Thanks to Phil Cornwell, a dedicated volunteer for Druk White Lotus School, who emailed me the most recent photos he had taken of the trees in Ladakh, I can now show you the progress of one of my most favourite Live to Love project - Tree Planting. I must tell you it was very hard job for my nuns to put these few thousands of trees in the barren land. You can see how dry and sandy the land is. But I have the confidence that everything will work out very well.

With the issue of global warming, we see so many natural disasters happening everywhere. Therefore I am always thinking that tree planting is very much needed to improve the environment. I don't think we should just sit around, talk about it and don't do anything. This is not my style. So I am encouraging my monastic institutions everywhere to put what we teach into practice, that means since we talk about benefiting beings, so we should be doing activities that truly benefit beings immediately and for the long term, without encouraging superstitions.

I know many people are very much against Tibetan Buddhism these days because some of our rituals really seem to be encouraging superstition and don't seem to be scientifically proven at all. As I said, everything comes from the motivation. If you have the motivation to benefit only yourself, then whatever activities you do will have a very limited effect, or even negative effect. If you have the genuine motivation to benefit others, then whatever you do will have a tremendous effect not only for others, but also for yourself.

This month is the holy month of Saga Dawa with several important anniversaries of Lord Buddha being celebrated. Some of my friends told me that this is the best month in a year to practise because whatever it is done will have multiplying effect. Sometimes I think spiritual teachers like us could have overstated the idea of "having multiplying effects" that some people don't practise on normal days, except on holy anniversaries. They don't practise 6 paramitas until on the 8th or 15th or 30th of lunar month.

There was quite a funny incident that I could remember. One of my students gave me an offering on the 15th lunar day and told me very clearly that she gave it on that day so that she could have hundreds or thousands more merits. I am not saying that this is not true. Of course this is true because on these holy days, the energy or the varous conditions are very helpful for accumulating multiple merit. But as I said, we should not be fanatic.

I think, saying this kind of things, such as having more merits on certain days, is more of skillful way to attract many people to join in the spiritual practice. But I do not think that one should be waiting for those holy days to happen to do beneficial deeds, because if you have the motivation to practise, to help and to benefit others, every moment should be a valuable opportunity for you. Keeping this in your mind and your action all the time will eventually help you to carry out spiritual practice and beneficial activities as a natural habit and with this kind of natural habit, you will gradually improve yourself and become a better person. By becoming a better person, you will certainly have a bigger mind and therefore a happier life. So, everything around you becomes positive, whatever you see is also positive due to your bigger mind which is able to accept more things.

Anyway, I will start talking about Gyalwa Gotsangpa, our great yogi, in my next message and I would also like to introduce one of our very important lineage of Rinpoches, the Drukpa Yongdzins. I will try to write some interesting stories about these great masters of our yogi lineage.