Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Denny Morphett offers a wide-ranging introduction to Buddhist philosophy in this 108-minute session, beginning with the Four Noble Truths. He traces how ignorance of reality leads to self-grasping, self-cherishing, afflictive emotions, and ultimately negative karma and suffering. He then explores the six main delusions—desire, anger, pride, doubt, ignorance, and wrong view—along with the ten non-virtuous actions of body, speech, and mind, examining their antidotes and how their severity depends on motivation and frequency. The talk includes extended discussion of difficult questions from participants about killing, meat-eating, vegetarianism, and the technicalities of karmic responsibility. Morphett explains the cessation of suffering, the need for wisdom realizing emptiness and bodhicitta for enlightenment, and introduces the eight leisures and ten endowments that constitute a precious human rebirth. The session closes with a guided analytical meditation on appreciating one’s human life. Aimed at newcomers and those early in Buddhist practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 2016 10 24 Introduction to Buddhism.mp3
UUID: add53fd9-cc2e-4a2d-840f-298d93843e27
Teacher: Denny Morphett
Collection: Into to Buddhism (Denny Morphett)
Date: 2016-10-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 108.7 minutes
Words: ~14,017
Okay. Now last week, if you recall, we We started talking about the causes of suffering. And we talked about the fact that the cause of suffering is basically our mind, you know, is in our mind. And it’s the ignorance in our mind that sees our self as inherently existing. We see that everything we have an ignorance about how things really exist.
So we see things as inherently existing, substantially, solidly, permanently existing, and we see ourself like that. So this ignorance that sees, views ourself as incorrectly as an inherently existing independent substantial self. When we think that way we then grasp at the self. So the ignorance of the mind leads to self grasping. Leads to self grasping.
So we grasp at a self that doesn’t really exist the way we think it exists. And that self grasping grasping at ourself leads us to cherish ourself leads to self-cherishing. So we know we see this ‘I’ as inherently existing and mine, I and mine, so my body, my possessions, my family as also inherently existing and we grasp at those things and we cherish our self and our our things, our body, our possessions, our loved ones before others. So self-cherishing happens because we grasp at ourself rather than cherishing others. And that self-cherishing leads us to have afflictive emotions or delusions.
The words are synonymous. So afflictive emotions or delusions in our mind. And we’ll talk about them in a minute. They’re all the negative emotions that we have in our mind. And those negative emotions, afflictive emotions or delusions, then cause us to create, to undertake contaminated actions.
So because we have these delusions, we create contaminated actions of body, speech and mind. We think negative thoughts, we say negative things, we act in a negative way because of the delusions in our mind. So, and then those contaminated actions lead to negative karma, which leads to suffering, which leads to rebirth and sort of around and around we go on the merry-go-round of saṃsāra. So ignorance in the mind leads to self grasping which leads to self-cherishing, which leads to afflictive emotions in our mind, which leads to contaminated actions, karma, negative karma, suffering and rebirth. So these afflictions, afflictive emotions or delusions, There’s millions of them.
I mean you can think yourself of all the negative emotions that there are. But Buddhism, as usual, collapses them down into a number. Six main delusions. And the first one is afflictive desire. Afflictive desire or desirous attachment, you can call it that, desirous attachment which is which arises in relation to something that we think is pleasurable.
So, you know, we see something and it’s always to do the delusions arise in relation to the six sense objects. So we either see something, hear something, taste something, touch something, what’s the other one, smell something or think something that we think is pleasurable and desirous attachment arises. That could Desirous attachment or desire can be desire, possessiveness, craving, grasping, all those kinds of things are sort of synonyms or synonyms. Can have a seat? No.
That’s So so afflictive desire or desirous attachment is really where you desire something and you’re attached to getting it, you know, you’re attached to it. It’s one of are you probably you might have heard about the three poisons, the three main poisons in Buddhism which is ignorance, attachment, and aversion or anger. So those three are part of the six delusions. So desirous attachment is really it rises in relation to something that’s pleasant. You know, we we see something that we think is desirable.
It might not be to anyone else, but to us it is. And we want it. You know, we want it. We desire it. You can you know, it’s sort of fairly obvious, I suppose.
The second one is anger or aversion. And for each of these six delusions, there’s an antidote to each of them. The main antidote for all the delusions is realising the wisdom that realizes emptiness to understand the true nature of reality. But within that the six have their own sort of antidote and the antidote to attachment or desirous attachment is to realize the emptiness of all things. If you, you know, if you think of those, you know, those shows on TV that have, you know, sort of forensic guy like silent witness and all that stuff.
One of the things with the monks, know, if the monks see nice pretty girls and stuff like that. One of the antidotes is to realize that what appears to you is not what it really is. So, if you think of those shows on TV where they have the body there, you know, and they peel back the skin. They just peel back. Because that’s all we are really.
We’re this bag of skin covering all this stuff inside. If you peel back that beautiful face and body, what have you got? You know, you’ve got blood and muscles and, you know, tendons and horrible stuff, know, phlegm and more and more horrible things and bones but we see a beautiful woman or a really handsome man and we we desire that we’re attracted to that what we think of as something beautiful or pleasurable. We don’t see what is really there. We see an appearance.
We don’t see what makes up, you know, that person. So the antidote to afflictive desire is to realise the emptiness of all things, to realise how things really exist, to look beyond the appearance. Anger, the second one, anger or aversion arises in relation to what is not pleasurable. So it’s the opposite, you know. With attachment we want something, we want to get something.
With aversion we want to push it away. If we’re sick, you know, we don’t want to be sick, want to push that away. If we’re with someone that’s really nasty to us, we don’t want that, we want to push it away. So people, situations that we think are going to not give us pleasure or are going to stop our pleasure from happening, we have aversion towards. We don’t want it.
So that’s the second one is aversion. It’s also known as anger. Anger is really a delusion where you want to bring harm to somebody. Sort of a, I guess, more extreme form of aversion, I suppose. And the antidote to anger or aversion is patience.
You know, if you if there’s someone or some situation or something that’s making you angry, irritated, know, is causing you to want to push it away, we’re taught to be patient. All things pass, things change, you know, it won’t be that way forever. If you react with anger to something that you don’t like or you feel threatened by, that’s not going to, that’s not a good thing. You’re just going to create lots of negative karma. That thing will pass.
So patience is the antidote to anger. The third one is pride. That’s the third main one is pride. And pride, we all know what pride is it’s basically this sort of puffed up feeling of ourselves that we elevate our abilities, beyond what they really are so we elevate them and we think we’re better than people you know we self me and more important self importance we we’re better than others you know we know more than others we’re better looking than others we’ve you know got a better house than others a better car all that kind of thing pride a puffed up puffed up view of ourselves and our abilities And the antidote to pride is to take joy in other what other people do. To be joyous about other people’s ability.
To not see yourself as sort of above people, but to appreciate what they are like. Ignorance is the fourth one and again this is ignorance of the nature of reality, the way things actually exist, as well as ignorance of karma, rebirth, all that kind of thing. And the antidote to that is, as you guess, realizing the nature of reality, you know, and also to learning about, you know, understanding karma, rebirth. And the next one is doubt. And it’s not I mean Buddhism doesn’t doesn’t want you to just just accept things from the scriptures or because the Buddha said it or whatever.
Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, you know, is really hot on you questioning things, know, checking up, questioning, studying the, you know, studying the teachings, trying to understand them, seeing how they might work in your life, not just taking them for granted. So it’s good to question but doubt here as one of the delusions is talking about, you know, not even sort of making the effort to try and find out, just doubting, you know, I doubt that there’s anything called rebirth or I doubt there’s karma. Not even trying to sort of consider it, not, you know, looking into it, not investigating it or studying it or whatever, but just, you know, oh, that’s rubbish. It doesn’t that doesn’t exist. So it’s that kind of doubt that’s being referred to here.
And the antidote for that is single pointed concentration, interestingly, which is really what that means is really meditating on the issue, really contemplating it and investigating it and trying to get a clear understanding of it, of whatever it is that you have some doubt about. So, you know, not just doubting and that’s it, but going into it, studying it, looking at what ‘s been said about it, trying to see how that might work in your life. And the last one is called the wrong view. The wrong view of the transitory collection. And the transitory collection is is us, our body mind complex.
It’s transitory because it’s always changing moment to moment. Your body’s changing moment to moment, know, momentary change happening in your body all the time, every second, every nanosecond. And our mind changes moment to moment, thoughts and emotions, everything that’s changing. So it’s a transitory and it’s a collection. We are not this in, you know, this sort of inherently existing solid self.
We are this collection of bits of parts down to our, you know, atoms and molecules and all that kind of thing. You know, we’re a collection of a head and arms and a trunk and, you know, blood and, you know, muscle and all that kind of stuff. Take one bit away, you know. One bit away. Television last night where they talked about how our actual body parts get replaced on a rest regular basis.
And they were saying how, you know, like a bone will be totally replaced over time and rebuilt. Yes. Yeah. And when you you hit and and then I thought about the Buddhist teachings and about Yeah. This sort of thing because it really explains it.
And that’s science. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Science is catching up a lot for some of the old Buddhist teachings, you know, like the plasticity of the mind, about path.
When we talk about the path to enlightenment, we’re talking about the path in our mind, you know, about our thinking. But you’re right, everything’s changing moment to moment, you know, everything, everything. All the cells are dying, being reborn, dying. I mean, that’s what cancer is, where the cells don’t die. They sort of go off, you know, madly.
They don’t die when they should die. Everything’s coming into being and dissolving back. Coming coming into being and dissolving away all the time continually, not just in our bodies but everywhere. So that’s the sixth delusion is the wrong view of the transitory collection and that’s really getting again back to seeing ourselves as inherently existing solid, you know, permanent thing that doesn’t change. And the antidote to that is again, recognizing the emptiness of inherent existence.
So they’re the six delusions. Now there’s heaps of other afflictive emotions or delusions. There’s jealousy as you say Jackie, you know, there’s irritation, there’s envy, I mean you name it, you know, all the negative emotions that you can think of. But they sort of all come under like irritation is a guess a lesser form of anger. If you get irritated with something someone does or some situation, if you don’t check it and let it go, can, you know, grow into anger.
So, you know, there’s lots of other sort of emotions but those six are the main ones. Afflictive desire or attachment, anger or aversion, pride, doubt, ignorance, the wrong view of how you actually exist. And when those delusions arise in our mind, if we go back to our little table there, you know, ignorance leading to self grasping, to self-cherishing, leading to the delusions or afflictive emotions, leading to karmic contaminated actions. If you have the delusions in your mind, then you start to create contaminated actions or negative actions of thought, of speech and of body, you know, action, physical action. And the teachings, the Buddhist teachings talk about ten non virtues numbers again..
So in terms of contaminated actions, again, there’s probably heaps and heaps but there’s sort of ten main ones. And they are the three of body which are killing, stealing and sexual misconduct. So killing is not just killing people, you know. If you I think I mentioned the first night to someone, you know, I’ve got this mania about mosquitoes and cockroaches and jumping years ago. I’d go to spray all these, you know, killing any sentient being, any sentient being.
So, you know, if we think, oh, I don’t kill anything, but you know, we’re sitting there and this mosquito, you know, lands on us and bites us and we smack it down, you know, that’s killing. So killing is anything. I mean, we kill some things unintentionally, like driving along, there’s lots of little tiny insects that get smacked by our windscreen. You know, that’s unintentional, but we’re still doing it. But we don’t have the motivation, you know, we’re not intentionally going out to deciding to get in the car to go out and kill lots of insects.
But we do we do kill things. Stealing is, you know, stealing as we know it, but it’s also can be referred to as taking that which is not given. So it can be if you cheat on your tax, that’s stealing. You’re taking something that’s not being given like you’re taking something that you shouldn’t. If you in the office, you know, I’ve certainly done it when I was working I’m sure maybe you lot haven’t but you know, you’re working in an office you just take a pen home or you know, a notepad or something like that.
It’s something that’s not given. That’s a real nice thing. Oh, is it? I bought it last week. Really excited.
You’re giving it back. Sorry. That’s alright. I’m sure it wasn’t to happen. You may keep it, I’ll give it to you.
I’ll give it. Giving it. Yeah. If you go out to dinner, you know, and you get the bill and they’ve left off a course. If you don’t say, oh look, sorry, you left off that or that glass of wine or something, that’s stealing.
You’re taking something that has not been given to you that made a mistake. They haven’t, unless they have deliberately, but normally they haven’t deliberately decided to give you one free course. So stealing covers a lot of other things. When you pirate download pirate stuff. No.
You’re stealing? Yeah. What about streaming? Is that okay? I don’t know.
Streaming legal? I don’t know. You don’t keep it. You just borrow it. Just borrow it more up.
If you take something that’s not given freely, it’s stealing. So, you know, we create negative karma all the time. All the time. So they’re the three of body. The four of speech are speaking falsely, which is lying, Speaking divisively, and that is where you say something to someone with the intention that that will cause a rift between them and someone or other else.
You say it I say to you, oh, you know, god that and you you know, you’re wanting to create a rift. You’re wanting to divide people. Or if two people that you know are having, you know, are sort of divided, not having a good time, you say something to keep them apart. You don’t try and reconcile them. What do you call that?
Divisive speech. Yeah. That’s where you say nasty things, you know, to try and you know, we’ve all had it in the workplace probably someone will say something about you that’s not true that they say it to someone else to get you in their bad books. So speaking falsely, lying, divisively, harshly, we’ve all done that. You say something to people, often it’s more people you love than anything.
You just say something harsh or nasty or hurtful, you know, and often and you do it knowing that what you’re saying is harsh and is going to hurt them. We’ve all done that. And the fourth one is speaking unnecessarily. People say, oh well you know a bit of gossip doesn’t matter. But from a Buddhist point of view, it’s probably one of the worst because you do it so we do it so often, you know.
We spend whole heaps of time in gossip and gossip of course leads to starting to say nasty things about other people. Often gossip you start off in sort of innocent y kind of gossip but it gets into so and so, you know, oh, did you know what they did the other you know, and it goes on like that. Plus from a Buddhist point of view it takes you away from, you know doing sort of meaningful kind of stuff. It doesn’t mean you can’t go out with your friend for a coffee and have a bit of a chat but speaking unnecessarily can lead to you know those other divisive speech and all that kind of thing. So it’s something to really watch because we do it so often.
You can say even just speaking the truth to your family could be, you know, they might think that could be misrule to speaking unnecessarily. They might not want to hear the truth either. Speaking the truth, you mean saying something harsh? Is that what you No. I’m just saying saying up your room.
No. Just saying, you know, just saying something how you think it is, and they might not want to hear your opinion or something. But that’s just Oh, okay. So Yeah. Can that be a bad thing?
Speaking unnecessarily can be even talking to yourself. Someone else doesn’t have to even understand it. If you just wah wah wah ing on, you know, it’s just verbal diarrhoea, you know, that’s speaking unnecessarily. It’s sort of a waste of your efforts really. Silence is better probably.
But sometimes people you see it on telly on some funny shows and usually it’s a poor woman that’s fun. That’s been know, they’re going, uh-uh. The the spouse is just, you know, blocked out, not hearing anything. And the other person, that’s a bit unfair I think from a woman’s point of view, but, you know, the other person is just going on, on, on, on. No one’s listening particularly, but they’re just wah wahing on.
Or that’s unnecessary speech. It’s meaningless and it’s pointless and it’s just what’s the point of it, you know. It’s just a waste of your energies basically. Anything you do uses your energy so you want to use your energy for something really useful, not not unnecessary stuff. So they’re the they’re the four of speech.
And the three of mind are covetousness. So that’s when you really want something that someone else owns. That can be a possession. It can be a husband or wife that someone else has. You know, it could be anything.
Cover it’s not just looking at someone’s, you know, someone’s dressed up nicely and you think, oh isn’t that a nice frock or something like that. It’s coveting it, wanting it for yourself. And the negative, the non virtue of it is in your mind. I mean it could then go into stealing because you might actually covet it so much you can’t deal it. But the non virtue is the coveting of it where you really really want this thing that belongs to someone else or this person that belongs to someone else and you’re going to get it.
You know, you make up your mind to get it. I missed sexual misconduct at the beginning. Sexual misconduct was a third of the three of body. And that’s mainly, you know, for lay people is adultery or rape or, you know, some form of misconduct from a sexual nature. For monks and nuns it’s sexual conduct, full stop.
It’s not misconduct, it’s just any sexual conduct. Which is why we learn about some monks will disrobe because they wanna marry somebody and they become a non monk. But for lay people it’s normally adultery, rape, using sex as a power thing, you know, that kind of thing, violence. So that was one of the three of body. So for the mind we’ve got covetousness, ill will, that’s thinking, you know, negatively about, you know, thinking nasty thoughts about somebody, you know, wanting to thinking about wanting to wish, you know, wish them harm.
Like if you see someone you mightn’t particularly like if they come a cropper, you know, something happens, you know, and you think, yes, you know, they’ve lost all their job or something, you know, you have really ill will thoughts about them. It’s not very nice. You might you might be really nice to their face but you’ve created a really bad negative karma with your thoughts. And the third and the last one is wrong view. So that again, that’s having wrong views in relation to rebirth karma, that kind of thing.
The Buddha, it’s not having it’s not being unknowing about the thing. You know, if you’ve never thought about karma, you know, that’s one thing. This is actually looking into it looking into the issue and coming to the wrong view of it. It’s not from a point of ignorance, it’s a point of misunderstanding, it’s from a point of looking at it, deciding that it doesn’t exist. From a Buddhist point of view, that’s the wrong view.
So they’re the ten non virtues which are the contaminated actions. And depending on the severity, I suppose, or the heaviness they say doing those non virtues depends on how heavy the karma is that we create. So it depends on if you do something with great relish, know, something negative, you know, really and being happy about it, like you kill that mosquito and you feel really good about it. Or you might do it and regret it. That’s different.
It’s not so heavy karma. But if you do it with great sort of glee, then that’s that’s not very good. That’s heavier karma. There happened something really funny. I’ve seen a cockroach in the forest.
Okay. Now I wanted to be a Buddhist. Had a cup over it. I put some paper underneath. I went out with this cockroach, and paper was not really exactly, and it must have sneaked out and I heard this crunch under my foot and said, sorry, it was not meant to be.
I don’t know what’s going on here. Well you didn’t well you sort of have probably a bit of a half a karma. The fact that you killed it, but you didn’t mean to. We used to have little mouse around here a couple of years ago or probably a family of because after pooges and stuff, we’d leave all the food out. Oh, we have this, you know, and we could see this little mouse running.
We’d be sitting in teachings here when Geshe la was teaching and all the students would be all down here and we’d be watching this mouse run across the altar. We wouldn’t listen to him, we were watching it run across. And Geshe la was really concerned, because, you know, we couldn’t, you know, he was concerned because they eat anything, mice, and they might start to eat the texts up there, you know, something like that, which for the mouse is really bad bad karma, not good karma for the mouse. So we had to get these sort of humane, you know, catcher things that you get plastic. We’ve still got some around somewhere in case we need them.
These little catcher things that the mouse gets in but it doesn’t like kill or anything like that and then someone would have to we’d check it, you know, when we were doing when we were all rostered on to do the office we’d check it and if there was a little mouse in there someone would have to take it up to the park lands and let it go and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, that was so we bought that thing to get rid of the mouse, but we also decided we wouldn’t leave stuff out on the altar. You know, we tried to look at ways, you know, to try and stop the mouse. And I remember once one summer when we were having teachings, it was really hot summer, and all these little ants were coming across and all the students were because a lot of us were sitting on the floor and we’d all be moving around, you know, because we couldn’t sort of smash these ants, you know, sitting in a Buddhist teaching. Everyone would be sort of moving and wriggling around because the ants would be crawling all over our feet.
The nightmare. What do you do in those situations? When you move. So you don’t do anything, you just let them go? Crawl over.
Lama Zopa, our beloved spiritual leader, he often has all these mosquitoes sitting on him having a nice he just sees, you know, they’re having it there. I’m feeding them. That’s the way he sees it being far more advanced than we are. You know, he’s feeding them. He sees it.
What about the danger of that because they carry disease? Yeah. And that’s the I mean, you know, from a Buddhist point, for a really enlightened Buddhist, your life really is, on the one hand is not important. So if you got sick from that and died, it’s just a life. You’ve got heaps more lives.
You know, there’s another life to come. At least you haven’t killed and ended up in the lower realms or whatever. On the other hand, it’s really important that he’s here to teach us and stuff like that. So there’s this sort of balance between looking after your body and that’s, you know, the other week we had that discussion about taking advantage of having this precious body but not being so attached to it that you’re going to put yourself before others. It’s a tricky one, that one.
It is a tricky one. Can I ask you about the killing and about the vegetarianism? When I first started coming to Buddha House, I just expected everyone to be a vegetarian. And I was really shocked to find out that a lot of people ate meat. Yeah.
And then I found out that Dalai Lama ate meat. I was devastated for a while. And then so I still don’t quite understand how Yeah. If if it’s if Buddhism teaches not to kill, why are Buddhists dead meat? Yes.
And how that affects their karma. Strictly speaking, if you kill something, if you kill the animal, like a lot of farming people kill their own animals, or if you ask someone specifically to kill that animal for you, that’s a killing. If there’s a whole bunch of meat that someone else has already killed in the shop, that’s not. Well, it’s a technical. A lot of Buddhism is quite technical.
Know, it’s a lot of technicality in Buddhism. And so it’s about you with karma there’s I’m trying to think now the fourth thing. You identify the object and you actually sort of undertake, you know, the action and you complete the action and there’s another one that I can’t remember but in that instance that. Yeah. That in yeah.
So in that instance, you know, if if you identify that object and whatever the second one is that I can’t remember, but then you kill it and you complete the killing, like you don’t die before you’ve completed the act, then you there’s a full karma. What about supporting an industry? Well, that might be morally wrong, but in terms of Buddhism, terms of karma, you’re not doing the killing. There’s the moral, the bigger moral issue, admittedly. Well I guess you know ideally it would be good if no one killed any animals, but they do.
I mean, Dalai Lama, he got quite ill. He was told he must eat meat. Most of the Tibetans eat meat because they’re up on those high plateaus. That’s all they eat, yaks and all that kind of stuff. There isn’t anything else to eat.
So there’s that issue, that broader issue of if no one ate then, you know, then, you know, no one would be killing. If no one wanted to eat then no one would be killing. That’s quite true. But in terms of the specifics of karma and creating a non virtuous act for the killing, for the non virtue of killing, it’s you, you know, it relates to you doing the killing or asking someone to kill it specifically for you. If you went to a restaurant doing that by just buying from the shop?
No. No. You’re not no. People stopped eating meat, then peep then the market would stop and people would stop eating. That’s true.
And that’s a broader issue. But no, you don’t go if you went to a local butcher, say, in a local town, in a little small town or something, and you ask that butcher if he would kill some yeah, for you, that would be you act of killing because it’s because when you ask someone to specifically do something like, you know in war it’s not just the soldiers that kill it’s the generals and stuff that tell them to kill that have the same negative karma from killing. So if you ask that butcher in that small country town to kill that little land there for you that will be the same as you killing because you’re asking someone else to do it for you specifically. Maybe I’ll understand over time, but to me, I just don’t get It’s the specificity in Buddhism. There’s a lot of quite technical particular stuff that goes on.
But you know, there’s a bigger issue. There is certainly a bigger issue. But in terms of karma, in terms of you getting negative karma, you haven’t done the killing. Yeah. But I understand that.
But to me, you know, when Buddhism is about suffering and you look at all the suffering of the creatures, the fact that you partake means that you are supporting the suffering by partaking. Into something like a tiger, it’s not like you can just eat vegetables. No. But there aren’t very many Buddhist tigers. No.
There’s a lot in Thailand. I don’t think so. But but all yeah. But I can hear what you’re saying, though. But if you if you take that view, that strict view, then you wouldn’t all all the vegetables that you eat Mhmm.
Think of all the sentient beings and insects and stuff that are killed by growing those vegetables. The land’s ploughed. All the little worms and all this and that and the other that are in the land that are killed when that land is ploughed. All the animals, insects that are killed when you pull up the vegetables, harvest the vegetables. So, you know, and all the little ones that are killed, you know, as the farmers harvest the vegetables and they put them in, you know, whatever, they boil the vegetables for, you know, frozen vegetables.
You wouldn’t eat anything. So it’s it with with animals like with meat and stuff, it’s more in our face, I suppose. But if you think about it, every vegetable that you eat, heaps and heaps of little insects have been killed, growing, plowing that land, growing those vegetables, harvesting those vegetables. So, you know, the same argument applies. You wouldn’t eat any vegetables because you’re encouraging all those worms and little things to be killed, to be sprayed and all that kind of stuff.
They’re still killing, you know, they’re still growing in the ground and and there are still worms and all the little, you know, things that are growing in the ground have all these little insects around them. So when the when the ground is ploughed to plant them, you’re killing them. When when they’re pulled up, the carrots are stuffed by their roots, you’re killing all the little insects there. So, you know, you’ve got to be consistent, I guess, in a case like that. So so that’s what Buddhism Buddhism is saying that technically in terms of karma, regardless of the bigger moral issue, which you’re quite right, you don’t receive the negative impacts of karma by going to the shop and buying, you know, a pound of lamb.
If you went to a seafood restaurant and they got those, you know, stuff swimming around and you said to the guy, I’ll have that crayfish or something. That’s worth it. That is you, equivalent to you killing because you’re asking that, you know, chef to pick that one out and put it in a pot and kill it. So in that case, that would be you getting the negative karma from killing. Don’t they purify the meat before they eat as well?
Who? Yeah. Yeah. Because it’s enough. You know, you you you recognize that, you know, this animal has given up its life so that you can be healthy.
So there’s an offering there. Okay. Yeah. But you’re you’re right. It is it you know, it sort of seems a bit strange.
Yeah. Explained it that way. Nobody’s really explained it that way to me. Right. Yeah.
It’s it’s useful to think about the the vegetables because it’s easy just to you know? Because there’s so many sentient beings around, and and we forget about all the little things. The actual exact description of a sentient being? It’s a being that how can we put it? That can feel pain, can feel know suffering, if you put it like that, I suppose.
It tells us that plants can’t feel anything. Well, whether they feel in the sense of they feel suffering, like if someone cuts us we feel suffering. If you cut an animal or a bird or a worm it’ll feel that suffering. You cut a plant whether it actually feels that suffering or there’s just some reaction I think probably the jury’s out on that I don’t know. Thought aesthetic being was a being with a brain.
Well, depends what you call a brain I suppose. You know, that’s from a Buddhist point of view is if you can feel suffering and pleasure, I suppose. So you have the capacity to feel. A mosquito can feel pleasure and suffering? Well it could certainly feel suffering if you smack it.
It would feel that pain. It will feel the pain. An absence of pain is well, not pleasure, I suppose, but absence of pain is absence of pain. You know, it’s sort of pleasure from not having pain if you want to look at it for that way, I guess. So, yeah.
So the heaviness of the karma depends on on whether you do something with, you know, gleefully, one of the non virtues, how often you do it, all that kind of stuff. And the opposite of the ten non virtues are the virtues. The opposites of the ten non virtues, which is what we’re meant to abandon the ten non virtues and adopt ten virtues. And it’s not just passively not doing the ten non virtues. It’s really good to not do the ten non virtues, good to not kill whatever.
But the more important bit is to not do it when there’s an opportunity. So you can say, I’m not going to kill any more mosquitoes. I will not kill any more mosquitoes. It’s a bad thing I’ll end up in the hell realms. It’s not good, you know, it’s causing pain to someone else.
You know, the opportunity comes and it’s buzzing you in your ear and starting to hurt. If you stop yourself killing it then, that’s more powerful than if you just decide passively I won’t do it again when there’s no opportunity to. What about wearing mosquito repellent? Well, could. I don’t think they drink it in, do they?
I think it just stops them from landing. So you could do that. Yeah. That’s not bad. No.
I don’t think that’d be bad. But the better the better the best thing of all to do so it’s good to passively not do the non virtues, but it’s better to not do them when the opportunity is there. And the other thing that is best I guess is to do the opposite. So the opposites of killing are saving lives, you know, with sick people and all that kind of stuff, helping them to get better doctors. Great.
You know, they can do a lot of that. The opposite of stealing is being generous, giving, charity and that kind of thing. The opposite of sexual misconduct is being really nice to your partner, you know, loving and kind and all that. And so it goes on, you know. So if you can not do the non virtues, that’s great.
If you cannot do them when the opportunity’s there, that’s even better. If you can do the opposite, that’s the best. Once I live in an apartment building and once it was in winter and I was out the front door waiting to go in and one of the elderly women in the building was there and it was winter so there was all those millipedes around the plant. And I saw this one and I thought, oh, I better because it was near the front door. So I thought I better move it out of the way.
So that’s that’s a positive for the killing, you know, that you’re actually saving, trying to save a sentient being. So if you see little slugs and this and that in the way and the path of, you know, where they’re likely to get stomped on, if you move them out the way. And I said, oh, there’s a metapedia, I must move it out the way. And this elderly lady, who’s a really nice lady, she goes bang and squashed it dead. So, you you’ve to be a bit more skilful and maybe do it without saying anything.
That’s right, unnecessary speech. Indeed, it certainly was. Oh god. There was something else I was going to mention there on that too. I can’t remember what it was.
Yeah. Anyway, so you can look for ways to to try and save save little creatures. Now just in terms of the six the the the the six delusions that we mentioned before, there’s factors that lead to those delusions. So they just don’t pop out of nowhere. You know, you don’t all of a sudden have those delusions popping into your mind.
There’s factors that lead those delusions to those delusions coming up in your mind. And they are like latencies or tendencies that you have in your mind stream. You know, you mightn’t be an always angry person, you know. You might say, I’m not an angry person. I don’t have anger necessarily.
But there’s always a latency there and if the situation is such that something happens then that latency of anger will come up. So it’ll come up when you the other the next factor is the object. So there’s always an object of the six senses hearing, seeing, you know, whatever, smelling, something that can act as a stimulant to those latencies arising. Distracting company can cause the delusions to arise in your mind. You know, you’ve got all the great intentions to not go out and get wasted, you know, I’m like, you know, and then someone will say, just come down for one drink, you know, you go down and next thing you can’t remember what you did last night, that kind of thing.
So distracting company can cause the delusions to arise in your mind. Distracting activity can cause the delusions, anger, aversion. A lot of young young guys, you know, guys probably more than young girls I suppose, playing all those war games and stuff that can cause agitation and anger to arise in your mind. Sort of a familiarity from or habituation from previous lives. If in a previous life, I mean you see little boys sometimes, you know, I don’t know if they do so much now, crackers on, you know, cats and blowing little animals up and stuff.
They’ve got, you know, there’s something in previous lives, they’ve done that in previous lives and they’ll do it again in this life. Know, it’s a habituation from a previous life of violence whereas other little kids are really gentle and get really hurt if they see some little animal hurt. You’re bringing over from a previous life sort of tendencies. And the other one is inappropriate it’s called inappropriate fixation or attention on an object. So you inappropriately fixate on an object or an activity or something like that.
So often a lot of particularly not only women but more so women maybe than men, I don’t know, get inappropriately fixated on retail therapy. They just buy buy buy, you know, there’s just been, you know, they’re a bit depressed so that’s just, you know, it’s inappropriate fixation or attention on that. Pokeys is one too. Pokeys. Yeah.
Inappropriate fixation. You could do that with the person too when you fixated on someone. Yes. Tell yourself that they like you or something. That’s the same too, isn’t it?
Yes. Yeah. And that can either bring that could bring desire or anger, you know, if they don’t want to know you. Either. For a lot of males, like women get sort of caught up in the retail therapy.
A lot of men get caught up in pornography, particularly on the net. Inappropriate fixation on an object. So that can, you know, stimulate the delusions in our minds. So there’s all those things. The delusions just don’t come from anywhere.
There are factors that make them come about. So they’re the delusions and the non virtuous actions that all are causes of suffering. Those delusions arise in our mind, we can create wrong actions, non virtuous actions, we create negative karma and we suffer as a result of that. Because negative karma only causes suffering and positive karma only causes happiness. So that’s we probably meant to finish that last week.
That’s the second noble truth. Truth of suffering, truth the cause of suffering. The third noble truth, truth of the cessation of suffering. So the cessation of suffering is either liberation or enlightenment. And we talked the other week about liberation being freedom from suffering for ourselves alone and enlightenment being freedom, you know, becoming enlightened so that we can help others to become enlightened.
So the one is just a personal thing and the other is for other people. And the difference between them to become to be liberated, nirvana, free from suffering, you need the wisdom that realises emptiness. So you need to realise emptiness. You need that for enlightenment as well. So, you know, you have to have realised emptiness before you can either be liberated or enlightened.
But for enlightenment, you also need bodhicitta. bodhicitta. I don’t know if you’ve heard of bodhicitta. Bodhi means enlightened and Chitta means the mind. So it’s the enlightened mind or the mind of enlightenment.
The mind aspires to become enlightened for the sake of all other sentient beings. So once you realize emptiness, you can be liberated, you’ll be liberated but you also need bodhicitta to become enlightened. Because bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment is cherishing others more than ourselves. It’s it’s recognising that you yourself are suffering and you want to get out of suffering, but you know it’s a selfish thing to just want to do it for yourself. So you want to other people to also get out of suffering.
So you cherish it’s about putting others before yourself. Cherishing others before yourself. Now, know, people say, well, how can you become enlightened? And the issue is there that the delusions that we’ve just been talking about are not an integral part of our mind. They’re not intrinsic to our mind.
They’re not at one with our mind. Our mind is at basis pure. So we talk about the clear light of the mind. The pure nature of the mind, the ground luminosity. It’s a lovely phrase, ground luminosity.
So our mind at its basis, at its ground is pure clear, pure clear light. And the delusions that we’ve just been talking about are what’s called adventitious, you know. They’re not one with the mind. If they were, we would be always angry. Always angry.
Always jealous. But we’re not, you know, we are sometimes. So they come up but they’re not part of the mind. They’re not part of the pure nature of mind. They come up because we, you know, we bring them up in our mind.
We create these delusions because of the six factors that I talked about just then. But because we create them in our mind, we can take them away from our mind. We can remove them from our mind. They’re not part of our mind. And what we’re trying to do when we come enlightened is have this pure reconnect with the pure nature of our mind.
So the analogy that’s used often in Buddhism is the mirror analogy. I think it mentioned in that handout I gave you last week that a mirror is clear, know, clean mirror. Clear, clean. If you throw all this crap at it, you know, like it’s all dusty and dirty and full of rubbish. You can’t see clearly.
And that’s like our mind. Our mind at its basis is pure clear like mind, but because we put all these delusions in it, it becomes obscured. You have obscurations in your mind. And what you’re trying to do in following the path in Buddhism is to clean out or purify the obscurations from your mind. The gross obscurations, so that’s your gross delusions like anger, desire, envy, all that stuff, and the subtle karmic imprints that they leave on your mind stream on your mind stream.
So and the way to do that, well there’s lots of ways, creating merit but purifying your mind. And next week I’ll give you a handout. There’s a little easy well, it’s not easy a simple way of doing a purification practice. And Geshe la here, he’s doing each the last Wednesday and every month purification practice starting this Wednesday I think. Last Wednesday and every month does a purification practice will teach you how to do purification.
I mean Buddhists we should do well. If you do any wrong negative action you should, body, speech or mind, you should immediately do a purification. But at the very least you should do it each day. You purify, you know, you regret the negative actions you’ve done and you resolve that you try not to do them again and you do some some other little purification prayers and stuff like that. And we’ll talk about that a bit next week.
But so you can purify your mind. You can you you put the delusions into your mind and you can remove them. They’re not an intrinsic part of your mind. So in that way, you can become enlightened, liberated and enlightened. It’s all to do with your mind.
Everything in Buddhism is to do with your mind. All the teachings are mind training, mind transformation teachings. So we’ve all got the potential to become a Buddha, to be enlightened. The trouble is, you know, we often don’t have the inclination or the, you know, the time or the energy or we’re just not interested. So while we can all become enlightened, often we, you know, we just don’t want to do it.
So one of the ways that we can think about this is by concentrating on our human rebirth, meditating on our human rebirth. So we can purify our mind, we can create merit that will by doing, you know, positive things that will create positive, good karma in our mind and we can do a whole lot of stuff and some of them we’ll talk about next week. But one of the things that it’s useful to do is meditate or contemplate or think about this precious human rebirth that we have, what was called a precious human rebirth. So I think last week we talked about a human rebirth. A human rebirth is really fantastic.
You know to be born as a human and not as a mosquito or whatever or a wild animal or animal’s going to be killed or in a hell realm hungry ghosts around or whatever is really quite amazing and quite rare. If you think of the number of humans there are around I think SBS used to tell us how many, didn’t they? SBS six billion and counting, it’s the only way I knew how many there were. I think we’re up to eight billion aren’t we now or something? I don’t know, a lot of humans.
But when you think about it, the number of animals, insects, all those creatures in the sort of animal migration, there’s heaps, heaps more of them. And the teachings say there’s heaps more even again of hungry ghosts, of hell realms, you know, god realms or whatever. So there’s not a lot of humans in a way in comparison to other beings. And so having a human rebirth is really good and to have got a human rebirth you need to have had some really, really positive karma, previous positive karma. You know, you don’t get a human rebirth with a lot of negative karma.
You’ve got to have had a lot of merit, a lot of positive karma to get a human rebirth. But if you look around, you know, there’s a lot of humans on this planet that don’t look very happy, you know. There’s a lot of humans living in terrible places in the Middle East, all that stuff going on there now. Syria and Iraq and everything, you know. There’s people suffering everywhere.
There’s people living on rubbish tips in Manila and, you know, there’s people in abusive situations, you know, there’s just, you know, there’s drug addicts and, you know, there are a lot of humans that have really terrible sad horrible suffering lives so even though they had and when I first started getting you know going to teachings of Buddhism I thought you sort of it was like a step, like a ladder, like a, you know, a stairway that you sort of started off here and you did good stuff and you came back and you learnt more and you just kept going up and up. Well, no. That’s not true. You can go up and you can come down. You know, you go around and around.
Doesn’t just because you have a good human rebirth by having a lot of really positive previous karma doesn’t mean that next birth is going to be even better human rebirth. Next birth might be a terrible rebirth. So that explains the people in jail for murder and all that. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. If you have a human rebirth, you’ve had really good throwing karma. karma’s a big topic. We can’t even touch on it in this course but if you have a peaceful positive mind at death you have a good throwing karma and you might a human rebirth. But there’s a whole bunch of other karma sitting around in your mind stream and that is what we call completing karma.
So you could have a human rebirth which is good but your completing karma can be particularly negative and you end up, you know, in all sorts of horrible situations. Same with an animal. I mean being reborn as an animal was not good, not good. But, so you would have had negative karma throwing karma to throw you into the next rebirth as an animal. But you’re completing karma you could have some positives.
If you’re a little animal that’s a dog or a cat, you know, in a loving family, you know, being looked after, being cared for, the Queen’s Corgi or whatever, you know. That’s good positive, good completing karma ripening. You know So does that mean that when they die they might be reborn as a human? Not necessarily. It depends I mean the trouble is if you’re born as an animal you don’t get hard to understand the Buddha, the Dharma teachings.
Mean Lama Zopa, he’ll get animals to go round and round stupas and stuff like that. You know, he says it excuse me, it can plant lots of negative positive seeds, karmic seeds in their mind. Who knows? People relate to their karma and how they live their life as an animal. Yes.
Yeah. And as you’re saying, you know, a lot of animals in the wild, all they do is just kill, kill, kill. So, you know, they’re stuck in this really horrible sort of cycle. You see some dogs that save, you know, dogs that save little kids and all that kind of stuff. That’s really good.
You know, they’re creating this really good karma. So when we talk about a human rebirth, it’s not always it’s not necessarily a great human rebirth. There’s a lot of people on this planet with shocking having a shocking time of it. So what in Buddhism, what we’re talking about, what we’re aiming for, and what we in this room have got is a precious human rebirth, which is even rarer, harder to get than a human rebirth. And a precious human rebirth has a number of qualities.
Eight leisures and ten endowments or eight freedoms and ten richnesses. There’s various different terms that are used. There’s lots of nots in the first bit. Not being born in the hell realm, not being born in a hungry ghost or an animal realm or a long life god realm. So not being born in those realms is good.
Not being born in a country where there’s no Buddhist teachings, you know, in a country as a barbarian, irreligious country I think the texts say, irreligious country as a barbarian. Basically, know, we haven’t been born in a country where there’s no access to the teachings. What’s that? Five. Not having wrong views, you know, so if we believe, you know, in rebirth and karma, that’s good.
What have we got? Oh, the Buddha having appeared. So even though the Buddha’s not here with us now, he has appeared in this sort of eon or this period and, you know, where we are and his teachings have come down. And the other one is having complete faculties is the way it’s described. So this means, you know, you’ve got all your mental and your physical faculties.
Now, I mean these days there’s a lot more help for people particularly with physical disabilities in terms of getting around and all that kind of stuff and accessing teachings for instance. But still there’s a lot of people with physical disabilities who are in a lot of pain and it’s just hard to study the Dharma or come to teachings. And in terms of mental, not having all your mental faculties, that’s like, you know, if you’ve got a strong intellectual disability, you know, you can’t understand. You can’t understand them. So they’re the eight endowments and eight endowments.
Sorry, eight leisures. So we haven’t been born in the four non free states, it’s called. We haven’t been born in hell realm, hungry ghost realm, animal realm or a long life god. We haven’t been born in a country where there’s no teachings. We don’t have wrong views, hopefully We have all our faculties and the Buddha has appeared The ten endowments or richnesses, there’s five that are personal and are sort of in a way a bit the opposite to the ones I’ve just said.
We’re born a human. We’re born with all our mental and physical faculties. We’re born in a place where there are teachings and there’s, you know, monks and nuns to teach us. We haven’t committed any of the five acts of immediate retribution which are killing your mother, killing your father, killing an arhat which is a kind of highly realized being, wounding a Buddha or causing a rift in the Sangha community. Presumably we haven’t done any of those.
We’re not killing our parents. And we have faith in the foundation, means, you know, faith in the teachings, faith in the power of aspirational prayers. Aspirational prayers in Buddhism are aspirations, prayers that you say to aspire you to to you know create positive qualities in your mind that kind of stuff they’re not prayers to a god necessarily you might pray to Tārā to give you strength to do something or whatever or pray to Medicine Buddha for health but they’re not prayers like to a creator god but aspirational prayers are prayers that you say to aspire you to be a positive person. So they’re the five personal richnesses and then there’s five that are sort of conditioned by others like the Buddha having arrived, the Buddha having taught, the teachings continuing. So these teachings have come down to today.
There being monks and nuns that that teach the Dharma like we have here and there are benefactors and people who support the monks and nuns because you know if there weren’t benefactors and people who like Buddha House, you know, as you know, or some of you might know, we’ve just got a new Buddha House that we’re about we’ll move into at the end of the year. So I won’t have the dancing girls. That mainly has come, you know, a huge donation from an Asian benefactor, a huge donation. But we’re all putting bits of money, you know, people give their time at Buddha House. And so you have benefactors or people that support, the teachers.
We have centers here that we can come to. So, for sort of, you know, hopefully, people in this room at least, we have what’s called a precious human rebirth. We’ve got all that stuff. I mean, you might have I mean, I’ve got, you know, my sister, she she’s, a really nice person. She’s born a human.
She’s got all her faculties. Know, she lives in an area where you know, a place where there’s teachings. Yada yada. She hasn’t killed her mother and father, etcetera. But she’s got no interest, you know, she’s got no faith in Buddhism.
You know. So so usually with those eight freedoms and ten endowments, there’s most of those we meet. There’s most of those a lot of people in Australia could say meet those. But there’s a couple like not having faith in the teachings or not attending the teachings that they don’t meet. So for those people, really nice people, they don’t have a precious human rebirth.
They have a human rebirth, but not a precious one. You have to have met all those sort of, so to speak, you know, ticked all those boxes to have a precious human rebirth. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. What is it would be a very difficult philosophy to follow if you didn’t have any money.
If you didn’t have any money? Because it’s one of the most expensive philosophies I’ve ever found. It costs so much money to come to sort a house. Twenty five dollars here, twenty dollars here. If you can’t afford it, you know, you can if someone can’t if you know someone that can’t afford to pay for the teachings, you can always we don’t want to turn anyone away we can always talk to Judy, our SPC, and see if there’s, you know, some people do other things instead of, you know, they’ll clean the gompa or, you know, they’ll come and help set up and do various things like that.
Yeah. Know what I know what you mean. Because I was just so surprised because when I looked at how many times I wanted to come a week Yeah. And how much that was costing, it was just like I couldn’t afford it. Yeah.
I know. I know. And then I realized that with the new Gomper and everything and because, you know, the nuns the monks and the nuns need to be supported financially to live. Yes. We’ve got huge costs.
Yeah. Huge costs. I know what you mean, but certainly we never want to turn anyone away or not have and there are people that, you know, there’s payment in kind, so to speak, that they’ll, you know, do stuff around the place, volunteer if they can’t afford to. And that was one of the things that concerned me about Buddhism, to be honest, that I was wondering, well, what happens to people who can’t afford it? Yeah.
Well Where do they not get to learn? Well, that’s that that is one of their karmas, isn’t it? You know? One of their they’re in a situation where they don’t necessarily can’t access the teaching. I mean, days, you can access it more because you can do online stuff.
It is easier these days than it ever used to be. I mean way back. I now get a lot of newsletters from all over the world about Buddhist, different organisations that I try and read but nothing beats actually being together. No. In the community and meditating together.
That’s right. That’s right. And having teachings. And and the teachers would say that, you know, a group that comes to a teaching with Geshe la or whatever, that group in previous lives was together then as well. Interesting, you know, you were a group that used to you know, coming to teachings for some previous monk somewhere.
It’s nice. It’s a nice, you know, you the the joint karmic joint karma brings you together again life after life. That’s interesting. But, yeah, I know I know what you mean, but certainly we try not to. I mean some centres just have a donation but there’s no way we try and keep the costs really down but there’s no way we can even here, you know, the rent on this place over a year is quite substantial plus we have the the flat where the Geshe lives which is, you know, the cost of a unit these days and plus we have, you know, all the other stuff we have to pay for here, the electricity and, you know, all that kind of stuff Plus we’ve got our other monk on retreat and the new place will be even more expensive because we own it and we have to pay back this loan, this very very generous loan that we got.
It was a loan and it has to be paid back. Plus we’ll have, you know, rates and taxes, electricity, you know, whatever. So we try to keep the teachings down the cost, but you just can’t do it. But I know what you mean but certainly if someone if there are people that cannot if you know many that just cannot afford it. But some people I mean it’s to do with priorities as well.
Some people spend nothing of having three buying three coffees a day at four bucks a pop every day, you know, when they’re working, you know, twelve bucks a day or something like that. People don’t think anything of that, but they but they would have trouble, you know, with twenty five bucks or something a week to come to teachings. More than twenty five bucks. Well, if you wanna come twice a week, you mean? Yeah.
Or three times a week. Yeah. Then it becomes expensive. It does. It does.
I mean, maybe yeah. Just need to come so often. Yeah. Yeah. Just on this rebirth Yeah.
We will always come back as humans. No. No. No. Okay.
I understand that. So and we could be if we do come back to the gyms, we could be born off for sex. Could be a female. Oh, sure. Yeah.
These people that are born transgender thought they were born, but then they’re in another body. What’s going on there in the Buddhist? Interesting question. Yes. I don’t know from a Buddhist point of view.
I mean, it’s their karma that they’re born that way. But, I mean, once upon a time, of course, now homosexuality or lesbianism or whatever transgender everything is far more acceptable even though it’s not completely acceptable. Lots of people, poor things of the world that don’t like it properly. But once upon a time, you know, it was a criminal offence certainly for men and it was terrible, you know, it was really you just hit it and whatever. So for those people, you know, that karma that threw them into a situation where they had to, you know, live in fear often, you know, being found out for their sexuality was is a negative karma that they were is a ripening of a negative karma from a previous life.
These days it’s far more the sort of how could you put it? The group karma is far more positive. The group karma, this change in society’s norms and stuff like that is far more positive. Does Clarissa have a a thought on on homosexuality? Or No.
I don’t I don’t I’m just trying to think what the Dalai Lama might might have said about it. He has been asked about that. I don’t think there’s a sort of a really strong view. I mean, it’s the issue about sexual misconduct that, you know, it’s not used as a in a misconduct y kind of way, but you know for a lot of same sex, you know, same sex marriage and stuff they’re committed people, you know, committed to their partner and that so that would not fall, I don’t think, under sexual misconduct. No.
A monk who’s died of old age has ever been found to be a woman. Say that again. A monk? Yeah. A monk who’s died of old age when the burial process and he was destroyed was found to be a woman.
I haven’t heard of that. I haven’t heard of have you heard of that? Oh, my mind just works. Yes. I dreamed there was one Yes.
Just creating this. I haven’t heard of it. Because men in the war, women would go to war because they’d go with men. Yes. Yeah.
I’m just wondering whether women wanted to be a monk so much that They could be a nun. But nuns haven’t haven’t always had such a good time. Even even now, nuns have heaps more vows than monks. And a nun, no matter how senior a nun would be, junior to a monk. The Kamappa, who’s the sort of head of the Kagyu school of Buddhism as the Dalai Lama is the head of the Gelugpa school.
We won’t get into that but anyway. The Kamappa is a sort of like there’s the Dalai Lama, the Pänchen Lama who’s been spirited away by the Chinese and then a Karmapa, a young guy who escaped from the Chinese. He’s trying to do a lot for the nuns. He’s trying to bring about a whole lot of change for nuns to recognise that they’re not sort of like it’s a cultural thing from way back being inferior to, you know, monks. It’s just women being inferior to men in general.
Well, that’s right. That’s true. That’s true. Is that for a being that you see a monk? Nun?
The nuns. Monks are men. Yeah. Monks are men. Nuns are women.
Same as Jesuits or whatever. Same as in Christianity, the monks are men. Do they wear the same? Well, the nuns in Burma wear pink color. They wear robes.
Yeah. No. Christianity wear those big bits of attire. Different Attire, the men and women. Nuns and priests are Oh, yeah.
But nuns and monks in Christianity wear the same robes. Like the Franciscan monks, you know, they got their long, you know, brown, I think they are robes. So, yeah. It’s probably a in the hot countries, you know, it’s just easier to do it that way. I don’t know.
Yeah. Okay. Okay. How are we going? We’ll stop in a minute.
It’s nearly quarter two. Oh. We might do a meditation in a minute. So, anyway, we started on the cessation. So the cessation, you know, there is a cessation to suffering.
You need wisdom realizing emptiness ongoing, you know, twenty four hours a day and you need ongoing spontaneous forever bodhicitta, the wish to achieve enlightenment in order to enlighten others, help others towards enlightenment. The mind, if you think of it like the mirror, it’s pure nature, it’s clear but we have all this crap that goes on in our mind which sort of dirties our mind but we can purify it with purification practices and by doing positive merit, you know, the ten virtues, can, you know, increase our merit and get a lot of good karma. We all have the ability to be Buddhist but it’s up to us whether we want to bother about it. But certainly with the precious human rebirth, you know, gives us this amazing opportunity to sort of move along the path to the cessation of suffering, to enlightenment, if we choose to do that. And next week we’ll talk about the path and what’s involved in the path and you know some of the things that we can do.
But but if you like, can do a meditation. We can do a meditation on the precious human rebirth. So make it a bit more meaningful to us. So I don’t know if you’re probably meditating. You’ve probably med been meditating out.
Meditated out. Yeah. Can record. So what we’ll do is a is a meditation. Now last week, we did a short meditation, mindfulness mindfulness meditation on the breath, if you recall.
So mindfulness meditation is where we’re mindful of something. In that case it was the breath. We’re trying to focus our mind so that we don’t have scattered energies, don’t have our thoughts, you know, speeding around all over the place. We’re just focusing on one thing, in that case the breath, so we’re mindful of it. Because the idea is to try and slow down our thoughts, to try and focus our mind on one thing so that next week we’ll talk very briefly about, you know, concentration, single point and concentration.
You need that calm abiding before you can try and realise emptiness. So it’s really important to try and, you know, focus our mind and meditation is the way to try and do that. Excuse me. But there’s other ways of meditating. There’s what’s called analytical meditation.
And in terms of Buddhist study, a lot of what the meditation we should do is analytical meditation where you look at a certain topic and you analyse it, you know, you contemplate it, you try and see how your attitude relates to it, you know, what your attitude in life is to this particular thing. You try and see if it can make a difference in your life by thinking of it in a different way, that kind of thing. And all the different, you know, topics on the path to enlightenment can be topics to meditate on through an analytical meditation. So we’ll do a guided Turn the lights down. Oh, yeah.
Just shut him. Turn the lights down. Oops. Alright. Can you turn the not yeah.
Those ones. Not this because I’ve gotta see. I’ve gotta read. So this will be an analytical meditation, but it’s a guided meditation. So I’ll guide you in it.
I’ll sort of say different things, talk different things. So just sort of concentrate on what I’m saying and try and contemplate what I’m saying and see how it relates, you know, in your life. And and we’ll see how we go. I want that one. So just take your meditation posture.
Make sure you’ve got a stable posture, eyes closed, feet flat on the ground if you’re sitting in your chair, which you all are. Your hands just loosely in your lap with your left with your right hand on top of your left hand and your thumbs touching. It just creates a little energy circle. Make sure your back’s straight but not rigid. Keep that curve in your back.
Don’t have your head up to the ceiling or down too tightly. Just sort of have it straight with your lips just touching with your mouth and your jaw loose and relaxed. And your tongue just at the back of the top of your teeth by the hard palate. Just resting gently there. And just quieten your mind.
Just let go of all the thinking we’ve been doing for the moment. Just check through your body that there’s no tight, tense bits. Just go through your scan through your body, all the muscles in your scalp, your forehead, and your eyes, little tiny muscles there, ears and your cheeks and your mouth, your jaw, your throat. Just soften all the muscles and let go of any tension in your shoulders, in your arms, in your hands, fingers, the back of the neck, your chest, your stomach, your shoulder blades, the middle of your back, the small of the back, and the buttocks. Just relax your whole trunk.
Your legs, your thighs, knees, calf muscles, shins, your ankles, your feet and your toes. Just go through and breathe out any tension. Soften. And just bring your mind home. Do a little motivation.
It’s good to do a motivation at the beginning of a meditation and dedicate at the end. Gives it a context. You can say any motivation to yourself, but often as Buddhists we say that, you know, with the motivation to do particular meditation or whatever, our motivation is to reach enlightenment for the sake of all beings. And to do that, we’ll do this meditation. The starting point of many problems is the way we feel about ourselves and our life.
human existence is very precious, but normally we fail to appreciate it. We have so much potential, so much latent wisdom and loving kindness, so much to offer the world. But we may ignore or be unaware of this and so let ourselves become clouded with depression. Focusing on shortcomings in our character and failings in our dealing with people and work or the harm we may have done to others, we develop an unfair low opinion of ourselves. We can unlock the potential for happiness and satisfaction that lies within every one of us by becoming aware of our mental processes and then applying discriminating wisdom to all our actions of body, speech and mind.
We must start by building a firm foundation based on a realistic view of ourselves. We have to accept our positive as well as our negative traits and determine to nourish the good and transform or eliminate the bad aspects of our character. And eventually, we will recognize how fortunate we are to have been born human. And once we understand this, we can begin to train our minds to achieve enlightenment. Contemplate that the nature of your mind is clear and pure and has the potential to become enlightened, the state of complete purity, goodness and perfection.
And this is true for yourself and all other beings. You can think, for example, the nature of every being’s mind is clear like space, vast and unlimited. Our negative thoughts and emotions are not permanent, fixed parts of the mind, but are transient, like clouds that pass through the sky. And because they are based on ignorance and misconceptions, they can be cleared away and the mind can be developed to a state that is completely pure and positive. If you find it difficult to accept that the mind has the potential to become enlightened, you can think of the positive qualities that you have: intelligence, loving kindness, compassion, generosity, courage, and remind yourself that these can be developed even further and that you can use your life to bring benefit and happiness to others.
Although all beings have the potential to transform their mind and become enlightened, not all beings are in the most ideal situation in which they can recognize and develop this potential. human beings are generally in the best situation. Nonhuman beings either have too much suffering or are incapable of developing their potential due to ignorance and other delusions. Imagine what it would be like to be an animal, for example. Animals in the wild have no one to care for them when they experience hunger, thirst, heat, cold, sickness or injuries, and are in almost constant fear for their lives.
Domestic animals are sometimes better off but lack freedom and are often killed for meat, fur or other products. And all animals, even the most intelligent, have extremely limited mental capacities and are unable to develop themselves intellectually or spiritually. Contemplate this to get a sense of how fortunate you are to have a human life. However, not all human beings have the right conditions to recognise and develop their potential. Imagine, for example, being a destitute beggar or living in a war zone.
Most of your time and energy would be spent simply trying to keep yourself and your family alive. You would have little or no time to think of anything else such as spiritual practice. Imagine suffering from a severe mental disability or illness, which would make it very difficult for you to understand the teachings on the mind’s potential and how to develop it. Or having a physical condition that caused you a great deal of pain, discomfort and inconvenience and hindered your ability to learn and practice spiritual teachings. And some people do not have access to spiritual teachings that explain the mind’s potential and how to develop it.
Imagine spending your entire life in a small remote village where no one has even heard about enlightenment, so there’s no opportunity to learn how to attain it. Other people may be aware of their potential and sincerely wish to practice the teachings on how to develop it, but are prevented from doing so by others. For example, people in some countries do not have freedom of religion. Others face strong objections from their parents, their spouse or children. Imagine yourself in such a situation, recognize how difficult it would be, and appreciate the freedom that you have.
Then there are many people who are physically and mentally healthy, are materially well off, and have the freedom and opportunity to learn spiritual teachings, but are simply not interested. Their interests lie elsewhere in accumulating wealth, property and possessions, acquiring worldly knowledge or skills, or in simply experiencing as much pleasure as they can. They never consider that all these things will be left behind when they die, like a dream that vanishes as soon as we wake up, and that only their mind will continue to the next life. Some people engage in harmful actions such as killing, stealing, being abusive or dishonest, not realising that these actions cause suffering to themselves and to others and create further obstacles to discovering their true potential. Recognize how fortunate you are to be interested in enlightenment and in using your life in meaningful, beneficial ways for yourself and for others.
Now bring to mind the positive qualities and advantages that you have. You are a human being with an intelligent mind, a loving heart and a body you can put to good use. There are people who care about and support you, family, friends, a spiritual teacher. You have opportunities to pursue your creative, intellectual and social interests. You enjoy a good standard of living.
At least you have enough to stay alive. And most of all, you have the potential and the opportunity because of all the other benefits to investigate, understand and transform your mind. And even if your life does not afford as much freedom and comfort as you would like, and even if you have to live with some very difficult problems and challenges, no matter where you are and what conditions you live in, you can always work on your mind. And think now how few people or creatures on earth share these freedoms and chances with you. When you have considered this deeply, you will realize how rare and precious a life like yours is.
Really appreciate your good fortune. Once you have seen the disadvantages your life is free of and the advantages you enjoy, decide how best to use your precious opportunities. Think of all the possibilities open to you: work, travel, enjoyment, study. If you wish to offer service to others, there are countless opportunities to help those less fortunate than you. But the most meaningful and beneficial thing you can do, both for yourself and others, is to develop yourself spiritually, overcoming the negative aspects of your mind and increasing the positive and actualizing your potential for enlightenment.
Try to see the limitations of a lifestyle geared solely to materialistic gain. Think of the insignificance of fame, wealth, reputation and sensual indulgence when compared to the goal of enlightenment. Why aspire to only temporal achievements when we are capable of so much more? See if you can feel a sense of joy and appreciation for the wonderful situation you have. Resolve to use your life wisely, doing your best to avoid harming others and instead helping them as much as you can and developing your love, your compassion, your wisdom, and other positive qualities that will enable you to actualize your highest potential.
And then finally, dedicate the energy and inspiration you’ve gained from this meditation to the ultimate happiness of all beings. And then gently open your eyes. Come back into the room. Like, two.