Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 88-minute introduction to Buddhism, Denny Morphett walks through the first two of the Four Noble Truths, the foundation of all Buddhist teachings. He starts with the truth of suffering, unpacking why the Buddha taught about dissatisfaction before offering escape—without recognizing your own suffering, there is no incentive to seek freedom. Morphett then breaks down three levels of suffering: manifest suffering (illness, pain, depression), the suffering of change (the impermanence of pleasure, the restlessness of chasing fleeting happiness), and the all-pervasive suffering of being bound to contaminated mind and body. He extends this into six and eight classical categories (uncertainty, dissatisfaction, death, separation from the pleasant, unfulfilled desire) and touches on rebirth through six realms. The second half moves into the causes of suffering: ignorance of reality’s true nature, which leads to self-grasping, self-cherishing, and afflictive emotions—a chain that generates karma and endless rebirth. He introduces emptiness as the antidote, though stresses it is the hardest Buddhist concept to grasp, and fields questions from the audience on topics ranging from having children in a tradition that sees rebirth as suffering to the difference between liberation and enlightenment. Suited for newcomers to Buddhism or anyone reconsidering how suffering shapes ordinary life.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 2016 10 17 Introduction to Buddhism.mp3
UUID: 3f36a9d1-9f7d-49d1-ae3a-90d731a6ee0e
Teacher: Denny Morphett
Collection: Into to Buddhism (Denny Morphett)
Date: 2016-10-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 88.8 minutes
Words: ~12,441
We didn’t get very far last week. But what we’ll start doing is talking about the Four Noble Truths, the truth of suffering, and hopefully get into the truth of the causes of suffering. So I remember last week we talked about the fact that when the Buddha became enlightened at Bodh Gaya, he decided he’d teach his previous five, the guys that were with him when they started out out on the quest. So he went looking for them and he came upon, you know, found them at Deer Park, at the Deer Park at Sarnath just outside of Varanasi. So what he taught the first teaching was the four noble truths.
Sorry. This is so hot. I’ll take it off. Really, the four noble truths, we talk about it in terms of the Buddha turning the wheel. He turned the wheel of Dharma at the start of the teachings.
Dharma can mean a lot of things but one of the things it means is teachings. So he turned the wheel and you’ll see that, you know, sometimes you see the Dharma wheel, the wheel with all the spokes out of it, you know, in it. Really the Four Noble Truths are his first teaching and they’re the basis for all the other teachings of Buddhism. So if you continue to be involved with Buddhism and come to teachings or whatever, all the teachings, all the thousands and thousands of teachings that the Buddha gave in the forty five years that he taught, All the commentaries on the teachings and all that kind of stuff really are sort of variations on a theme of the Four Noble Truths, you know, they’re looking at those from different ways, going into them in a deeper level and whatever. So they’re really, really important.
And the first truth is the truth of suffering. And sometimes people think that Buddhism’s fairly, you know, all about suffering and it’s a bit depressing and why, you know, why did the Buddha teach suffering as the first noble truth? Why didn’t he sort of teach about getting out of suffering and how to get out of it first up? And I guess the issue is that unless we realise that we’re suffering and the word in Sanskrit is dukkha D U K K H A. A funny word suffering is a sort of a funny word from an English point of view.
People interpret it as dissatisfaction or an unease in your life, you know, just the dissatisfaction of living that kind of thing but suffering is suffering is the word that’s used in the teaching. And I guess what the Buddha was saying was unless we realise that we are suffering there’ll be no incentive for us to try and get out of it, to try and free ourselves from suffering. We think and most people do they think oh, you know, I have a bad day here and there and now and again things don’t go right in my life but generally life’s pretty good you know life’s okay I don’t think I’m suffering all the time so the Buddha taught that unless we realise what suffering means the sort of subtle levels of suffering unless we realise we are really suffering we won’t want to or why should we bother to look for a way to find to get out of it you know why should you bother if you think everything’s pretty hunky dory? Why bother? So that’s why he taught as the first noble truth the truth of suffering.
And then the second noble truth he taught was the truth of the causes of it. So if you come to understand that we are suffering then we look for the reasons why we’re suffering. We look for the causes of it. And once we realise those, then the Buddha taught that there can be an end to suffering. There is an end to suffering if we want to look for it.
So then he taught that there can be an end to the suffering and to the causes that cause you to suffer and then he taught the way, the path, the fourth Noble Truth, the path of the cessation of suffering The cessation of suffering. So you’ve got suffering, the causes of suffering, the cessation of suffering and then the path that leads to the cessation of suffering. And sometimes the teachings talk about it in terms of a medical analogy. So, you know, if you’re not feeling well, if you’re feeling a bit off, you’re not feeling very well, you go to the doctor and he diagnoses that you’ve got a sickness, an illness. So in this analogy, the Buddha is the doctor and the Buddha will tell you that you have an illness, suffering.
He’ll diagnose that’s why you’re not feeling great. And then in the medical analogy the doctor will say this is what’s caused your illness, you know, you’re sick because of such and such. In the teachings the Buddha will tell you the causes of your suffering. In the medical analogy the doctor will then say I can cure you of it, you know, presuming he can for this analogy we’re saying the doctor can cure you of your suffering. The Buddha teaches that there’s a cessation of suffering and then the doctor will prescribe medication or surgery or whatever as the way to cease your to get rid of your illness and in the Buddha’s teachings the Buddha shows you the path to the cessation of suffering so there’s a little medical analogy that’s sometimes taught in the Buddha’s teaching it’s sometimes useful to remember that So what are these sufferings?
Now there’s various ways I think I mentioned last week the Buddhist Tibetans certainly love numbers, you know, three of this and four of that whatever And there’s different ways you can look at the sufferings. There’s the three sufferings, the six sufferings and the eight sufferings. Now the three sufferings which are the main ones that are taught are the first one is manifest suffering and this is what we all know it’s suffering the suffering of suffering it’s called in the teachings manifest suffering when we get sick when we have a headache when we break our leg you know, when we, I don’t know, feel really, really hot or cold or something like that, when we’re really depressed mentally that’s manifest suffering. We all understand that, you know, we all have that and that’s the first type of suffering, the suffering of suffering. So it’s, you know, we all know what that is, we all suffer from it now and again.
And then the second type of suffering is more subtle and it’s what’s called the suffering of change. Sometimes it’s useful to think of it as the impermanence of pleasure. So in the Buddhist teachings we talk about happiness, you know, long term happiness and in English language we sometimes talk about happiness but what we mean from a Buddhist point of view is pleasure short term pleasure not long lasting happiness so we say oh I had a happy day you know it was really good today I was really happy I did this and that and the other Buddhists would call that pleasure, you know, short term pleasure and we all have times of pleasure. You know, life isn’t complete and utter, unremitting suffering. We all have times of pleasure but it doesn’t last.
It’s impermanent. So the second suffering, the suffering of change, sometimes you can think of that as the impermanence of pleasure. It doesn’t last and we suffer because it doesn’t last. We have a really good day, we want it to keep going. You know, we go on a holiday, we don’t want it to end.
We don’t want to go back to work, you know. We want it to keep going. We want that pleasure to stay and of course it doesn’t. So what we we one of the ways that we’re taught about this suffering of change is as an example, you’re out in boiling hot heat if we ever get heat in Adelaide this year. But you’re out walking in the summer, a hot summer’s day, it’s boiling, you know, and you’ve got to go somewhere to do something.
And you’re so hot and all you want to do is cool down. So you go into a shopping centre or something when it’s really cool. They’ve got the air conditioning going full blast and you think, oh, that’s so nice. Oh, I’m happy now. You’re not happy now.
You sit down and you get really cool. The heat goes. You’re not thudding any longer. But after a while you get cold, you know, it starts to get too cold and you so you’re looking for the heat again, know, looking for the heat. Same if you if you’re on your feet all day for instance, you know, you’ve got a job or somewhere where you’re just walking or you’re on your feet all day and you get really tired and you think, If only I could just get home, lie down, get off my feet, that will I’ll be good.
That’d be good. Everything will be fine. So you get home and you lie down. Now after a while, you don’t want to lie down there forever. You want to get up and do something.
If that lying down was long lasting happiness, was to give you continual happiness, then you would lie there forever and you’d still be happy but you don’t. It’s the happiness that we think of like that is suffering below the threshold is the way they talk about it. So, for instance, what we identify as happiness is actually relief from a previous suffering. We it’s the sort of yeah, it’s relief from a previous suffering. So how can I explain it?
It’s a bit tricky. It’s a change a change in the type of suffering, put it that way. So we see it as happiness but it’s a change in the type of suffering. So that example I gave us going from the hot to the cold. We see the cool as happiness but it’s not.
It’s just a change in the type of suffering because eventually it becomes a suffering. You get too cold. So what we do in life is spend our time, we sort of occupy ourselves all the time from going from one, from trying to sort of, I guess, escape almost one type of suffering of a situation by creating another situation. So we’re always in a situation where we think we’re happy for a while you know for instance we might be on our own enjoying some solitude after a while we’re so bored on our own we just want to see more other people you know, want to be in company. We’re in company for a while and then we’re sick of that and we want to be on our own.
We just go through our life from one situation to another trying to escape one form of suffering by replacing it with another activity which we think will make us happy and of course it doesn’t because everything is impermanent. But it’s called the suffering of change. It’s a more subtle suffering than the manifest suffering. And but if you think about it in terms of the impermanence of pleasure that helps you to more easily understand it but it’s about just the nature of our life which is continual change continual change Nothing lasts and we want stuff to last or we think we want stuff to last but after a while we want to get rid of it, we’re bored with it, we want to change it. And the third type of suffering, the most subtle suffering is what’s called in the teachings the all pervasive compounding suffering of cyclic existence.
And what that means is just the fact that we are alive basically. Our aggregates, we’re made up of aggregates, right? The teachings talk about the five aggregates. The body, one aggregate, and four mental aggregates. Different mental factors, you know, a discrimination, different mental factors, our consciousnesses.
So we’re made up of these aggregates and these aggregates are what are called contaminated because they come about due to karma and afflictive emotions. And because they’re contaminated they can only bring us suffering. They’re not pure. So just the fact that we keep being reborn again and again in these contaminated aggregates is a base for suffering. Because if you didn’t have a body and a mind, wouldn’t have manifest suffering, suffering of change, discontent, that kind of thing.
So the third suffering is that very subtle, all pervasive compounding suffering of being born in the body, mind, matrix kind of if you want to put it that way, body mind combination and having to be born again and again in that body mind combination. So that’s the way the teachings talk about the three sufferings. Manifest, suffering of change, more subtle and very, very subtle which is the fact that we actually inhabit this body mind thing, you know, and all the problems that that brings. Now there’s other ways that the teachings look at the sufferings or talk about the sufferings. There’s the six sufferings and they are uncertainty.
So life is uncertain, you know. We never know from day to day what’s going to happen to us. One day we’re, you know, we’re rich, the next day, I don’t know, our house burns down and we’re homeless, all the fires and floods that we see around us. One day we’ve got a job, the next day we haven’t got a job. One day I’ve got a girlfriend or boyfriend, the next day we haven’t.
There’s just uncertainty, the nature of life is uncertainty. That’s one of the six sufferings. The second of the six sufferings is dissatisfaction. We’re never content. We always want more or different.
We get bored easily. We’re never content with what we’ve got. Always buying more stuff, doing more things, changing, changing, suffering of change. The next of the six sufferings is that we die again and again from Buddhist teachings, rebirth. We take one life after another.
We die again and again and that is a suffering. The fourth one is we’re born again and again so we don’t get out of it. A lot of the monks, you know, when they see a little newborn baby they cry because they think that poor being is back again and I’ve to go through it again. It’s not necessarily a happy experience like it is in the West. So, you know, there’s uncertainty, dissatisfaction, being dying again and again, being born again and again, moving from a low high status to a low status.
And you can see that all around you with when you see politicians that, you know, have a big crash or, I know, movie stars, pop stars or whatever, CEOs of corporations. On the news today, you know, tonight, Bob Day’s business has gone bust, you know, going from a high status to a low status. I hope it happens all the time. And not just for sort of famous y kind of people but ordinary people, you know. You have a job and then you lose your job.
You know, you get made redundant, that kind of thing. So that’s another suffering. And the sixth one and the sixth is not having companions is the way it’s talked about but what it really means is that at the big times of our life, when we’re born, when we’re sick, when we die, we’re alone. We haven’t got anyone no one can feel what we’re feeling at those times. So although there might be people around you, there’s no one that can go through that experience with you no one can go through the experience of being born not that we necessarily remember it or dying or when we’re really sick no one you know people can sympathise but they can’t feel what we’re feeling When we’re depressed, they can’t feel what we’re feeling.
So there’s that aloneness I suppose, aloneness rather than probably loneliness. So that’s the six types of suffering. And then there’s the eight types of suffering. There’s a bit of variations on themes here. And the eight types of sufferings are birth, which when you think about it, is not a very pleasant experience.
Know, babies come out crying and squealing and not being very happy. You know, they’re in this nice warm sort of gentle kind of place and they come out and it’s all bright lights and noise and they’re being rubbed down with, you know, cloths and that kind of thing. It’s not a very nice experience, birth. It’s also from the Buddhist point of view the base for all the stuff bad stuff that happens. So birth is the sort of basis for all the other sicknesses and dying and stuff that come after it.
The minute you’re born or the minute you’re conceived actually you’re moving inexorably towards your death. You know, every moment is getting closer to the time when you die. So birth is the beginning, you know, what is born will die. Birth is the beginning of your journey towards being towards dying. So and birth means that you’re taking this these aggregates again, this body mind complex again.
So it’s a basis for all the delusions and all the sort of bad karma that happened. So there’s birth, there’s old age. We know, you know, old age ain’t, you know, necessarily too flash. Your your body gets weak. Your senses, you know, you lose your strength.
You know, your senses start to break down. You can’t hear. You know, you don’t taste much. You know, you can’t see very well. There’s some teachings I remember reading once and talked about with old age when you try and get up from a chair, I suffer from this now, but I’m, you know, you know, it’s like pulling up a tree by, you know, for the roots, you drill like that and when you sit down of old age you just go down like a sack of potatoes, just plonk down and you can see it if there’s old people in your family that you know or whatever.
They’ve just got no strength, Their, you know, their body is just giving up. And mentally they’re not very happy. There’s not that many people that are happy when they start to feel the effects of old age, whenever that might be. So you have birth, old age, you have sickness. We all know that sickness is a suffering.
Whenever you’re sick, you just, you know, you suffer. You suffer physically and you suffer mentally because you can’t enjoy, you know, whatever you were doing before you got sick. So sickness is a suffering. Excuse me. And death.
Death is a suffering, you know, that dying process is not not pleasant. So death is a suffering. As you’re getting near to death, as you’re dying, you know, you’ve got physical problems and you’ve got mental, emotional problems as well. So birth, old age, sickness and death are four of the eight sufferings. And the other ones are meeting with the unpleasant.
Now that can be, you know, you come into contact with some crazy person, some dangerous person that’s, you know, might be going to attack you or something like that. You know, you’ve got someone that abuses you, a family member or someone at work who abuses you in an abusive situation in meeting with the unpleasant. Even like, you know, if you’re on a plane on a long journey and you get stuck next to some really boring person that just talks to you all the time, That’s a meeting with the unpleasant, you know, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s meeting with the unpleasant. It happens all the time we get in situations. So there’s meeting with the unpleasant.
There’s being separated from the pleasant. So separated from family, from your loved ones, from your country. You think of all the refugees around the place that are separated from their country, their homelands. You’re separated from something or someone that you love or that’s pleasant to you that makes you happy. That separation from the pleasant.
You know, that’s fairly obvious, I guess. The other one is desiring something and not being able to attain it. So that’s a bit like being separated from the pleasant. You know, you might desire a certain job. You can’t get it.
You go for it. You can’t get it. You might desire, you know, a boyfriend or a girlfriend that you really like. You can’t get them, they’re not interested in you. You might want desire to see a really nice house that you want to buy but you can’t just can’t afford the money it takes or something like that.
Desiring something and not being able to get it is is a big suffering. And then the last of the eight sufferings is sort of a bit like the suffering, the all pervasive suffering. It’s just the five aggregates again. The five aggregates and all the sufferings that they bring you. So your body, your mind, all those unpleasant, unhappy situations that you find yourself in because because we’re made up of a body and mind.
So that’s, you know, different ways that the teachings talk about suffering. So three sufferings, six sufferings, eight sufferings. Impermanence and death’s another suffering, I guess. Impermanence because we don’t want impermanence, you know, we want things to stay nice things. We’re quite happy with the idea of impermanence if it’s an unpleasant thing.
We think, that’s alright, I quite like impermanence if it’s something you want to get rid of. But generally there are lots of things in our life that we want to keep the same we don’t want things to change. So we don’t we don’t like impermanence really you know we want we don’t want change people are generally not very happy with change they don’t cope with it very well because they don’t see the reality of things as they are. You know, they’re convinced that things won’t change. So impermanence can be a real a real problem for a lot of people.
And, of course, death is the big thing at the end of impermanence. And people don’t want to face death either, you know, it’s part of not wanting things to change. People don’t want to see that they they or their loved ones won’t be around forever. So there’s a there’s a good little meditation that you can do sometimes if you want on death, meditation on death. Some of you might have done it if you’ve come to any of the Lamrim teachings where you you look at three aspects of death.
That death is certain, you know, it’s gonna happen. There’s no way that it won’t. No one yet has, you know, found a way to not die. And every day we move, as I said earlier, inexorably towards our death. That the time of death is uncertain, even though death is certain, the time of our death is uncertain.
And we, you know, we say, oh, yeah, I understand that I’m going to die. I mean, of course I understand that I understand that I’m going to die but we still we do intellectually we understand that but emotionally we push it out we keep pushing it out further and further I know I’ll die but it won’t be for ages because I’m young and fit or whatever But we don’t know about the uncertainty of death. Again, you just have to it’s a good idea sometimes when you’re watching the news to sort of think of Buddhistic kind of things, you know, like the recent floods, you know, fires and stuff. People wake up one morning, everything’s okay. They’re just not there at the end of the day.
They’ve drowned or they’ve got burnt in a fire or something like that. So death, the time of death is uncertain. You know, we might live for decades yet. We might live for a few years. We might die tonight.
You know, who knows? We don’t know. Even though we’re healthy at the moment we just don’t know. Because there’s lots of ways, I guess, there’s more ways that you can die than there are that you can keep alive. And the body in some ways is quite fragile.
So there’s a certainty of death but the uncertainty of the time of death. And the third aspect of death if you do a meditation on it is is that nothing at the time of death, nothing can really help you. You know, your all your possessions are of no use to you. They won’t stop you. Your goodies that you’ve got around you, they won’t, you know, there’s nothing all the money you’ve in the bank won’t stop you dying eventually.
All your family and your friends, they can’t stop you. And your body, you know, you’ve got to give up all your possessions, you’ve got to let it all go, you’ve got to let go of all your family and your loved ones and you have to let go of this body that you’ve, you know, looked after and pampered and all the things that you do, you know, you’ve taken care of your body, you’ve eaten well, you’ve exercised, you’ve put all this stuff on, all that, you know, you’ve got to let that body go. The only thing that goes with you at death is your subtle mind, the Buddhists believe, your subtle mind stream, your subtle consciousness with all its karmic imprints, good and bad, that you’ve generated in this in previous lives. That’s the only thing that goes with you. All the rest you’ve got to sort of let go.
So there’s lots of sufferings. I’m going to watch the time tonight. Of sufferings. So there’s the first noble truth, the truth of suffering. Which is a bit depressing, can be a bit depressing but it’s good to sort of get it out of the way first in a sense, you know.
But it is hard to get our head around it again emotionally. Intellectually, a lot in Buddhism intellectually, you know, is not that difficult to get a handle on but emotionally it’s difficult. And you’ll hear about, you know, having realizations in Buddhism, you know, like realization of emptiness, the realization of the ultimate nature of reality, all that kind of stuff. A lot of it we can understand intellectually, but but to realize it, to actually be it or or make it a part of your being takes a lot more work and a lot more sort of time and effort with your brain to sort of rewire your brain so that you can sort of make these concepts a part of your life I suppose. Suffering is one of those that it is hard to come to terms with sometimes and hard to actually do something about because we all want to, you know, we all want to think that we’re relatively okay, you know, we’re alright, why should I change, you know, everything’s sort of humming along the odd bad day but generally it’s not too bad but the Buddhist teachings will show you that there are lots of different levels of suffering and that subtlest level of all is that we are here in this mind body combination which causes us suffering, manifests subtle or whatever.
Any questions on the sufferings? Does it sort of resonate with your life, you know? There’s lots of different ways to look at it. And some, I think, sometimes things you go, oh, yeah. You know, sort of resonate more than others in your life.
But Just an observation, but it sounds like I’m not sure that, you know, that the children or a baby is not a good thing. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Why would you wanna have children type thing?
It’s sort of like Yeah. Yeah. Cause that suffering to a child? Yes. Well, I suppose people don’t think about that, do they?
You know, I mean, if you’re not a Buddhist, you wouldn’t naturally. Our life, our sort of society is that we want to bring children into the world. And certainly, you know, it’s important to nurture children and nourish them and love them and all that kind of stuff. But I guess from a Buddhist point of view, when you see a baby being born, what that’s saying is that that being hasn’t been liberated from suffering, you know, it’s got to go through it again and again. So, you know, while I mean the monks and all that, mean they love little children and you know, literally, but sort of I guess in a technical sort of way I suppose taking another rebirth is not from a Buddhist point of view is not a reason to rejoice because it means you haven’t been liberated in the previous birth.
You haven’t got there yet. It’s an opportunity to be liberated. It is. It is. I find it very negative.
What? I mean, I think Buddhism? Well, what you’ve just said is that I think a baby is a beautiful thing, and I think the gift of life is just a wonderful thing. It it I think it’s an opportunity to learn and to to to grow. Well, it is.
Mhmm. But a lot of people don’t from a Buddhist point of view, a lot of people don’t have the opportunity or are able to do that in terms of moving beyond suffering. Yes. You know? So it I guess when I say, you know, they’ll cry if a baby’s born, it’s it’s a sense of sadness that they, you know, that their karma is such that they’re having to take another rebirth.
So don’t Buddhas want to have babies? Oh, well, I don’t think they it’s not a matter of wanting or not wanting. If you have a baby if you’re a Buddhist and you have a baby, it’s a fantastic, as you say, fantastic chance to to help that, you know, being to move towards liberation enlightenment certainly. But but what it’s saying is that person hasn’t that person’s had to come back again. You know, that being that you’ve given birth to has had to come back again.
Now, I mean, being born into a Buddhist family for instance or good family or Christian family or whatever is fantastic and it gives another chance for that being to to get there, I guess, to get liberated. But, you know, there’s that tinge of sadness that that person, that being hasn’t got there yet. It’s like all of us. We, you know, we’re here again because we didn’t we didn’t get it, you know, we didn’t become liberated last time, you know, we we were born again and we’ll talk in a minute about causes of suffering. We’re born again because, you know, there’s a whole lot of karma that we carried with us to give us this birth.
I guess one of the interesting things with Buddhism is that there’s that tension between I don’t know if I mentioned it last week, maybe I didn’t between having wanting to renounce worldly life, right? Wanting to renounce the world and your life and become liberated. That’s that’s the goal of Buddhism to become enlightened actually for all others. So we’re wanting to renounce all this place where we are, all attachment to worldly life, right, and become liberated and enlightened. But on the other hand, it’s important to see this life as a precious human rebirth, which is what you’re sort of saying.
And to use the body mind, to use ourselves as a way to achieve enlightenment. So it’s it’s that subtle tension I guess that a lot of people find difficult when they want to become a Buddhist or whatever that subtle tension between renouncing worldly life, trying to find a way out of being reborn again and again, but appreciating that you’ve got an opportunity with this life to become enlightened, you know? And if you’re a good Buddhist, learn how to sort of balance that tension, you know, hold those two things at the same time. Does that make sense? Yeah.
You’ve got to sort of hold them both. You’ve I mean, the ārya beings, the beings that have reached liberation, the bodhisattvas, Dalai Lama, you know, they are reborn again and again through compassion and love. They’re not reborn through karma and the afflictive emotions. But the rest of us, or I can’t speak for all of you, you might be bodhisattvas in disguise or myself, you know, I’m being reborn again and again due to karma and afflictive emotions, delusions. Not so saṃsāra, you know, is not a place and nirvana’s not a place.
Samsāra is really ignorance into the ultimate nature of reality. And nirvana is insight into the ultimate nature of reality. And saṃsāra is really being reborn again and again and again and again due to being sort of what’s the word I use? Suppose, bound to the five aggregates by karma and delusion. So we keep being reborn, bound to this well, we might not, you know, even, you know, it might be reborn as a slug or something like that.
So being reborn again and again due to our previous karma and delusions. The Ārya beings, the bodhisattvas who have become liberated at the very least can be born again and again but they do it through choice almost, you know, to love and compassion. But we don’t do it through choice. We just do it because of our karma. So it’s holding that tension.
And next week we might talk about with the cessation of suffering, the precious human rebirth, which is not just an ordinary old human rebirth, it’s a different precious human rebirth. So you’re right, you know, it’s that it’s holding that tension in your in your consciousness that, you know, I’m I’m reborn this time again, you know, going through all these sufferings again and again because that’s what happens when, you know, the baby’s born. It’s got all these sufferings ahead of it, you know, all of the stuff we’ve talked about. But at the same time, if we can use it in a way as a vessel to reach at least liberation, then it’s very worthwhile. And at least it’s been born human.
Teachings I’ve heard, it’s been said you’re very lucky to be born human. So can I ask, with rebirth, is it infinite? How does it work? How do you believe that the rebirth works? Is it infinite until you reach enlightenment?
Or Yes. Yeah. You you’re you’re reborn. Your your subtle consciousness your subtle consciousness, your subtle mind stream is reborn again and again into some kind of a body or another until you become enlightened. That subtle consciousness is infinite.
So the subtle consciousness of the Buddha, you know, the Buddhas still, you know, have still got a subtle consciousness that continues on but then it’s not reborn again, you know, in a certain body. The bodhisattvas are reborn again but they choose to be, they don’t have to be so they choose to be. But once you become enlightened you’re not born again unless you choose to be unless you want to come back as a bodhisattva to help people but so but if you don’t do that you’re not born again but your subtle consciousness continues that’s what’s infinite So the mind of the Buddha still continues because because it’s subtle because the subtle consciousness never disappears, you know. It becomes the ongoing mind of a Buddha in a Buddha or an enlightened person. So it’s like energy cannot be created or destroyed.
That’s right. Law of science. Yep. That’s right. K.
Exactly. And something you said then, I can’t think what it was I was gonna oh, yeah. About being born a human. You’re right. The teachings well, we can talk on that now.
We’ll just go on about with the sufferings, I suppose. The other sufferings are the sufferings of the different realms. So, there’s beings are born again and again in different realms and migrations. So sometimes, and you hear about, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s the three realms and then sometimes there’s six realms. There’s three realms that, you know, beings can be reborn again and that’s the desire realm that we’re we’re in, the form realm and the formless realm.
Now the the the desire the form realms the form and the formless realms, you can be born into them due they’re sort of the cause for being born in those is a very high level of meditative concentration or meditative absorption. Way, way above what any of us might, presumably, have achieved in meditation. So if you if you are a really, really sort of fantastic meditator and you reach these really high levels of meditative concentration absorption, you can be born again in the form or formless realms. Formless realms means, you know, no body, just mind. Now the teaching, Lama Yeshe, on the right there at the top that taught me, that one, picture, he he said once in the teaching that we shouldn’t want to be born in the formal form, you know, it’s not something we should, you know, choose to try and attain, this rebirth in the form realm because because if you’re if you’re reborn in those, you’re sort of just bliss out, you know, for like eons and eons.
You’re just blissed out, you know, and you’re not enlightened. Mhmm. So at some point, when all that positive karma that positive merit that you generated to be born in that realm, those realms, is exhausted because merit does get exhausted. Might talk about that at some stage. You’ll drop down to another rebirth, you know.
What’s the difference between the form and the fullness? It levels of meditative stabilization. But if the formless has no body, what’s the form? She got a body. Like, I could be very Yeah.
No. I could be I could be reborn in a form form realm if I had really, really high levels, but I’d just be somewhere else blissing out just, you know, blissing out for, like, eons. So Geshe la said Are they Sorry? Is the form realm in our life or not? Different place to us.
We’re in the desire desire realm. We’re in this desire place. So these are not within where we are. Okay. But Geshe la said, you don’t want to you don’t want to be what you should do is try to achieve those levels of meditative concentration but not to be born in those realms because you need to in order to realise emptiness which you need to become liberated to realise the empty nature of reality not just understand it You need to have a very strong stable level of concentration, meditation, meditative absorption to understand that fine level.
So so you want to try and reach those meditative levels, but not in order to be born in those other realms. If you get my drift. Excuse me. Why do those realms exist? Why do any realms exist?
I guess, you know, they’ve always existed. There’s always been, you know, beings who can be in this state of, you know, sort of really, really high levels of meditation where they’re just not reborn in this desire realm. I mean the Buddhist the sort of cosmology which we will go into here and I haven’t gone into it in a lot of teachings myself but some of the teachers have talked about the cosmology, the Buddhist cosmology which is, you know, very complicated and, you know, there’s other places, you know, other than just this earth where there are beings and there’s other sort of levels of Existence. Existence or whatever where there are beings. And one choose bliss over suffering?
Well They were able to attain it somehow. For yourself, you might. But from a Buddhist from a Mahāyāna Buddhist point of view, that seemed to be a very selfish thing to do to just have your own bliss when you can come when you can when you can instead reach enlightenment in order to help other people go beyond suffering. So see this is where with the Theravadins they only believe in liberation that you reach that level of meditative absorption where you can understand emptiness and therefore be liberated from suffering for yourself alone. And a lot of the Theravadins would see that as enlightenment.
But the Mahāyāna, the Mahāyāna Buddhists see that it’s just personal liberation. So yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people want just personal liberation but if you reach liberation like that you still have the very subtle obscurations to enlightenment. Plus you’d still have karma as well, wouldn’t you? No, because you’ll drop back. What is emptiness?
We we might go into it on the last night if we have time, but emptiness is about seeing the nature of reality. But that’s really important part of Buddhism. It is. It is. So I’m hoping that we’d be able to cover it.
I hope we can Yeah. In in fairly basic detail. Emptiness is the hardest part of Buddhism to understand, But you need it to become both liberated and enlightened. It won’t make you enlightened because to be enlightened you need the great compassion along with the wisdom realizing emptiness. But you do need it to become liberated and you do need it to become enlightened but on its own it won’t make you enlightened.
But it’s about seeing things as they are not as they appear to be. And I’ll start in a minute on the causes of suffering and I would touch on that just a tiny little bit. But hopefully we can go into it next week or the week after. Emptiness is seeing things as they are not what? Emptiness, to realise emptiness is to see the true nature of all things, all phenomena, that they are not as they appear to us which is solid and permanent but to see them as they are which is which is that they are made up of parts labelled by our mind, all that kind of stuff.
So we’ll try and go into it a little bit hopefully. So just getting back quickly to the realms. So we have the form and formless realm and the desire realm. And in the desire realm are the six migrations. So even though you’ll sometimes hear about the three realms and the six realms, It’s easier if you think about them in terms of the three realms which is the desire form and formless and within the desire realm are the six migrations which is being reborn as a hell being, as a hungry ghost, as an animal, as a human, as a demigod or as a god.
So if you hear about being reborn as a god that’s not that’s no big deal because it’s still within the desire realm. Still, you know, beings that are reborn as gods or demigods have created a whole lot of really, really good merit. But merit’s sort of like money in the bank. You know, if you spend it and don’t replace it, it’ll run out eventually. So could you just run through them again?
A being, a hungry ghost, an animal, all the types of animals, insects, everything, human, demigod, and a god. And they’re the six migrations within the desire realm that we’re in. And then above that, you’ve got the form realm and the formless realm. So this is the ghost one again? hungry ghost.
Preta, sometimes called p r e t a, Preta. Some of the reasons for being born as those in those migrations are enormous, enormous, enormous bad karma from anger. You’ll be born as in the hell realm or lots of killing like Hitler kind of thing. Lots of killing and stuff like that. For hungry Ghost it’s really could you put greed and miserliness miserliness.
Get my head out. So someone that’s really miserly, greedy, you know, a Scroogey kind of you know, this is sort of really, really bad. Not that you have one day when you’re feeling a bit greedy, I suppose. But, you know, that that real miserliness, real nasty sort of greedy kind of person because the hungry ghosts have these tiny mouths and huge stomachs and they can never satisfy themselves. No matter, you know, they can never fill themselves up.
They’re always empty because they’ve been miserly and not been generous in the previous lives. So can you give me an example of what one might be? What do you mean what one might be? Well, they’re they’re in the desire realm, so that’s in our life. Can’t necessarily see them.
I mean, you can’t necessarily see them. So what you’re describing to me, it’s almost sounds like a person who is starving. Good. Some of the teachings, some people say that the realms, the six migrations, hell beings, hungry ghosts, demigods, gods, I mean we can see animals, so don’t aren’t really they’re metaphors, you know? But other teachers, the Geshe at said no, they are real realms, are real places.
It’s only that we can only see the animal realm and our human realm. We can’t see the other realms. But a good way to think about it, because some people don’t believe in rebirth, you know, even some Buddhists grapple with it. But a good way to think about it is the types of qualities that have brought people to those realms and you’re right, you know, you could look in the human realm and you could see a hell realm really, really angry people really, really hellishly or hellish situations that people live in as we can as we know. Some hellish situations.
hungry ghosts. Yes. Really people that are really miserly, that are really ungenerous and mean and, you know, greedy and all that kind of stuff. And also as you say people that are starving and can never ever be satisfied they can never have their hunger or their thirst satisfied. Animal realm animal realm is through ignorance So people that, you know, I mean, in the Buddhist sense, it’s ignorance of the four noble truths and karma, rebirth, that kind of thing.
But when you think of animals, you know, they’re ignorant. You know, no matter how much you sit a dog there and I talk to him, he’s not going to understand Buddhism, you know. It’s sort of there’s an ignorance there with animals. They’re mainly they mainly operate on instinct, mainly. And then you’ve got us humans, the demigods, can think of them as born from envy.
They’re very envious. So you could see people like that in in in a human life, know, really envious, you know, they’re just just envious of anything that other people have that they don’t have and it just eats them away, you know, eats them up. And the gods is pride. Pride is the thing that you know? So you can see that.
And, also, the gods, you know, gods and the demigods, you can see it in the corporate world probably, you know, fighting and clawing their way up. And the pride, yeah, pride for the gods, you know, for the god realms. Yeah. Yeah. So you can you’re right.
You can see them in the human. Sometimes it’s a useful way to think about them. So that’s probably the sufferings. I think we’ve done the sufferings. Now the causes do you want a break?
Anyone wanna stretch or get a cup of or something? No. We we struggle on. That’s fascinating. The causes of suffering.
Now the cause of suffering or the source of suffering is the mind. So all those sufferings that we’ve been talking about, all those three and six and eight, all that stuff. The cause of it, the source of suffering is the is our mind. Your mind? Switch it off.
Switch it off. Okay. So and in our mind, the of the nature of reality, this is we get into the true nature of reality. So our ignorance of the ultimate nature of reality, of the way things exist, is the beginning of the cause of suffering. And this ignorance leads of the way we exist, the self.
So we talk in Buddhism about two types of self. There’s a self of the person, the self, me, and I I, and the self of phenomena or other stuff. Is phenomena? Phenomena is everything. Everything is a phenomenon.
Everything That happens? Well, every sort of thing, yeah. But our body is also a phenomenon. So we have when we talk about the self, we’re talking about the self of the person, you know, the I and also the self of the body, the five aggregates. And so this ignorance of the self, of the body and of the person leads to self grasping.
Alright? We grasp onto a self, an I as as truly existing, as really truly existing. You say, well, I exist. You know, I am here, you know. I’m sitting here, therefore I must exist.’ If you really look for that ‘I’ that you think exists, you won’t find it.
Where is the eye? Is the eye in the body? Or is the eye in the mind consciousness? If it’s in the body, where is it in the body? Is it in the head?
Is it in the hands? You know, how many eyes are there? You know, is it one with the body and mind? Or is it separate? If it’s separate, where is it?
So you know we grasp onto this sense of self ‘I’ you know ‘I’ we talk about ‘I’ all the time but there is no truly existing ‘I’. There’s a conventional ‘I’, there’s a label but there isn’t a truly existing one that truly exists. There’s only things exist, put it this way, things exist in dependence on three things. Causes and conditions that’s karma cause and effect so things including ourselves exist in dependence on causes and conditions. They exist in dependence on their parts or their aggregates and they exist in dependence on the label imputed by the mind so the label that the mind gives us so that chair there you know, you say well there is a chair there, I could see it but chair doesn’t inherently exist.
There is no inherently existing chair there. So when we’re trying to realise emptiness what we’re looking to refute is the inherent existence of something, not the thing itself. We’re not saying there’s no chair there. What we’re saying is there’s no inherently existing chair there, existing from its own side, independent, you know, on its own. So that chair is made up of three things.
That chair exists in dependence on three things, on causes and conditions. So it just didn’t sort of pop out of nowhere, you know, pop out of space. Someone built it, someone wove the material, someone soldered the things, you know, on it, whatever the things that legs and arms and stuff like that. So it exists in dependence on causes and conditions that brought it into being. It exists in dependence on its parts.
It got a seat, it got legs, it got stuffing in there in the back, and it exists in dependence on the mind giving it the label chair. The base we call that. So it exists depending on its base. The mind labels the base chair and that’s the only way chair exists. So it exists because it’s labeled chair and the label chair exists because of the base.
And the base, what we talk about the base, is the characteristics of it, the function of it it’s got a function people sit on it that’s what you do with a chair and the convention that we all from our shared karma have agreed that that thing is a chair. And that’s the only way a chair exists. It’s there, it’s not that it’s non existent and this is where teachings on emptiness and the ultimate nature of reality are very difficult because some people think they mean that nothing exists. That it’s all nihilistic, you know, it’s non existent. It’s not non existent but it’s not inherently existent.
It exists in dependence upon causes and conditions, parts and the label that the mind gives it. The base, the label on the base. Okay. So, you know, that’s Very deep. It is very deep and a lot of people won’t teach on emptiness very much because some people will get that view that nothing exists.
Oh, there’s no chair there, there’s no you know, so who cares? There’s no this, there’s no that. It’s not that, it’s that, you know, things exist conventionally, conventionally, because we all agree. We all agree at your One of the nuns that was here once a few years ago, we’re having a discussion, you know, she was in a group talking about emptiness. And she said she’s Dutch and she said that her uncle or something was a missionary and he’d go over to the islands and take stuff for the take stuff for the people in the islands.
And once he took over a whole lot of clothes, you know, for all these islanders And the ladies lady native islanders were pulling all this stuff out, and they pulled out a pair of bras. Oh, they held this up, and they thought they couldn’t work out what this what this thing was. You know, they’re looking at laughing. They finally figured it’s something to carry rice in. Because they hadn’t there was no convention of a pair of bras, you know.
So for them, bra there wasn’t, you know, there wasn’t any bras anyway. There was this thing, this thing that existed in dependence on causes and conditions someone made the pair of, you know, made the bras dependence on its parts but mainly dependent on the label that the mine gave it and the label that by convention we all agreed that this was a pair of bras. But on the island they didn’t, you know, they didn’t have bras. They didn’t see it as a pair of bras. So for them, there was no pair of bras.
There was a rice carrier. Know, and it’s an interesting way to sometimes think of it. Because we have this shared, you know, shared convention of labelling things such and such or other. And in this country, you know, we might label something this but in another country it’s labelled something else. So for those other people that thing has no existence really.
Now, at a deeper level, you know, when you get into parts and all that kind of stuff it gets a bit more complicated again. But, you know, if you if you if you think about it in terms of maybe impermanence is a good way to think of things. You know, nothing lasts forever. You know, everything is made up of bits and pieces. Everything’s made up of atoms and whatever.
You take it right down. There’s nothing there but energy. If it go right down from, you know That’s that’s emptiness really, isn’t it? Well, yes. Yes.
That’s right. It’s empty of inherent existence. We talk about things being empty of inherent existence. When you break them down, there’s nothing there in the end. Nothing.
And that’s the same for us as a person, you know, as an I. There is no ‘I’. And in terms of causes of suffering, our ignorance of that, of the nature of reality, means that we grasp onto a self, self grasping. We grasp onto this self, you know, as existing inherently. And due to that we come self-cherishing where we cherish this self that we’ve grasped onto, this I, we cherish it above everybody else.
Or mine. I and mine. So we cherish mine, my body, my family, my country, you know, whatever whatever it is that we think belongs to us. So due to ignorance, we have self grasping grasping at a self. Due to self grasping, we have self-cherishing.
Due to self-cherishing, we have afflictive emotions and delusions, which we’ll talk about in a minute if our brains are still awake. And dependence and due to afflictive emotions and delusions, we create contaminated actions, which creates karma, which creates suffering, which creates rebirth and around and around and around we So grasping leads to cherishing. Ignorance is the first and the most important. The ignorance of inherent of the true nature of things leads us to grasp onto a sense of self to a self which doesn’t really exist. So ignorance of the true nature of reality leads to self grasping.
Self grasping leads to self-cherishing because we cherish ourselves before others. Self I, I I, mine, my body, you know. self-cherishing leads us to have afflictive emotions and delusions which we’ll talk about in a minute. Six main delusions. And these afflictive emotions or delusions, it’s, you know, same thing, lead to us committing contaminated actions, negative actions of thought, word and deed which creates karma, negative karma.
You could do positive karma too but, you know, talking about the sufferings here. Negative karma which leads to suffering and rebirth and we just keep going around and around. If we could understand if we could get rid of ignorance, the first step by realizing the true nature of reality, the other stuff wouldn’t follow. But that’s the hardest thing to get rid of, the ignorance of the true nature of things, emptiness, the emptiness teachings. Very difficult.
You know, we could say, oh, I understand. I understand emptiness. I understand that, you know, I there is no really existing I. I you know, there’s no true existing I. But a few years ago when I was getting, you know, trying to get my head around all this stuff, my husband and I went out to dinner and we were waiting for this couple that was meeting us for dinner and they were late and I hate people being really late and I was sitting there and I was getting really angry and at one stage I thought because I’d been studying the emptiness teachings and I thought where is this I that’s getting angry?
Know, I am getting I know. I’m saying to myself, I’m getting so cross where are they? And it’s and you know, it makes you realise if you think you understand emptiness and then someone says something nasty to you or something and you get really hurt or cross, you haven’t realised emptiness. You can understand it, you know, intellectually. You can read it and you can see the logic of it and whatever.
But one of the teachings says that someone that understands emptiness can have someone on one side of them waving in fan for the hot weather and the other side with a knife ready to cut their throat. And they’re quite calm because they know neither really exists inherently. I think we’re a long way from probably getting there. But you know, it’s good to think sometimes to do that meditation, to go through you can go through what the way you’re meant to try and do it in terms of realising the emptiness of self is to first try and identify the self, the inherent existing ‘I’. Because unless you can identify it, you can’t sort of realise it’s not there.
And the way we’re taught to identify the inherently existing ‘I’ or what we think of as the inherently existing ‘I’ is something like that. Think back to a time when you were really, you know, sort of annoyed about something someone had said to you or done to you or you were really, really upset or something like that. And if you think that you’ll have a really strong sense of I I was hurt by that or I was really angry about that and try and feel it. Yeah and people don’t give way or you’re not quite fast enough and then Yeah. Beeping the horn and eye.
Shows you. Yeah. The eye. Yeah. You try you try and in a meditation, you try and get that feeling for that I and then you try and find it either one with your body bind or separate from it.
Now if it’s separate, because we talk about my body. When we say my body, that implies that there’s this I self the self here, I, that owns a body. Right? That’s what it’s implying. I and my body.
Where is this I that has a body? It has to be separate from the body to be the possessor of the body. Right? So where is it? You can’t find it.
If it’s one with the body or the mind, where is it? You go in your meditation, you go through. Is it in the head? Is the I, the self, the mind, Me? Is it in the head?
Is it in the hands? The legs? You can’t say, Oh, it’s all of that because then there’s lots of eyes and there isn’t lots of eyes. You only talk about eye, one eye. So you can’t say oh it’s here and it’s there and it’s there.
It can’t be a combination of them because that’s multiple as well. Is it in the mind? Well if it’s in the mind, well then it’s not in the body. If it’s in the body, it’s not in the mind because you can only have one it’s only one eye. Why can’t it do?
Don’t think you can one spot. But where is it? Can you identify it? You’ve got to identify it. It’s in where is it?
Where is this I? So it’s difficult to do but first you have to try and identify it by thinking back to that situation, you know, where you felt strongly, I am cross or I, you know, and then you try and find that I and you won’t find it. You will not find that I. There is no I. There’s just this label.
It’s just a label. I guess if you see yourself as consciousness continually moving it helps you lose that perspective aright, doesn’t it? It can. It can. The impermanence because your mental consciousness is changing moment to moment, it’s never the same.
And that’s what travels from life to life. If you can come to that point where you you know, it’s good sometimes it’s good to even if you just think about that stuff, you’re starting to break down that sense of ‘I’. And sometimes one thing I do sometimes, if you sit in your meditation and you think about, you know, I’m sitting here. So you say to yourself, what is, you know, what is sitting here? The body.
The body is not me or my body. Depersonalise it. The body is sitting on the chair and the mind is contemplating whatever you’re contemplating. Try and, you know, remove yourself from that that identification and that ownership of it, of the body and mind. If you can do that, it’s quite can be quite powerful in terms of you starting to break down that sense of I and mine because that’s what we are, that’s what the teachings are saying.
We’re just a combination, the five aggregates. Form, the body, feeling, there’s the physical aggregate and the four mental ones. Form, feeling like pleasure, you know, sort of non pleasure, whatever the word is. Form, feeling, discrimination, the mental factor where you can discriminate things. This is chair, this is carpet.
Mental form feeling discrimination, compositional factors, which all the other mental factors, memory and all that kind of stuff, and the consciousnesses. So we have six consciousnesses. We have the eye, the ear, the nose, whatever the taste, touch consciousness. So we have we have organs, sense organs like the eye, the ear, you know, the nose, the tongue, the body, whatever the other one. How many have I got here?
You know? Yeah. And then but then we have the the sense consciousnesses. So you have the eye organ that sees the eye object, but it’s eye consciousness, you know, that makes that that is that connection. Or the ear organ, hearing organ, and the sound, which is the object, but you’ve got an ear consciousness that connects that.
So you have the six consciousnesses, the five of the senses plus your mental consciousness. And that’s all we are with this with this combination of this aggregate of these five things. And that’s all we are. And at death, all the body aggregate, you know, disappears into the energy fields. And the five mental consciousnesses, the five consciousnesses gradually the gross ones die and then the subtle ones, you know, eventually sort of die is not the right word, can’t think, whatever you like me.
But you’ve got your gross consciousness, your subtle consciousness, and then the very subtle consciousness which is what leaves from your heart center and carries on. So what are the gross consciousnesses? Well, your eye, your ear, all those, the five, and your and your mental is six gross consciousnesses. Gross thoughts, you know, not meditative subtle thoughts. So your your gross consciousnesses are the six consciousness, but, you know, as they operate in day to day.
I guess with Buddhism, there’s a lot of reading to do. Yes. I’m just gonna find the because I think I think that’s the way we really learn about Buddhism. Exactly. Study.
Study. Study. Listen to the teachings. We’ll talk a bit about that how to do it in the last session, the last night. You know, the path to whatever is about a bit about that.
Yes. So what happened when you’re letting your defences? You thought there’s a side to me. It didn’t help. I was so cross.
But it doesn’t help when you’re in that in that zone. Yeah. Didn’t. And this was, you know, this was a few years ago. Hopefully, I’ve gone on a little bit further since now.
But no, it didn’t. I couldn’t I was so cross and it wasn’t their fault, poor thing, they couldn’t get a park. It was in Gouger Street or something. But it didn’t help me. But, so what they say you should try and do is practice it in meditation when you’re not really, really angry.
You’ve still got to try and remember that, you know, remember that situation so that you can sort of feel what you felt because at that time your sense of I is really strong, really strong. So, but if you do it when you’re not in that situation but trying to sort of recall it so that you can then try and find it and you find it’s not there, then that’s a good way to do it. So that eventually when you are like, I’m better at it now, a little bit, you know, you can you can sort of react differently to situations like that. Don’t be late to ask. Okay.
Oh, shit. I was just gonna say because then I mean it seems like it’s a lot of reflection on things that you already sort of know in the back of your mind isn’t there. But then it’s the sake of exercise doing it and realizing that it’s it’s very sort of Yes. Going around in circles and not really of, I guess, yielding a result. That makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah. That’s it. Because we will come back in this physical body and we’re all working through our previous karma, but we’re also creating more karma. Yes.
Yeah. So we’re getting rid of the bad stuff, but creating a little bit more as well. So Yeah. And if you and if you like the bank analogy, if you don’t do good stuff you don’t create lots more merit and good karma even though we’ve obviously, all of us, got a lot of good karma from previous because we’re here in this human rebirth and we’re, you know, trying to be Buddhist. If we don’t replenish that, then all our good karma gets exhausted as well.
We don’t want to be left with just the bad. But I think you’re right, you know, you’ve got to just you know, if you’re serious about understanding Buddhism and being a Buddhist, you’ve got to put the time and energy and effort in to to studying it, the scriptures, you know, and you know, and listening to teachings, listening to people, you know, the teachers because they can, I mean I sort of did a lot of study for many years before I started coming to Buddha House and I thought that was all I needed to, you know, study at home but it’s not the same if you listen to the teachers, They have they can bring a different aspect to it? And it’s repetition, it’s repetition. It’s like when we were little kids, you know, the way you learn is by repetition. I don’t know about how kids learn these days but you know, like driving a car, anything.
It’s doing it and doing it and doing it. And you’re right, a lot of this stuff if you’ve ever been a bit of a thinker, you know, if you’ve ever sort of done something more than just superficially having a good time, some of it is there. And from Buddhist point of view, we would say that it’s, you know, it’s there from previous lives. That in previous life, you’ve been a Buddhist or interested in Buddhism. Because sorry.
No. Go on. I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I mean, it’s just because I guess the way that I’m I’m sort of viewing it at the moment is that, you know, the the ultimate form or, you know, the the the goal for any sort of Buddhist is to seek enlightenment. But then once you’ve attained enlightenment, it’s up to you by choice whether or not you want to come back to this rebirth again. Yes.
You’ve gained it but then you have to come back and suffer. No. Not that you’ve gained it. Well no you don’t. Don’t.
Really? Okay. So if come back you come back through love and compassion, through choice. And in the Lamrim it talks about again, you know, that the bodhisattvas who are sort of almost Buddhas, you know, Buddhas come back through choice to help others like the Dalai Lama. And they’re willing to sort of go through the sufferings.
I mean, know, manifests, he gets sick or they manifest sickness, we talk about them manifesting sickness. They’re willing to do that because because of what they’re wanting to do. Whereas we all just get reborn, you know. We have no say in it. Our karma just drags us along to another rebirth and then, you know, we’ve got a chance to to do something about it then.
But until we’re enlightened, we don’t really, you know, have a choice. So then, I guess, if you if you sort of look at it from, like, a Christian perspective, this is enlightenment. It could be like a form of heaven because you sort of escape. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s sort of Because what nirvana and saṃsāra sounds like is that it is.
The I’m trying to think one of the teachers once I think I think sort of heaven or, you know, a Christian view of heaven was a bit like a god realm or something like that. Still within saṃsāra, but the god realm or a sort of a pure not a pure land realm. It’s sort of a, you know, a good place where you bliss out kind of thing. But the Lamrim teachings say that for those that have reached liberation are just blissing out for eons and eons. That the book I mean, this is a bit literal but sort of the Buddhas will tap them on the shoulder at some point and say, you’ve got work to do, you know.
You’ve got all those people to save. Mean, Buddhists believe that Jesus Christ was a bodhisattva. So I got a lot of respect for the Christian teachings. But, you know, yeah, I vaguely remember something about one of the teachers talking about, you know, sort of what the Christian heaven would be but I can’t really remember exactly, more of sort of a realm of liberation or, you know, where you’re sort of blissing out, I think. But sort of not a direct comparison because, of course, there’s a God there and because, you know, Buddhists don’t have a God.
You know, we don’t believe in a creator God, of course. So But, yeah, Jesus is said to be a bodhisattva. We would see him as a bodhisattva because he cherished others, you know, rather than himself, had great compassion, that kind of thing. Yeah. Now do we wanna do a meditation, or do we want to keep going?
Have we got time? Well, it’s quarter to nine. What do people wanna do? Keep going. Keep going.
Keep going. Yeah. I’m happy in your work. Yeah. Some of you have probably done your meditation tonight, haven’t you?
Meditation would be good. Meditation. Yeah. We’ll do it. Okay.
Next week, we’ll we’ll keep going on the causes because we’ve only just started on that really. But