The Path to Ultimate Happiness: Lamrim Teachings from Kopan 2009

Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Sep 2018 · Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive

About this ebook

“It’s most amazing what this mind can do. We can’t see this mind. There’s nothing to touch. It has no color, no shape; it’s formless, colorless, shapeless, but what it can do—the happiness, the benefit it can offer to numberless sentient beings—is like the limitless sky.”

- Lama Zopa Rinpoche

The Path to Ultimate Happiness presents teachings given by Lama Zopa Rinpoche during the 42nd Kopan lamrim course in 2009. In these teachings Rinpoche discusses our potential to bring benefit and happiness, including full enlightenment, to all sentient beings.

Rinpoche explains the stages of the path to enlightenment, teaches extensively on emptiness and the good heart, and gives commentaries on sur practice, the Offering Cloud Mantra and other prayers and practices.

The teachings convey the spontaneous and intimate quality of Rinpoche's teaching style and include many anecdotes from Rinpoche's own experiences. Rinpoche encourages us to study and practice Dharma in order to purify the mind, collect extensive merit and achieve realizations. In this way, our life becomes most beneficial and useful to others.

About the author

Lama Zopa Rinpoche was born in Thami, Nepal, in 1946. At the age of three he was recognized as the reincarnation of Sherpa Nyingma yogi, Kunsang Yeshe, the Lawudo Lama. Rinpoche’s Thami home was not far from the Lawudo cave, in the Mount Everest region of Nepal, where his predecessor meditated for the last twenty years of his life. Rinpoche’s own description of his early years may be found in his book, The Door to Satisfaction (Wisdom Publications). At the age of ten, Rinpoche went to Tibet and studied and meditated at Domo Geshe Rinpoche’s monastery near Pagri, until the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959 forced him to forsake Tibet for the safety of Bhutan.

Rinpoche then went to the Tibetan refugee camp at Buxa Duar, West Bengal, India, where he met Lama Yeshe, who became his closest teacher. The Lamas went to Nepal in 1967, and over the next few years built Kopan and Lawudo Monasteries. In 1971 Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave the first of his famous annual lam-rim retreat courses, which continue at Kopan to this day.

In 1974, with Lama Yeshe, Rinpoche began traveling the world to teach and establish centers of Dharma. When Lama Yeshe passed away in 1984, Rinpoche took over as spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), which has continued to flourish under his peerless leadership. More details of Rinpoche’s life and work may be found on the FPMT Web site.