{"id":22741,"date":"2025-07-02T12:32:30","date_gmt":"2025-07-02T04:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orfeostoryweb.com\/thekchen\/?p=22741"},"modified":"2025-07-07T03:10:05","modified_gmt":"2025-07-06T19:10:05","slug":"creating-merits-with-your-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orfeostoryweb.com\/thekchen\/creating-merits-with-your-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating Merits With Your Children"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Have you ever wondered how your children can also create merits for their practice, and to lead a happy, healthy and fulfilling life?<\/h3>\n
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This article is inspired by Lama Zopa Rinpoche\u2019s book called Joyful Parents, Successful Children.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Why is it important for my child to create merits?<\/h3>\n

Just like how you want peerless happiness and awakening for yourself, your children are also precious sentient beings capable of being enlightened one day. It is important to wish for your child to become a kind-hearted human being who can benefit even just one other sentient being and to become a Buddha for all. To awaken these innate wisdom qualities within your child, it is important for them to gain merits, so that they may realise these qualities.<\/p>\n

What can my child do to gain merits?<\/h3>\n

Your child can do something as simple as making daily prostrations before school to accumulate merit. Even a single prostration to the Buddha plants the seed for enlightenment and lasting happiness. Moreover, the merit increases based on the number of statues present\u2014prostrating once to a thousand statues generates a thousand causes for enlightenment. If your children do this regularly, it will give them tremendous inspiration, as they\u2019ll be creating the causes for happiness and success both in this life and in future lives, along with the causes for liberation and enlightenment. So, by teaching your children to make prostrations to sacred objects, you\u2019re offering them a truly meaningful gift.<\/p>\n

There are many other valuable practices you can share with your children. For instance, it\u2019s beneficial to have an altar at home with many images, thangkas, and statues of buddhas and deities. Each child could also have a personal statue, such as one of Tara or Chenrezig. Every day\u2014ideally in the morning and maybe also in the evening, but at least once daily\u2014they can offer a sweet or a biscuit on a clean plate to their personal statue as well as to the other holy images. If nothing else, they should recite OM AH HUM to bless the offering and transform it into vast nectar before making the offering.<\/p>\n

You can also make prayers together such as:<\/p>\n

By this merit, may I never cause harm to any sentient being and may I cause all sentient beings to have every happiness up to enlightenment as quickly as possible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or:<\/p>\n

By this merit, may I, like the Buddha, be able to liberate numberless sentient beings from suffering and bring them to enlightenment as quickly as possible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By dedicating in this way, your children will not only collect the extensive merit of making offerings to holy objects, but also the merit that they create will become extremely powerful.<\/p>\n

No matter how many university degrees someone has these days, there is no guarantee that they will find a job and be happy. On the other hand, there are many people who live a happy and satisfied life, who experience inner peace, even though they don\u2019t have a university degree. For these reasons, you must focus on using skillful means to help your children create merit. You must put effort into this so that, sooner or later, they will come to have an easy life, free from problems. By creating merit, they will have every success in life, including finding a job.<\/p>\n

Thinking beyond exam success<\/h3>\n

Exam success is only a small part of happiness and does not bring happiness for future lives, nor does it create the cause for their liberation and enlightenment. Of course, you can pray for their long lives, for them to be healthy, for all their wishes that accord with the Dharma to succeed, for their actions not to become negative karma and for them to not cause harm to themselves and others, but in particular, you can also pray:<\/p>\n

May my children develop the same qualities as Tara (or Chenrezig, Manjushri, Medicine Buddha or Lama Tsongkhapa) in this very lifetime and be able to do perfect work for sentient beings, freeing them from the oceans of samsaric sufferings and bringing them to full enlightenment as quickly as possible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This prayer is short but it includes all the realisations.<\/p>\n

You can pray to Tara together with your children in the same way that you normally pray to her. I am just giving you some ideas and then you can elaborate on them. There are many things that you can do to educate your children and give meaning to them having been born into a Buddhist family.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/h3>\n

While your children are young, it would be most fortunate to plant good seeds in them. By saying this, it is not implying that you should force your children to adopt your lifestyle. Rather, it is to emphasise that it is important to help them abandon the causes of suffering and create the causes of happiness\u2014not only this life\u2019s happiness but also the happiness of future lives, liberation from samsara and full enlightenment. If they learn some Dharma practices, recite some mantras and so on when they are young, even if they don\u2019t continue with these when they get older, all the merit they collected earlier on will still cause them to meet and practise the Dharma in future lives and will bring them happiness for many lifetimes. Because it is not easy to help your children when they become teenagers and don\u2019t want to listen to you anymore, you should try to benefit them as much as possible while they are young.<\/p>\n

If you are interested in planting the seeds of Dharma in your children, consider signing them up for our Dharma Junior programme which happens yearly! Click\u00a0here<\/u><\/b><\/a>\u00a0to find out more.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever wondered how your children can also create merits for their practice, and to lead a happy, healthy and fulfilling life? This article is inspired by Lama Zopa Rinpoche\u2019s book called Joyful Parents, Successful Children. Why is it important for my child to create merits? Just like how you want peerless happiness and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[112],"class_list":["post-22741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bodhi-weekly","tag-growth-mindset"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCreating Merits With Your Children - THEKCHEN CHOLING<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orfeostoryweb.com\/thekchen\/creating-merits-with-your-children\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Creating Merits With Your Children - THEKCHEN CHOLING\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Have you ever wondered how your children can also create merits for their practice, and to lead a happy, healthy and fulfilling life? 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