Actual Practice
Transforming the Mind into Dharma and Bodhichitta
The text says:
The Method to Transform a Suffering Life into Happiness (Including Enlightenment)
At the beginning of each day, after you open your eyes, until enlightenment is achieved and until death, especially today, so that all the activities of your body, speech, and mind – hearing, thinking, and meditating, as well as walking, sitting, sleeping, doing your job, and so on – do not become causes of suffering and become causes of happiness, and especially that they become causes to achieve buddhahood (that is, that you transform them into a method for accomplishing benefit and happiness for all sentient beings), here is a method for transforming the mind into Dharma and especially into bodhichitta.
The Method to Transform a Suffering Life into Happiness (Including Enlightenment) is the motivation for how to live your life in Dharma, especially in bodhichitta. In the morning, when you open your eyes, you should remember to transform your mind into Dharma; into Dharma means into a cause that brings only happiness. You should understand that this is how to live your life in happiness. It is not about living your life with self-cherishing, in suffering and depression, thinking, “I’m hopeless.” Instead, from the morning, you make your life the most beneficial and meaningful for sentient beings with the motivation of a good heart, of bodhichitta. This is then the basis for actualizing the lam-rim realizations and the meditations of the tantric path.
The reason that I’m pushing you to do this practice first thing in the morning is that this is what you need to do if you want to be happy and avoid depression, and to make your life most beneficial for sentient beings, which means also for yourself. You should recite this motivation every day to lead your life in the most meaningful way for every sentient being – for every ant, every mosquito, every maggot, every fish, every animal, every human being, every asura, and every sura in the numberless universes – by freeing them from suffering and causing them happiness. This motivation makes your life become a cause of happiness beyond this life, of liberation from the oceans of samsaric suffering, and of the state of omniscient mind.
However, if you do other lam-rim prayers daily, such as the lam-rim prayer found in Lama Chöpa, The Foundation of All Good Qualities combined with Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga, Guru Shakyamuni Buddha Meditation, or Calling the Guru from Afar, you don’t need to do The Method to Transform a Suffering Life into Happiness (Including Enlightenment). Otherwise, in the morning when you open your eyes you should do this practice to transform a kaka life into a happy life, including enlightenment.
It is very important for your daily actions to not become causes of suffering – in particular, causes of the lower realms – and to become causes of the happiness of future lives. If your mind is not paying attention to that, it doesn’t matter if you meditate without moving for hours. If you don’t check your motivation, your meditation becomes another cause of suffering, another cause of the lower realms. If you don’t know the motivation of the lower capable being, which is the first Dharma, the very basic Dharma, and you don’t meditate with that motivation, your whole life’s meditation can become the cause of the lower realms. If you’re meditating so that you can be happy or gain power or attain peace, your meditation becomes another cause of the lower realms. Other people may think, “Oh, he meditates all the time,” but if someone is meditating without knowing even the first Dharma, it just becomes a cause of the lower realms, even though there might be some pleasant feeling of bliss or peace. If you don’t know what Dharma is, your whole life can be wasted. Even though you meditate every day for many hours, it’s meaningless. In reality it’s very sad; if you don’t know what Dharma is, you waste your whole life and also create causes of the lower realms.
Meditating on this practice makes your mind become Dharma. It transforms your mind from your present motivation of worldly concern, or attachment to this life, into a Dharma motivation unstained by that attachment. And it transforms your mind into the motivation of bodhichitta. When you do everything, including eating, walking, sitting, sleeping, and working, with bodhichitta, all your actions become causes of enlightenment. In this way, although it might not be nice to say it like this, your previously kaka life is transformed into gold by transforming your mind into bodhichitta.