How bodhisattvas accumulate virtues and benefit beings


Accumulating Virtues

  • Maintaining and sustaining bodhisattvas’ morality
  • Joyfully making effort in hearing, contemplating, and meditating
  • Performing service for honoring all teachers
  • Helping and nursing sick people
  • Giving properly and proclaiming good qualities
  • Rejoicing in others’ merit and patience
  • Having patience when others look down on you
  • Dedicating virtue toward enlightenment and saying aspiration prayers
  • Making offerings to the Triple Gem and making efforts for the virtuous teachings
  • Sustaining introspection
  • Recollecting the bodhisattvas’ training
  • Protecting the bodhisattvas’ training with vigiilant awareness
  • Protecting all the sense-doors and moderately eating food
  • Making effort in meditation practice without sleeping too early in the evening or too late in the morning
  • Attending spiritual masters and authentically holy people
  • Investigating your own mistakes and purifying them

Practicing these good qualities, protecting and increasing them are called the moral ethics of accumulating virtues.


Benefitting Sentient Beings

  • Supporting meaningful activities
  • Dispelling the suffering of sentient beings who are suffering
  • Showing the methods to those who do not know them
  • Recollecting others’ kindness and then repaying it
  • Protecting others from fears and dispelling the mourning of those who are suffering
  • Giving necessities to those who do not have them
  • Making provisions to bring disciples into the Dharma community and acting according to those people’s level of understanding
  • Creating joy by reporting the perfect qualities
  • Properly correcting someone who is doing wrong
  • Refraining from creating fear with miracle powers
  • Causing others to be inspired by the teachings

Source: Gampopa, The Jewel Ornament of Liberation (Khenpo Konchog Gyaltsen Rinpoche translation, p. 199), citing The Bodhisattvabhumi (The Stage(s) of the Bodhisattva).