Ancient prayers for confession, rejoicing in goodness, and cultivating care for all beings offer practical tools for emotional resilience —staying compassionate and open-hearted when life gets difficult.
Image by Claudia Salamon.
What do ancient Buddhist sūtras have to say about wellbeing today? In this six-part short video series, we explore selected sūtras and the practical insights they offer for navigating modern life. Through brief, accessible reflections, each episode highlights how the Buddha’s words can support clarity, balance, and inner resilience.
In this video, 84000 editor Nathaniel Rich introduces two distinctive practice texts from the Tibetan Buddhist Canon, Fulfilling All Aspirations and Protecting All Beings. Although classified as the Buddha’s own speech, these works function primarily as liturgical prayers centered on confession, rejoicing, and the cultivation of a bodhisattva’s altruistic mindset. The video highlights an important scholarly insight: Protecting All Beings appears to provide a direct canonical source for teachings later systematized in the mind training (lojong) tradition, which was long believed to lack explicit scriptural foundations in the Canon. By translating these texts, 84000 makes available ancient contemplative tools that support emotional resilience and compassion in times of difficulty, revealing the Tibetan Canon as a vast and still largely unexplored repository of teachings with profound relevance for contemporary spiritual life.
Dr. Nathaniel Rich is a research editor at 84000 whose work focuses on the intellectual and institutional history of Nyingma traditions in Tibet. He holds a PhD in religious studies from UC Santa Barbara and is actively involved with Dawn Mountain Tibetan Buddhist Temple and Research Institute in Houston, where his mentors first inspired him to learn Tibetan and support the transmission of the Dharma.
