhisatva of compassion -- maybe chanting his/her mantra om mani padme hum tens of thousands of times will help.

[Legend · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is written by Lama Zopa Rinpoche. He was born in 1945 in Thami, Nepal. This book is about patience, finding peace in daily life, controlling anger, universal responsibility and mediation. This book has the answer to the question ‘’How can we make best use of this perfect human rebirth, the precious human body that we have received just this once? How can we make it most beneficial, not only for ourselves but for those other, most precious, extremely important living beings? Just like us, numberless other living beings, each of whom is equally precious as we feel ourselves to be, seek only happiness and dislike any suffering. How can we make our lives product live for their sake?”

[Thupten Lhundup]

This book deserves more than 5 stars. The author of the book is Kyabje Lama Zopa Rhinpoche. In this book, he tells us that the best way to find happiness in life or to be happy is to live with compassion and wisdom. This book should be read to help usthink deeply about our daily lives. It shows how enemies are important to develop the perfection of patience, and how anger destroys all good qualities. In summary, it shows how we can change our daily problems into happiness.
- By Thubten Lhundup (Class 10, Kopan Monastery)

[Duncan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short and easy to read. There are some interesting sections in there, but as other reviewers stated, it is a bit repetitive. This is because the text is actually a transcript from a talk that Lama Zopa gave in America. As such, the explanation of why reality isn't actually how you perceive it to be (from the Mahayana perspective) is really difficult to comprehend. The book is worth reading though.

[Scott Goddard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short and concise - a treatise into how compassion or striving to be a bodhisattva is the best way to realise happiness not only for yourself, but for others too. The author tries to tackle the amorphous idea of emptiness, but still despite his best efforts, my understanding remains incomplete.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as part of my daily morning practice. It’s an excellent book for practitioners, but may not resonate as strongly with Western non-Buddhists unfamiliar with dharma

[Kevin Lin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generic overview of some of the fundamental aspects of the dharma

[Antonio Bustillo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few sections are a bit repetitive yet the chapters on compassion and how to view one's problems are good and worth reading.