As one Chinese proverb goes, “The more one strives for goodness, the greater the obstacles are.” To propagate the profound highest tantra, one will definitely encounter a great multitude of obstacles. When many esteemed masters such as Shantarakshita (8th century C.E.) first arrived in Tibet, even though they were as marvelous as the Buddha, they were not able to propagate tantra. Hence, they had to seek help from Padmasambhava.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Guru Yoga Practice of the Seven-Line Prayer to Padmasambhava]

Practitioners wishing for enlightenment: When you have completed the preliminaries and accomplished everything except enlightenment, the Guru Yoga of Padmasambhava is particularly important. Words cannot describe the realization of the true nature of mind or the Great Perfection; the true nature of mind is beyond words. The best way to attain such realization is through guru yoga, and not any other way.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Guru Yoga Practice of the Seven-Line Prayer to Padmasambhava]

If you have enough confidence and insights, visualizing offerings to Buddha and Bodhisattvas has the exactly same effects and merits as a real offering. Exoteric, especially Mind Only Chittamatra, believes that everything that we see, whatever it is Pure Land or hell, is all mind-made, the appearance is only built by one’s heart. Tantra is explaining to the very bottom of this view by its behavior and practice.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series: The Blessing of Speech]

What can be detected by our five senses, including the people we meet and the surroundings we are living in, all indeed seem very real. They are like what we experience in a dream, which is also vivid to us. When we have a dream at night, we still have a strong attachment to our surroundings. We cannot deny the existence of our dream when we are in the dream. However, when we wake up from the dream, we suddenly realize that the dream and everything in it were unreal. Therefore, we have to accept that all material objects manifest in different forms if we look at them in different ways. What we see in this world depends on the structure of our eyes. The world would look different if we had different eye structures.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Illusory World]

Practitioners facing adverse conditions: When adverse conditions happen in your work or practice due to all kinds of reasons, you can eliminate these adversities by practicing the Guru Yoga of Padmasambhava.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Guru Yoga Practice of the Seven-Line Prayer to Padmasambhava]

1. Who Can Practice the Guru Yoga of Padmasambhava? Beginning practitioners: As a new practitioner, you will encounter adverse conditions during practice. To dispel such unfavorable situations or adverse conditions even before you develop renunciation and bodhicitta, you may first practice the Guru Yoga of Padmasambhava and accumulate his heart mantra 100,000 times. This will facilitate smooth progress when you go on to engage in other practices.

【Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Guru Yoga Practice of the Seven-Line Prayer to Padmasambhava】

Our eyes are ordinary sense organs; what can be observed with our eyes are all relative. When we look at things with our naked eyes, static objects are real for us. The movement under the microscope, though, can be called the absolute truth, but absolute truth from the Buddhist point of view means a lot more than that. The microscopic view is only a lower level meaning of the absolute truth.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Illusory World]

Ongoing practitioners: Whether you are engaging in the five preliminaries or other practices, if you practice the Guru Yoga of Padmasambhava at the beginning of each year and accumulate the heart mantra or the Seven-Line Prayer 100,000 times, you may dispel all the obstacles to your practice within that year through the blessing of Padmasambhava.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Guru Yoga Practice of the Seven-Line Prayer to Padmasambhava]

Why do Dharma practice often visualize lights? Lights symbolize Buddha’s career. In both exoteric and esoteric sutra, you can often see this description: when Sakyamuni Buddha is preaching sentient beings, his body glows, the lights shine into hell and so the three lower realms beings, release them from their sin, reduce their pain so they can escape from samsara.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series: The Blessing of Speech]