Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 70-minute introductory talk, Denny Morphett opens with an invitation for a four-week study of Buddhism’s foundational teachings, beginning with the Buddha’s life and culminating in the Four Noble Truths. He traces Śākyamūni Buddha’s journey from sheltered prince to spiritual seeker—his encounters with sickness, age, death, and a wandering ascetic; his years of austere practice; and his eventual enlightenment under the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya. Morphett emphasises that the Buddha’s story mirrors our own: we too live in relative comfort yet harbour underlying unease, and like him we could train our minds to clarity and freedom if we committed time and effort. The talk then addresses core Buddhist concepts: the distinction between saṃsāra (ignorance of reality) and nirvana or enlightenment (insight into reality); the difference between Theravāda and Mahāyāna traditions; and karma as action born from thought, intention, and motivation. Pitched at complete newcomers with no prior Buddhism knowledge; several audience questions on karma, meditation, and the tension between renunciation and the value of human rebirth anchor the session in practical inquiry.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 2016 10 10 Introduction to Buddhism.mp3
UUID: 688fe75c-bfe0-4113-90c9-8a5ca70891e5
Teacher: Denny Morphett
Collection: Into to Buddhism (Denny Morphett)
Date: 2016-10-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 70.3 minutes
Words: ~10,152
That’s a can you hear me talking? Yeah. Can you all hear me talking? Alright. There’s a couple names.
People will put their names down, but they haven’t turned up yet, they may come a bit later, but whatever. My name’s Denny, and I’ll take the course for the next four weeks. Just wondering if people can just say their name to so that everyone knows who everyone is. I’m just Ebner. Theresa.
Jackie. Jackie. Jackie. Madeline. Nancy.
Jackie. Ricky. Eddie. Eddie. Okay.
And Jamie at the back who’s also recording for posterity. Okay. What we’ll do for the next four weeks This is an introduction to Buddhism, as the title says. So, I’m presuming most of you don’t have a lot of knowledge of Buddhism. He may, but, you know, who knows?
Have any of you been to Buddha House before for various things? You all been to Buddha House? No. Most people. Okay.
But I presume some of you have read about Buddhism or has anyone people have read a little bit about Buddhism? No. Maybe a bit a bit about it. Often, I think there’s always something in our lives that acts as a bit of a hook to get us interested in Buddhism. I mean, I grew up, you know, with a Christian upbringing, Anglican, high church Anglican, might as well be Catholic.
In my late teens that didn’t sort of do it for me, so I read a lot of books about this and that, theosophy, you know, Sufism, everything, you know, trying to sort of find what might be interesting, what might be a bit meaningful for me. And the thing with Buddhism that attracted me was the focus on the mind. And the mind is a big thing in Buddhism. So basically, from a Buddhist point of view, you know, our reality is mind made. I might have said that at some of the meditation.
So whether we have happiness or suffering, it’s up to our own mind, really. It’s not the external stuff, which is what everyone thinks it is. So that really appealed to me. That was the hook for me that got me interested in Buddhism. And for other people, you know, it can be some aspect of Buddhism, it can be some drama in their lives, some grief or something going wrong.
There’s always something that will hook you into getting interested in Buddhism. Not necessarily the thing that keeps you interested in it, because sometimes, you know, as you go along, other things other than the original sort of hook will keep you interested. But, you know, there’s usually something that starts you off on the track. And people think about Buddhism in a whole lot of different ways. Some people see it as a religion.
It’s not certainly one of in Buddhism we don’t have a theistic approach. You know, the big theistic religions, know, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, that have a God creator or a creator God. Buddhism doesn’t have that at all. There’s no creator god, no sort of force or person up there sort of pulling the strings, so to speak. But some people call it a religion, and if that’s meaningful to them in terms of what, you know, they mean by religion, that’s fine.
Others call it a philosophy or a belief system or a framework by which you live. Often these days, I think a lot of people don’t have a framework within which they live, so, you know, they’re a bit lost, bit wandering around if they have to make decisions or if they’re, you know, faced with some kind of dilemma. They haven’t got this sort of framework of a belief system or a it doesn’t have to be a belief system a framework of how to live your life, how to make decisions. So people have muddied thinking sometimes. Of the obvious things is with capital punishment.
Some people say, I don’t believe in killing another human being. However, you know, a serial rapist should get the death penalty. It’s sort of muddied thinking. There’s no framework within which often people make their decisions. So Buddhism is that.
It’s also a sort of philosophy. It’s a bit of a psychology as well. It’s a whole lot of things and it means different things to different people from that point of view. But what it does, I guess, is tries to answer some of the big questions in life. And what we’ll do in these four weeks is I’ll talk a little bit about the Buddha, the Śākyamūni Buddha.
A little bit. We won’t go into that too much. Then what I’ll do over the four weeks is just talk about his first teachings, were the Four Noble Truths. I don’t know if anyone’s heard of the Four Noble Truths or read anything about them, knows a bit about them. But basically, this was the Buddha’s first teaching.
And really, everything, or if you come to teachings here or whatever, there’s meant to be, I don’t know, eighty four thousand sutras or something that the Buddha taught. All the Buddhist teachings can be sort of variations on a theme, I guess, of the Four Noble Truths. You know, they go into it in a deeper way or they look at it you know, from another angle or whatever. But the four noble truths are basically the basis of Buddhism and everything else sort of flows from that. So we’ll, over the four weeks, we’ll try and get through the four noble truths.
We’ll try and do one a week or might spill over to another week. We’ll have a bit of a break in about about, you know, about twenty past eight, ten minutes. You can get a cup of something or stretch your legs. Then we can have some questions or if we need to go on a bit, we’ll go on with that after the break. And a little bit of meditation and then finish up about nine So that’s the general idea.
So I think it’s useful to not everyone’s really clear about the Buddha or Buddhas, you know, or is there one or more Buddha or or whatever. And Śākyamūni Buddha, the one up there, is referred to as the Buddha of our time. So he was born, you know, an ordinary person like you or me, in his last birth about two thousand five hundred years ago. And the teachings say that his teachings will last about five thousand years. So we’re sort of halfway through his teachings.
But so he’s referred to as a Buddha of our time, Śākyamūni Buddha. But he’s not the only Buddha. And there’s in our eon, which is, you know, a long, long time, just millions of years, I don’t know how many years make up an eon, but it’s a lot. There is said that there will be a thousand Buddhas teaching Buddhas, of which Śākyamūni Buddha is the fourth. So even though he’s a Buddha of our time, you know, he’s not he’s not the first, and he won’t be the last of our eon, even though he’s the Buddha of our sort of time.
So he’s the fourth teaching Buddha, and the next Buddha after him will be when his teachings have sort of disappeared, because as said, we’re about halfway through the period of his teachings. They will Buddhism talks about us living in a degenerate time, I think we can probably all sort of agree with that at the moment. You know, it’s called a Kali Yuga, a degenerate time. And eventually, the Buddhist teachings will die out, you know, and there won’t be any Buddha’s teachings as we know them now, what the Śākyamūni Buddha taught for a long, long time. And then the fifth Buddha, which will be who will be Maitreya Buddha.
Where is he? Is this one, you might not be able to see it, at the back there, sitting on a sort of a seat, a throne. The Buddha to come. He will be the Buddha to come, who will come in a long, long time in the future when, you know, there hasn’t been any Buddhist teaching for quite a while. He’ll be the fifth Buddha.
Fifth teaching Buddha. I say teaching because there’s lots of Buddhas around. You know, there’s the teaching Buddhas and Śākyamūni Buddha, the Buddha of our time, and there’s been three before him and there’ll be, you know, a thousand all up in that aeon. But there’s lots of Buddhas around now, you know. We would say the Dalai Lama is a Buddha.
He just says I’m just a humble monk. But he’s not, you know. And followers of Buddhism would see that he is a Buddha, an enlightened person. Our the one on the throne in the front, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who’s the spiritual leader of the organisation to which Buddha House belongs, an international organisation, we would see him as a Buddha. So, and there are lots of Buddhas around, you know, in and out amongst us, have been, will be.
So, when we talk about the Buddha, you know, there’s sort of almost like three levels. There’s people who have reached enlightenment or become awakened, and we’ll talk about that a bit more, what that means. There’s Śākyamūni Buddha of our time and then there’s there’ll be this thousand Buddhas in our eon and I don’t know. After that, who knows? I don’t know.
So it’s useful to sort of get that sort of get the ideas clear in your head. Because certainly followers of Tibetan Buddhism, Dalai Lama would say he’s a Buddha and we would see our leader Lamas or Rinpoches as a Buddha. They wouldn’t say they were, of course. Or then you hear the term sometimes bodhisattva. Bodhisattva is like almost a Buddha.
Bodhisattvas are almost enlightened. They come back. They keep coming back and being reborn by their own will, I guess, rather than us who keep being reborn through our karma with no choice. But a bodhisattva, and you could say Dalai Lama was a bodhisattva, keep being reborn, coming back again and again to try and teach people how to reach enlightenment. So that’s just something, you know, to keep in mind.
Śākyamūni Buddha was born just like you or I. He had a number of rebirths just like we have, but he sort of over the over the long long time numberless lives created a lot of merit and got to the point where in his last life, which is the life we know about him, he became enlightened. But, you know, he was born a prince. He was born in about five sixty three ish BC to to King Shuddhodana. Not terrible, I’ve got his name wrong.
I’ll get him and his wife mixed up. Shuddhodana, yeah, Shuddhodana. King Shuddhodana and Queen Maya. King Shudadana was the head of the Shakya clan in Western Nepal. So that’s where you get the name Śākyamūni.
So Shakya is the clan or tribe or whatever that King Shuddhodana was head of. Muni means wise one or sage or whatever. Wise one or sage. And Buddha means an awakened or an enlightened person. So the Buddha Śākyamūni means the awakened Buddha, awakened wise person of the Shakya clan.
That’s that’s where he gets his name. But he was born Prince Gautama Siddhartha to the King and the Queen. And when he was born, a prophet came to sort of have a look at him, like he did in those days if you were a king I suppose, a prophet came along and sort of had a look at the prince. And he said to the king that Gautama would either become a great king or a great spiritual leader. Now the king wanted him, of course, to become a great king and take over from him when he died.
So he kept him he didn’t want him to become a spiritual leader, he wanted to become a king. So he kept him sort of within the palace. He didn’t let him go out and sort of see all the troubles of the world and all that kind of stuff because he thought if he did, he would want to become a spiritual leader or spiritual person. So he had this, you know, really nice life in the palace. It was all nice and, you know, luxurious and everything went well and everyone there was, you know, young and pretty and good looking or whatever.
He learned how to be a great, you know, warrior and a sportsperson and all that kind of thing. And then when he was sixteen, he married so about five forty seven, he married his cousin, Yashodhara, as opposed to Shuddhodana and, you know, was a husband. And then a few years later he had a son, Rahula, in five thirty three BC. He was about twenty nine. And after that, sort of not long after he had his son, he just started to become curious about life and what was outside the palace, you know.
He started to question. So he snuck out with his with his servants. And he saw the teachings say he saw four things. He saw a sick person, an old person, a dead body and a wandering mendicant, an ascetic, you know, person wandering like you see in India. And he hadn’t seen these things before because within the palace the king made sure he didn’t see old people, sick people.
He just had beauty and splendour and all that kind of thing. And he said what he saw the sick person. He said what’s going on here? What’s wrong with this person? And they said, you know, he’s sick.
Everyone will get sick at some stage in their life. You’ll get sick, you know, your wife, your child will get sick. That’s what happens to people and he was quite shocked by that. And then he saw an aged person, you know, bent over, looking really frail and weak and all that. So he asked about that as well.
And his servant said, well, that’s what happens if you live long enough. You get old and you get frail and, you know, it’s not very nice. And that’s what will happen to the ones you love. He was he was just amazed because he just had never seen anyone old in the palace. They were all kept away from him.
And then he saw a dead body and he wanted to know about that because he hadn’t seen anyone die. And they said this is what happens if you you know, to all of us. We all get sick, get old, well, not all get old, but we all die and this will happen to everybody. And then he saw the wandering mendicant, and he he looked really serene and calm. And he thought, well, I wonder what he’s, you know, what he’s doing and what he’s learning about and why he looks so peaceful and calm.
And he wanted to know that. So when he got back to the palace, he was just he just was completely changed. He didn’t he just all the beauty and the splendour and the, you know, what happens in palaces, all that sort of distractions and all that kind of stuff just lost all its allure for him and just meant absolutely nothing to him. And he thought, you know, I can’t bear the thought that, you know, for me and for those I love that they will will suffer like I’ve seen out there. And I really want to find out how, you know, this can be stopped.
How how this, you know, can be combated and and sort of gotten over. So he left. He left his wife and his little baby, and he snuck out at night with his groom, Chana, and he just took off and he decided he wouldn’t come back till he had worked out why these people were suffering so much, you know, why we all suffer so much. So for the next five or six years, I suppose, he hooked up with a whole lot of Brahmin teachers and he learnt this and he learnt that and he went to teachings and that didn’t really answer his questions. And He very quickly knew more than they did about the teachings.
And with another five seekers, they thought maybe if they do this austere asceticism they might find out how to get over suffering or whatever. You know, if you don’t eat or you don’t sleep and all that, if you sort of ignore the body in that way, then maybe you’ll go into deep meditation and that way you’ll find the answer to all sort of mental suffering and physical suffering. And so for quite a long time they did this, you know. They sat there and didn’t eat a few grains of rice a day and hardly slept. And he got so sick after all that, you know, he couldn’t even meditate.
He was so weak. And he was sitting on the the banks of one of the rivers one day, and he saw this boat go by with a with a musician in it, he was tuning his instrument. And he was he said to Gautama, when you tune an instrument, you don’t tune it too tight or too loose. You’ve got to tune it just right, not too tight, not too loose. And he sort of had a realization and he saw that it’s the same the way you live that you don’t, you know, you shouldn’t be completely sort of preoccupied with pleasure and luxury and just enjoying yourself and self indulgence.
Nor should you, you know, be such a sort of ignore the bodily needs and take that really sort of austere path that you need to find a middle way. That’s what you often hear about Buddhism, the talk about the middle way. A middle way between complete indulgence and mortifying of the body and the mind and all that kind of stuff. So he thought, uh-huh, you know, maybe that’s where the answer is. So there was this young maiden on the river who gave him some milk pudding or some milk pudding because he was so starving.
You know, he gathered his strength back and he headed on again. And he ended up at Bodh Gaya. I don’t know if any of you have been to Bodh Gaya up in sort of eastern India. Anyway, he went up there, got up there, and he sat under the what’s we call the Bodhi tree or the Pipil tree or Pipil tree. It’s a or fig tree, I think.
So he sat under that. He thought, I will sit under this Bodhi tree, we call it, and I will meditate until I reach enlightenment, until I clear away all the obscurations, all the negativities from my mind. And that’s what he did. And so he meditated for quite a long time on that. And somewhere here, there’s a nice little he says, as he sat in this is really nice.
As he sat in his final meditation, the last Maras, m a r a s, or delusions. You know, talk about Maras and and a lot of in Buddhism, you know, sort of it’s like Jesus in the desert or something, you know, the all the sort of, you know, Mars came and tried to sort of tempt him tempt us. It’s sort of really Mars or the delusions. So it’s sort of delusions in your own mind is referring to here, really, even though they talk about it as sort of having some kind of being. As he sat in his final meditation, the last maras or delusions came to him.
Because what he’d done in in this long meditation is he’d finally, you know, he was finally in deep meditation getting through, getting close to seeing the nature of his own mind. He could see his previous lives, how he died, how he was born. Could see other people’s lives. You know, he went into such a deep, subtle consciousness state that he could see a lot of this stuff that we, of course, can’t see because we’re all covered in, you know, delusions and negativities. But one day we will.
So as he sat in his final meditation, the last maras or delusions came to him and tried to disrupt his meditation. They threw intense mental obstacles at him: anger, confusion, attachment and desire. So this was sort of his his consciousness trying to, you know, sort of not want to go there. He remained unshakable. Finally, they challenged him saying, what gives you the right to believe you can attain omniscience, so enlightenment?
Siddhartha, Gautama Siddhartha, touched the earth with the middle finger of his right hand and said, the earth is my witness of all the rebirths that I have had, of all the effort I have made to end my suffering, and of my wish to be of ultimate benefit to others.’ And that’s when he became enlightened. So when you see statues of Śākyamūni Buddha, that’s how you know Śākyamūni, you’ll see, well, if you can see behind the thing, his right hand is always down like that touching the earth. You probably can’t see behind it. Yeah? Or is that him there?
I’m going blind in my old age. Yes. So touching the earth, asking the earth to bear witness, you know, of all the life, all the things he’s suffered, all the stuff he’s tried to do and that he wants to reach enlightenment. You see a lot of other statues and stuff around here. We’ll go into them another night, but there are bodhisattvas and various things.
And you can tell the difference between Buddhas and bodhisattvas by their hand mudras normally. That’s the usual way and other stuff. So that’s if you see that and in some of the countries that have that follow Theravāda Buddhism as opposed to here in Tibetan Mahāyāna Buddhism different. All the statues in Burma and Laos, Cambodia have that Śākyamūni Buddha pose rather than a pose, you know, like this with a meditation pose. That’s more Amitābha Buddha or other Buddhas.
So that’s the Śākyamūni. So that’s what he’s doing. He’s getting the earth to bear witness. So he became enlightened then. And really, to become enlightened, what it means is, you know, to see into the to all your obscurations, all the negativities and afflictions in your mind are cleared.
And you can see reality clearly, you know, you can see the, know, the true nature of reality, I guess. And you have no sort of if you’re an enlightened being, you have no you don’t create more negative karma. You have no stains of negative karma. You’ve sort of gone beyond that, I suppose. Samsāra, we often say, you know, we’re in Samsāra.
We live in Samsāra. You’ve probably heard that phrase. And we want to be in nirvana, which is liberation, which is slightly different from enlightenment. Liberation is about you having gone beyond suffering for yourself. But whereas enlightenment in the Mahāyāna tradition is about you becoming liberated or enlightenment in order that you can then, you know, help to liberate others.
Slightly it’s like something for yourself as opposed to something for others. But saṃsāra basically means ignorance into the nature of reality. And nirvana means insight into the nature of reality, a knowledge of the nature of reality. They’re the two differences. So we don’t, you know, they’re not places, they’re sort of states of being, I guess.
You know, in one state of being where we are now, we’re in Samsāra, we take rebirth again and again due to all our negative karma and afflictions. And we don’t understand the true nature of reality so we create all this negative karma again and again. nirvana or enlightenment is where we do understand the nature of reality so we no longer create negative karma, so we no longer have to go through rebirth and suffering. So that was the Buddha. Now, once he became enlightened, he thought, you know, how am I going to ever teach this kind of stuff to everyone?
No one will believe me or no one will understand. He thought for a long time about how he could teach other people this. And anyway, he decided he would. So he thought, well, maybe those five people he originally, you know, was with early on, when they were doing all that, you know, austere sort of practice and stuff, they’d be good to teach first. He’d teach them first.
So he wandered off to Varanasi. Don’t know if anyone’s ever been to Varanasi in India. And near Varanasi, or the Ganges, there’s a little village called Sarnath. And he saw his five old friends there. And they weren’t too impressed with him at first because, you know, they were still doing all these austerities and he’d got along drinking the milk pudding that the girl gave him and, you know, he’d sort of left them and they were a bit Anyway, they saw him coming along at in a place called that’s now called the Deer Park, the Deer Park at Sarnath.
Lots of deers around. And that’s why is it? Where would it be? Somewhere, you often see with Buddhism a wheel, Dharma wheel with the deer, there’s deer on it, that’s sort of might be out in the other room. That represents the deer park.
But, anyway, when they saw him, they could see that he’d changed, that he had this, you know, this calm and this peace about him. And so they they followed him and he they were ended up being his first five disciples. And the teaching he gave, the first teaching he gave to those five disciples at the Deer Park at Sarnath was the Four Noble Truths, which is what we’re going to study. And then so he was about thirty five at this time, and he taught for another forty five years. So he taught till he was eighty.
Went around everywhere, had lots of disciples in the retreats, in the winter retreats, the rainy season, people would give him their homes and stuff to teach in and do retreat and that kind of thing. So he taught for a long time, you know, and then he ended up in a place called Kushinagarr in India when he was eighty and he got food poisoning and he died there. I guess the teachings would say this was his final teaching, a teaching on impermanence. He taught that even the Buddha, nothing lasts, nothing is permanent. So even the Buddha doesn’t last forever.
And he passed away there at Kushinagar. And his last teaching, his last words were, he said, all compounded phenomena are impermanent. It’s one of the four seals of the of Buddhist teaching. All phenomena all compounded phenomena, and we we are a compounded phenomena made up of bits. All phenomena are impermanent.
All phenomena in the nature of suffering. All phenomena have no self. And nirvana alone is peace. So they’re the four, what they call the four seals of Buddhism. So he taught that.
After that, there were a number of Buddhist councils, one not long after he died, where they got together, all his disciples, and they, you know, took, you know, sort of made sure they remembered what he’d talked about. And Ānanda, one of his disciples, who had this great memory, you know, he made sure everything was he must have one of those amazing memories and, you know, everything was sort of, I don’t know, did they write down in those write in those days? Probably not, but anyway, sort of verbally passed along. So and then and they had other councils in a couple of hundred there’s about four councils, I suppose, up to about the year one hundred AD. And when everything was sort of set down and remembered.
And we talk about three baskets of Buddhist teaching, the Tripitaka. I don’t know if some of you are old enough like me to remember that show on TV called Monkey. You know the monkey? Tripitaka was the young monk. Yeah.
Well, Tripitaka means the three baskets of teaching. Tri is three, and Pitaka is basket. So the Tripitaka. I love that, Tripitaka. The three baskets are the the sutras, which are the Buddha’s teachings, the Vinaya, which is the vows of the monks and nuns, and the Abhidharma, which is the highest sort of philosophical commentaries and whatever on the teachings.
So they’re the sort of three baskets of teachings. And the Abhidharma, the Vinaya, the monks’ vows, they worked them all out, all his followers after he died pretty quickly. And then they, you know, then Ānanda remembered all the sutras, and they they were all passed down. And then the Abhidharma in about one hundred AD was sort of set in stone with Ashoka, that great Indian king Ashoka. He wrote a whole lot of stuff on big pillars everywhere around India.
So really, the teachings we have now all come down from that time, you know, from the time. So any teachings you hear are from the sutras, are from the Buddha’s words that have been, you know, passed down, down, passed down. And we talk about lineages. Our Geshe here, when he teaches, he teaches the lineage, the Tibetan Buddha, some lineage that goes back and back to the Buddha originally. So, you know, it’s not like it’s all sort of new kind of stuff.
So that’s the Buddha’s life. And I guess the issue where are going? Oh, that’s right. The issue is that for him the same as us, you know, there were the big questions in life. You know, who are we?
The big questions. Who are we? Where did we come from? What happens to us when we die? Why do we suffer?
You know? How can we be happy? How can we make our life meaningful? All those kinds of things. And for him, from that story about his life, you can see that he also had the same big questions in his mind.
And our lives aren’t unlike his. I mean, we’re not princes, but but we live certainly in Adelaide. We live in relative luxury. You know, we’re comfortably off even if individually we might have, you know, heaps of money, we can get pretty well what we want. We can obtain what we want.
We’re not in dire straits. So in terms of the Buddha as a prince and in his previous lives, you know, we we are comparable with that. We are quite comfortably off. We don’t we’re not we don’t have terrible suffering in our face. I mean, we see it on the TV and stuff like that.
Know, Aleppo and all that kind of stuff. But we’re not experiencing terrible suffering like that directly. We’re not, you know, on a daily basis and some of us never confronted by death. Even old age we push everyone away. So it’s the same type of thing that Śākyamūni Buddha, you know, he saw a dead person, he saw sick people.
We don’t see a lot of sick people even, you know, I mean we see the odd one, but it’s not in our face. So to some extent, you know, live a similar kind of life that he lived. And yet, you know, we often still have this underlying sense of unease or dissatisfaction in our life or, you know, not sure sort of why we’re not really, really happy. And so, you know, I guess while we can look at his life and see that, yes, ours sort of has some similarities, we often don’t we’re not, I suppose so from that point of view, I guess, we could see that, yes, we too could become like the Buddha, you know, if we wanted to, if we wanted to put the time and effort in. We could also clear the obstructions from our mind.
We could also, you know, get rid of all our negativities and our delusions and whatever. And we could become healthy, we could have healthy minds. But it takes time and effort and that’s often what we don’t want to do. You know, we don’t want to put in the time and the effort and the discipline to doing it. We put in time and effort to other stuff.
You know, we put in time and effort learning how to drive a car or, you know, learning a musical instrument, learning, you know, getting a job, learning how to do our job, all that kind of stuff. Learning how to work out iPhones. We put time and effort into all those things, but but we don’t put time and effort into trying to learn about our own mind. And what Buddhism does is tries to help us to do that. You know, because often there’s so many distractions in life, so many sort of things that we can spend our time on and so many toys that we have.
But in the end, we die. And so we can’t take any of that stuff with us. All we take with us from a Buddhist point of view is our karma, our positive and negative karma, which decides where we end up in our next rebirth. Are we going to end up in Aleppo or something like that? Are we going to end up on a rubbish tip in Manila or something?
Whatever. Are we going to end up in a pure land or something with the Buddhist? It all depends on from a Buddhist point of view on how we we live our life and what kind of karma we accumulate. So that’s the Buddha’s life. And it’s interesting an interesting life.
He had, of course, lots of other lives before that. And he was all very different things. The Jātaka Tales, there’s a book called The Jātaka Tales, talks about all his very different lives he had as a human, as an animal and all that kind of thing. But but he, you know, his life can be an inspiration for us that he’s not some sort of god or some sort of fully formed Buddha. He was an ordinary person.
He was just an ordinary person, but he, you know, he reached enlightenment. And there are others around that are ordinary people, and they too can do it. It’s a matter of time, I suppose, and effort. Any questions on the Buddha’s life or any questions on yeah. Any of that?
Sorry. So did he recall all his prior lives and tell his disciples? Is that Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Yeah. I mean, even now, some of the monks and all the different, you know, highly realized meditators can go into that really deep, deep meditation and access different levels of mind and consciousness, which we can’t. Well, you might be able to. I certainly can’t. Even now, these days, people can do that.
But he, in those sort of watches of the night when he was in that last stage, went into really, really deep down to subtle because we’ll talk about it probably I think we’ll probably get onto it one week, you know, about is is you know, there’s a gross consciousness that we have, and then there’s subtle consciousness and even more subtle. And your very subtle consciousness is is the mind stream that that goes from life to life. So when Buddhists talk about we talk about more about rebirth and reincarnation. Hindu, you know, idea of reincarnation that this soul, this is permanent soul that moves Buddhism there’s nothing permanent in Buddhism. But what goes from life to life is the very subtle stream of consciousness, mind stream, which is changing all the time, but is made up of all the karma that you’ve created, all the potentialities, all the sort of habits isn’t a very good word, but, you know, all the sort of the potentialities and all the sort of seeds, I suppose, of of behavior that goes from life to life.
So when he was in those deep states of meditation, he could access those very subtle levels of consciousness. So that’s how he could see previous lives. There’s been quite a bit of work. The Dalai Lama talks about some young you know, they’ve got some stories of some young children in India particularly. One young girl, I can’t remember it that well, but, you know, when they’re young they remembered.
There was a young girl, she remembered a previous life when she’d got killed or something in some other village and she remembered her parents and all that stuff. They went back and they did find that, you know, these people and that they’d had a little girl who died in this way that she talked about. You know, you often you get and there’s no way that they could have, you know, known about this. She could have known about this. So often with children, you know, they can remember stuff that as we sort of get older and get all sort of rigid, you know, we forget.
But often young children can remember stuff from previous lives more easily than other people. So, yes, he could remember that, and he, you know, used to tell his disciples about when he was this, when he was that, whatever. Yeah. And what are the sutras? The sutras are all the teachings, basically, of the Buddha.
All the teachings he gave. The eighty four thousand, I think they talk about eighty four thousand sutras, all the different teachings. Accurate are the translations from the Sanskrit to, like, English? Well, because some well, I would think they’d be pretty pretty But, you know, I mean, they’ve been translated from Indian into Chinese, into Tibetan. You know, there were all those sort of translations because, of course, Buddhism was in India first.
And then, of course, it sort of died off in India, really. And Hinduism became dominant. Then, you know, Islam became, you know, at one stage became dominant, Hindus are dominant, you know, whatever. But so but a lot of the great Indian masters went to Tibet, of course, which is what we follow here, Tibetan Buddhism, to China, Japan, you know, all those all those sort of areas, Sri Lanka, you know, Laos, Cambodia, whatever. So I guess there was all translations on all those levels and then translations into English.
But I mean, they’re pretty right, you know, pretty sort of you might get a little bit sort of lost in translation, but basically they’re they’re they’re and we have people here sometimes Jampa Chösang I’ve forgotten his English name now. Is that terrible? I’m getting old. Anyway, he used to be a monk Australian, used to be a monk and but he does a lot of translation and he sometimes comes here and teaches us. He’s a great guy.
I think he’s based in Melbourne now. But there’s some really good scholars that translate from the original writings of whatever Chinese, Indian, Tibetan, whatever into English. They take a lot of time and they talk with the monks to make sure they get the right meaning. So the monks, of course, or in our point of view, the Tibetan monks can read the Tibetan and, you know, go and write back the old scrolls and the old books and all that kind of stuff. And so when they’re being translated into English, certainly with the Tibetan teachings, the English interpreters or translators check to make sure they’re not getting the meaning wrong and that kind of thing.
But even the Dalai Lama, last year when he was in Brisbane, he was reading because he’ll often his English is not too bad, but often when he’s giving a teaching he’ll have the translator there. He’ll talk in Tibetan and then translate. Was, I can’t remember it now, one of the prayers Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland. There was a word, I can’t remember it, but there was a word in English he was reading and he reads it and he said, I have no idea what that means. I don’t know what that means.
You know, there was no sort of direct, you know, it had been translated into that English word but in Tibetan that word sort of didn’t make sense. So, yeah. And in Tibetan they say, you know, early on the Dalai Lama he couldn’t understand, you know, sort of what we meant years ago by depression and stuff like that because the Tibetans didn’t suffer that kind of thing. You know, they didn’t have a word for depression or whatever. You know, it wasn’t something they had a word for because they didn’t really do it.
Didn’t they get sad? Well, they might have got sad with some things, but it wasn’t like we mean depression. You know, they might just get a bit sad, like sometimes you have a bad day or you’re sort of a bit sad or a bit morose, but you know, you get over it, I suppose. Yeah, just some of those things are different. Can I ask you about karma?
Mhmm. So I’ve been coming to Buddha House for a while now, and one of the things that attracted me about Buddhism was the Buddhism way of helping sentient beings. Mhmm. And some of the basic Buddhist I don’t know what they call that points of how to live. I’m just interested in the karma because I don’t know a lot about Buddhism.
But what I’ve heard is a lot of talk about karma and a lot of things and prayers that can be said to assist with bad karma. Right. Is the point of Buddhism to get rid of karma so that you’re you are rebirthed into a better life? Or is the point of Buddhism to help all sentient beings? Well, there’s two forms of Buddhism.
There’s Theravadan in countries like Burma, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, whatever they follow or used to be called Hīnayāna, which was yana means vehicle, and Hīnayāna was the small vehicle originally. And Mahāyāna which we follow Tibet, China, Japan, the great vehicle. That sort of that word Hīnayāna has gone out of favor a bit because it seems a bit pejorative really. So they’re called Theravadans. Theravadans believe in liberation.
I think I mentioned that you personally can be liberated. But they believe only Buddha Śākyamūni became enlightened, that the rest of us have no hope of becoming enlightened. The most we can get is liberation, freedom from suffering, sort of blissed out for eons and stuff like that. But the Mahāyāna believes that what it’s all about is becoming enlightened and that we can all become enlightened, which means to go beyond suffering no more suffering, no more creation of karma. But in order that we can then help other people become enlightened.
So it’s not for your own sake. It’s about intention, isn’t it? Yes. It’s about intention and motivation. But to get to that point, you can’t like, you know, just, you know, we can’t all become enlightened next week kind of thing.
So you have to it’s like with the Śākyamūni Buddha, that was his last life, so to speak, when he became enlightened. But he’d had numberless lives before that, you know, starting off as probably maybe a not very nice person once upon a time, you know. So to get to be enlightened so that you can help all everyone else become enlightened humans and animals and stuff like that you need to get you need to have this huge door of merit and you need to understand the nature of reality. What you have to do first up is keep having good rebirths so that you can move further along the path, if you want to put it that way. Now to get good rebirths you have to have good karma.
karma is really they talk about three levels of manifestation in Buddhism. There’s manifest stuff that you can see. There’s sort of slightly hidden things like impermanence. We can sort of excuse me. Impermanence is slightly hidden if we we’re not really aware of it unless we think about it, but, you know, you see the trees, the leaves falling, stuff like that.
And karma, which is a very hidden kind of thing. And while you can get a general idea of karma, no one can, other than an enlightened being, a Buddha, really understand all the ramifications of karma. Because what we karma means action. That’s what the word means. And it’s and it’s originally it’s initially mental action, thought, and then physical and verbal.
You know, it’s all karma, but you can’t have the physical and verbal without the mental. So every thought you have creates karma. It creates a karmic imprint in your mind. Every thought, thought, every moment of every twenty four hours you’re creating karma. Good or bad, depends what you do.
You know, like I was watching Donald Trump tonight and I was probably creating like heaps of negative karma because I’m thinking, oh god, you know, I was not being a very good Buddhist. But every moment you’re creating by your thought. That’s why we talk about the mind being so important because the because speech and actions come from thought. So karma is is means action. Mental action followed by verbal and physical.
You don’t get those two without the mental. So the idea is to try to, in our pathetic little way, minimise the negative karma and maximise the positive karma. Minimise the negative actions and maximise the positive. So, and we’ll talk probably one week about the ten non virtuous actions, you know, not killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, the three of body, speaking falsely like lying, harshly, which we all do, disruptively it’s not the word I want but splitting people up or unnecessarily which are the four of speech divisively or unnecessarily. That one is really interesting that unnecessarily because it’s like gossip and stuff like that.
And we all think that’s quite harmless, you know, gossip. But it’s not, because often gossip gets into saying nasty things about people. Plus, a Buddhist point of view, you’re just wasting your time. You should be doing something more sort of meaningful than waffling around. So even that creates negative karma.
And then the three of mind is covetousness, you know, ill will, and wrong views, like not believing in karma or rebirth and stuff like that. But is is that where meditation comes in? Because the meditation changes the way you think. Yes. Yeah.
Meditation, over time, will start to work on your mind, will start to change. And, I mean, even now, you know, with science, the plasticity of the mind, it’s all the big thing these days, the plasticity of the mind. And we know we can rewire our mind. And, you know, they know from, you know, the Dalai Lama is really involved with a lot of the scientists. He has his mind science conferences every few years.
You know, they do a lot of work, the scientists now, on meditators that are really good meditators, not like us, not like me. And they can see, you know, all the alpha waves and all that kind of stuff differs when you’re in deep meditation. So you can rewire your mind. And I think, you know, if you I know with myself, used to have, you know, you can look back over your time and see how your how your thoughts change, how your actions change. There’s a little prayer aspirational in Buddhism we talk about aspirational prayers.
It’s sort of not not prayers to God kind of thing because we don’t believe in a God, but they’re aspirations. Again, it’s all about mind training. And it says, all if I can remember. All thoughts lead to emotions. So it’s really quite a profound little prayer.
All thoughts lead to emotions. Emotions lead to moods and behaviour. And moods and behaviour lead to habits and character traits. Penetrate the screen of thoughts and glimpse the fundamental state of awareness. What it’s saying is everything starts all the things you do and say start from your thoughts.
All thoughts lead to it. You know, every thought you have leads to an emotion, a positive or negative emotion. All emotions lead to what did I say? All thoughts lead to emotions, emotions, to moods and behaviours. So your emotions then lead to your kind of mood you have and the behaviors you have.
And moods and behaviors behaviors lead to habits. All thoughts lead to emotions, emotions to moods and behaviors, moods and behaviors to habits and character traits. So everything starts from your thought. You know, the type of person you are, you know, what you do, what you think, how you react with people, all comes from those initial thoughts. So every thought we have, every word we say, you know, I mean we can be thinking nasty horrible things about someone and speaking to them really nicely.
But you know, we’re creating heaps negative karma doing that because one, we’re having horrible thoughts and two, we’re being sort of, you know, not being real. We’re creating negative well, we’re creating positive and negative karma all the time, all the time, every minute. And so when you die, the Buddhists believe that the the state of your mind at at the point when your gross consciousness ceases, not and we probably I don’t think we’d get into this. I don’t know. We might.
But when not your subtle consciousness, but when your gross consciousness ceases, that state of mind determines your next rebirth, is your throwing karma. So even if you’ve created a whole bunch of negative karma, if your state of mind at death is calm and positive, not angry at the fact that you’re dying, not clinging on to all your relatives and loved ones that are there, it’s really hard to do, then you have a good rebirth. You still have all your negative karma. It doesn’t go away, but it won’t necessarily ripen in the next it won’t end up giving you a bad rebirth. It might still ripen, completing karma in the next rebirth or hopefully you get a good good rebirth that allows you to create more merit and purify more of that negative karma.
It’s all sort of it’s very complicated karma. The other thing from a Buddhist point of view is that your motivation and your dedication are really important. I’ve talked about this a bit in the meditation class. You bookend everything you do, really. So whatever you do, you should do it with a motivation to achieve something.
And from a Buddhist point of view, it should be at the very least with the motivation to have a good rebirth. But more importantly it should be with the motivation to reach enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. Everything you do, having a shower, you know, everything And then after you’ve done it, you should dedicate it. You dedicate what you did so that you will achieve enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. And it sort of sounds weird, and it was hard when I first started doing it.
But in the end, like anything, repetitious, you just get it’s easier to do the more you do it. And you can you can and that creates spirit. And that doesn’t you know, if you if you do something with a motivation to achieve something, then it will help towards achieving that thing. So you can have someone who’s a really lovely person who’s very generous, you know, presents and gives charity and all that kind of stuff. A really, really lovely person.
They’re creating positive karma, but it’s what Buddhists call it’s what we call contaminated positive karma because they’re not doing it understanding the emptiness of it, which is getting a bit complicated maybe. But they’re doing good stuff and it’ll probably help towards them having, you know, a good rebirth. But it won’t enable them to come enlightened because they’re not doing it with that motivation. It’ll just they’re just doing good stuff and so it’s good karma, but they can do some really good stuff, you know, and then the next moment like they could, I don’t know, walk along the street and give some money to the big issue guy or something like that, generosity. Five minutes later someone rings them and they say something and they just go off their nut, you know, they get really angry and so they just destroy that positive karma that they’ve just done because they haven’t locked it in kind of thing.
It’s the intention, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s the intention. Motivation is really important in Buddhism. So we do create karma all the time.
And karma is created from our delusions or afflictive emotions. The afflictive emotions are probably and we’ll do that one maybe next week. Causes of suffering. Haven’t even got around to suffering yet. Oh, god.
Anyway, the afflictive emotions are probably even more important than the karma because the afflictive emotions create the karma. So if you can get a hold of your emotions, get some control over your emotions, you’re less likely to create negative karma. So from a Buddhist point of view, it’s really important to create merit by doing things with right motivation, virtuous actions, and it’s really important to purify your negativities. And there’s, you know, purification practices that you can do. It’s all about, again, the mind.
You know? You create the negativities in your mind, and you can purify the negativities from your mind. There’s no God up there that’s gonna do it. There’s no God sort of sitting up there saying, I I give you absolution, you know, and you’re forgiven, you know, like a Christian confession. There’s none of that.
It’s about you and your mind. So with a Buddhist purification practice, a Vajrasattva purification, you take a refuge in the Three Jewels, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. You regret the negative things you’ve done that day or that week or whatever and you resolve that you won’t do them again or you won’t do them for, you know, ten minutes or if it’s really hard, you know, if really fly off the handle a lot of something, you might resolve it’s better to resolve that you won’t do it for a short time than to say I’ll never get angry again when you know that won’t work, you know, until we’re Buddhists. So you might, resolve that you won’t get angry with your spouse for the next twenty four hours or for the next five minutes or something like that. And then you do some sort of what they call a remedy which is some prayers or some stuff like that.
So again, you’re sort of you know, it’s all to do with your mind. Because you create negativities in your mind, you can remove negativities from your mind by doing sort of serious purification practices. So it’s all to do with your mind. But, yeah, karma is the thing. karma is the only thing you carry with you when you die.
Selfish in that what I’m saying is you’re sort of doing good or you’re trying to do good things but because you want to achieve your own enlightenment. Is that how I’m understanding? Yeah. Well, you’re trying to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. That’s the sort of phrase we use.
So, you know, in Buddhism, we say, you know, with the motivation to whatever sorry, with the motivation to reach and to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, I will do I, you know, I will I mean, one of the easy things because it’s easy to do there’s a lot of stuff you do in the day, you know, you have a shower, you know, you eat, you go for a walk, all that kind of stuff. And one of the easy things to do is to say with the motivation to reach enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, I need to live a long and a healthy life in order to practice the Dharma. So I will have this meal now or I will I do it with clean the house. I will clean the house. You know, if you live in a dirty house, you won’t get sick and then you won’t live a long and healthy life.
So that’s a good one to do that covers a heap of stuff and you’re building lots and lots of merit. With the motivation to reach enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, that’s sort of like the standard. I need to live a long and a healthy life because you can’t in order to practice the Dharma. Because if, you know, if you have a short unhealthy life, it’s really, really hard to practice the Dharma. You know yourself, if you’re not well, you know, I get migraines sometimes.
Can’t even think about doing a prayer. You know, you just can’t do it if you’re not well. So in order to practice the Dharma, you need to live a long life because we’ve all got a long way to go and a healthy life. People that aren’t healthy can practice the Dharma, but it’s harder. You know, it’s harder.
So in order to reach enlightenment, need to live a long and healthy life in order to practice the Dharma so that I can reach a lot but therefore, you know, I’ll go for a walk, I’ll clean the house, I’ll buy good food to eat, you know, I’ll have a shower. There’s heaps of stuff that you can think of that is a good motivation. You’ve just got to work out how it fits in, you know, how it fits in. I mean, there’s other stuff like, you know, with the motivation to reach enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. I’ll practice generosity and give this money to the big issue man or something like that.
You know, there’s generosity kind of stuff you can do. I will not get angry with Fred, you know, for the next I’ll practice patience. That’s about practicing patience. So there’s lots of things like that. But there’s also heaps of just this ordinary daily kind of living stuff that you can do if you can if you can build it into something that keeps you healthy to live a long and healthy life.
And we’ll talk about I better have a break. We’ll talk about probably tonight or tomorrow, next week, probably next week, about the tension between renunciation of this life and living having a precious human rebirth, you know, which seem contradictory that, you know, we should be renouncing this life, which is really renouncing attachment to this life, not topping yourself and the precious human rebirth. On the one hand, it sounds like it’s not a good thing to have we want to get out of Samsāra, we want to get out of being reborn again and again. But on the other hand we’ve got this thing called precious human rebirth. So what’s going on here?
And one of the things that you try and achieve in Buddhism is that balancing that tension balancing that tension between realising that, you know, you don’t want to keep on having rebirths even as a human and on the other hand we’ve been given this life and we need to use it to reach enlightenment. It’s a really interesting tricky kind of thing to do to keep those two things in your mind. Might have do we want a break? Ten minute break? Have a coffee or you can bring a cup back on.
Well, you can for me. I’m not a Geshe, so I don’t know. I’ll let you bring it in. Oh, yeah. Oh, thank you.