Benefitting Animals

Rinpoche was very very happy to receive the letter below from a young Dharma student - the letter and Rinpoche's reply follow:

'Dear Lama Zopa,
I live in New York City and am 9 years old. I have been vegetarian all my life. Here is a story about Milarepa kids' camp in Vermont, U.S.A.: Recently I was reading your newsletter (the April 2004 issue) when I saw the article that said you should catch bugs and let them go outside. So, when I was at Milarepa kids' camp, I caught about 50 flies indoors one at a time using small paper cups. It took me all afternoon. Then we brought them to Geshe Tsulga who blessed them, and then we took them down to the stupa, circled it while praying, and let them go. I thank you a lot for starting Milarepa.'

'My very dear Rafaello,
I was very very happy, very happy to receive your email that you had saved so many flies and spent your afternoon liberating these flies. I want to thank you very much for practicing my advice, liberating these living beings.

Here is some more explanation about the benefits of helping living beings like this, please see if you can understand this advice and also help other boys and girls to understand how important it is to help others, especially to help the animals and all the different creatures in the world to protect their lives.

I am going to put your picture in the Mandala and explain what you did, I am very happy.

With much love and prayers,
Lama Zopa'

To read the advice referred to by Rinpoche, which contains advice for helping animals in everyday life and when they die, just go to http://www.fpmt.org/teachers/zopa/advice/default.asp

Excerpts follow:

'I started the tradition of how to liberate animals. The way we do animal liberation causes long life but that alone doesn’t ultimately help the animals, so the best thing to do is to circumambulate the animals around holy objects and to bless them with mantras and prayers. So you can carry the animals around a table in the middle of a room with many, many, many holy objects on it piled up, many tsa tsa, pictures of Buddhas, texts, whatever you have and then you take the animals around these holy objects.'

'If you love your animal very much then this is what you must do for them for their good rebirth and quick liberation from samsara.'

This article is taken from the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT).