The vital importance of this teaching by Lama Zopa Rinpoche is evident from his advice:

"No matter how many other realizations you have, if you don’t have realization of emptiness, there’s nothing that can directly eliminate the root of samsara, ignorance. No other realization can directly cease delusions and karma. There is no other way to be completely liberated forever from suffering."

Here, Rinpoche not only explains the root cause of our sufferings, but skilfully guides us, step by step, on a profound meditation on emptiness, from identifying the object to be refuted (how things appear to our hallucinating minds) to generating an awareness of how everything is totally empty; conventionally, dependent arising.

How correctly devoting to the virtuous friend in thought and action matters to realizing emptiness is also explained. It comes together with listening, teaching and meditating on emptiness as a highly potent means to gather the supporting conditions for attaining wisdom.  Encouragingly, Rinpoche assures us that when the conditions are there and the mind is ready, even just “a few words... can suddenly click in your mind. It’s like you’ve woken up from sleep."

Students familiar with the subject may yet acquire new insights from Rinpoche's unusual clarification of some of the subtler points concerning the relationship between the ultimate nature of all phenomena and their conventional reality; and what would be the direct experience of the emptiness of an object.

Outstandingly practical, Rinpoche's teaching also addresses some of the obstructive experiences that meditators may encounter, such as the fear of losing the "I" and the anxiety over falling into the extreme of nihilism.

This is an unmissable teaching from a fully realized master whose humility belies the limitless extent of his accomplishments.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche, teachings on The Heart Sutra at Tara Institute, Melbourne, Australia, March 2000; excerpted, edited and reviewed by Ven. Ailsa Cameron and Ven. Joan Nicell, 2024.

46 pages, 2024 Edition.