Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A personal story about learning to bake cakes anchors the central argument of this 45-minute introductory retreat session: finding a spiritual teacher follows the same logic as finding any qualified instructor — check credentials, check reputation, then commit. Geshe Pema Tsering first explains how to approach Buddhist teachings as practical instruction rather than dogma, surveys the Lamrim’s three-scope structure, and introduces Buddha nature as innate potential. He then extends the cake analogy into a detailed guide on evaluating and committing to a teacher. The session closes with impermanence and death meditation — a holiday analogy makes the case that facing mortality generates urgency for practice, not despair — and ends with a brief distinction between concentration and analytical meditation. Suitable for newcomers to Tibetan Buddhism.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 Retreat.mp3
UUID: c2bd0c03-af41-4e9f-82a4-dae4d081bff1
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Retreat Jan (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~9,107
For doing this activity of listening to Buddhist teachings, thinking about their meaning, seeing if there’s something useful there for us. Just thinking that thought. Okay. I’m sitting here because I know I definitely wanna be more happy, less neurotic, less suffering, more clear, more wise, more compassionate, more loving. Thank you very much.
Yes. I want that. Well, Buddha says we can have it. It’s our nature. So on the basis of listening to this stuff today, may we sow the seeds into our mind for exactly this result, the development of our marvelous potential for the sake of all beings.
So, okay, last night we looked at this approach. It’s really to get a feeling of the approach of how of what it is what it means to bring Buddhism into your life, you know? That’s why we until we discussed it’s like the way to listen, to hear this stuff as something in an objective way, not hear it in the way we tend to think of religion as something you just gotta swallow, you know? Believe in a hundred percent, not like that. Listen to it as something, you know, with an objective mind, very open mind.
In the same just in the same way that you’d listen to instructions from a doctor. You’d hear it as something personal. That’s something important. Or either way you’d listen to an explanation of how of how to do something. You know, first you have to hear that you want to do it, and then you have to hear clearly how to do it and it’s completely our choice whether we do it or not it’s our decision and then two, the crucial thing is that it’s practical, not just a bunch of ideas that you’re supposed to sort of say, now I believe that I’m a Buddhist, I believe in that That’s not it’s like saying, I believe in pianos, you know, so I’m a pianist.
Believing in a pianist, you know, in music doesn’t help. You have to practice it. Even if you’re you know, you might have taken refuge once as a Buddhist a few years ago. If you’re not doing it every day, you’re not a Buddhist. You gotta put your money where your mouth is, you know?
So to hear it as something eminently practical, to hear it like that is very important. And then to know that, as we said last night, As Lama Tsongkhapa says, there’s no contradiction between scripture and practice. Everything is to be taken as sound advice, you know, as there’s no contradiction between scripture and practice. So that’s the way to hear it. It mightn’t be applicable to you right now.
That’s okay. That’s just fine. But the principle is that everything said in this room is something that eventually can be practiced, be tasted. It’s important to hear it like that, not as there’s some intellectual interesting ideas or some kind of holy thing, like I said, that you’re supposed to believe in. It’s more dynamic than that.
This is how we ought to take all our spiritual paths, you know, for something tasty and real. So here we’re presenting way Buddha sees reality Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist psychology. And as we said last night, you know, very essence of practice in Buddhism is learning to see things differently, because Buddha is saying we’ve these series of very strong assumptions, deeply held assumptions in our being, I mean, in our bones so deep, that we have brought with us, that we haven’t been taught even in this life. That k? What?
Can I? Doesn’t see it’s got such a thing, so I have to shout more. It’s on on. Oh, you did it. Oh, very good.
Thank you so much. Okay. Can you hear me? Good. Alright.
Where was I? Okay. Yeah. So as I said, yeah, just to reiterate this point, that what Buddha is saying is that we have a series of assumptions deep in our being that are very ancient and old within us that we simply take as the truth. This is what Buddha is saying.
He’s presenting his view of how things are, and he says that our assumptions of how things are, the way we hold now, are actually contrary to how things are. So we’re always crashing into things, which is always why we suffer. So he’s saying the extent to which we have certain assumptions, which aren’t in sync with reality, is the extent to which we suffer. So what being a Buddhist means, and let’s face it, it’s the same as being a Christian, communist, being anything else, you change your view of reality, you change your philosophical assessment, don’t you? You change your assumptions about things.
So those assumptions then, you know, dictate how you respond to certain situations. Well, Buddha’s view is when change fundamentally our our assumptions and bring them into line with how things are, and this is, know, Buddha’s view of how things are, then then then we will find what we want, which is happiness. And we’ll avoid suffering. It’s it’s it’s like it’s difficult. It’s difficult to do, but it’s as simple as that.
The essence of it is is that. This is what we’re trying to do. This is what the meaning of practice is, but it’s kind of, you know, doing this and something magical happens. It’s very it’s very tasty. It’s very kind of hands on.
So being your own therapist is this job of first listening to Buddha’s view of reality. Like being a gardener doesn’t just go out don’t kinda go out there and get all kinda cosmic and start pulling things out and growing things. You gotta know what you’re doing first. You’ve to go learn boring old botany, isn’t it? So here, being your own therapist, transforming your mind, changing your views of reality, to be in sync with how things are, is not an easy job.
You’ve to go learn the theories first, and this is here we’re discussing the words, the Buddhist words, which we then incorporate gradually if we choose to into our mind, and therefore shifting the way things are, know, shifting the views of how things are. So we’re changing our minds. So what part of our mind? Well, part, You know? This part.
It stems from here, but it’s here. This is where we feel it all, isn’t it? All our emotions, you know? So anyway, what we’re doing is presenting this this weekend. Presenting this, as I said, we started last night, presenting this Buddha’s deal of reality in this particular packaging that’s unique to Tibet called the Lamrim, graded path, steps on the path, and it’s divided into three scopes.
And each of them is simply the points in these various scopes are presenting the points of Buddha’s views about how things are, which through certain types of meditation one incorporates into one’s mind. So the very very kind of the very in the first scope, you can say the very essence of the practice is to learn to abide by the laws of karma. Would would you know, and we’ll get to this. This is the very heart of the first scope of practice. The very heart of the second scope of practice is based on that, but goes more deeply into really being your therapist, really looking at how to go beyond all suffering altogether.
And the third scope is where we learn to benefit others. The first two scopes are the work we do on our own mind, in a sense you can say for our own benefit, and don’t underestimate that. Don’t think that’s not spiritual. And then in the third scope, on the basis of success in the first two, we then are capable, we learn to how to transform, how to develop love, compassion, and the other qualities, to genuinely be of use to others, you know. So the very essence, as I said, of the first scope of practice is learning to abide by the laws of karma, that’s where we begin to put our money where our mouth is.
But before this, there were a series of kind of contemplations that Atisha, Lama Atisha, this Indian, this tenth century Indian saint and scholar who wrote, who put this little text together called The Lamp on the path, which this Lamrim is based on, he gets us to do various other contemplations that kind of prepare our mind to really begin to practice. And then even before this, there are some things that are useful to contemplate to give us some background. And the first one we discussed last night, which is looking at what the mind is. We need to know this because all Buddha’s dealing very much with the mind. The mind is where you do the work, so we need to be clear about what it is.
So like we said last night, mind is not the brain. Mind is not merely the intellectual process. It is the entire spectrum of our inner experiences. You know, from in the intellectual, positive, negative, thoughts, feelings, emotions, positive, negative, you know. Unhappy ones, happy ones.
Instinct, intuition, unconscious, subconscious, soul, spirit, the whole deal, that’s your mind, you know. Not physical. Doesn’t come from god or buddha, not created. Doesn’t come from mom and dad. Is it you know, and it can’t come from nothing.
So only other option that the mind can even think of is that it comes from previous moments of itself. And this is the Buddhist idea, of course, of reincarnation. This is where that comes from. This consciousness of ours is is not physical and doesn’t come from those other external sources, is its own thing. So whatever’s in our mind now, and we’re just experiencing just the tip of the iceberg of it, is is the result of what we have done before.
Whatever we experience is what we have done before. All this has to do with karma, which we’ll get to. So this this consciousness of ours is what is what it is, it’s beginningless, non physical, not created, is ours. It’s mine. Whatever’s in here is mine.
You know, I put it in here, nobody else, from before before before. Then the other point in Buddhism, of course, is that the main point we mentioned last night is that we all possess this astonishing potential to be perfect, quite literally. To become Buddha, Buddha says. You know? Buddha nature.
We all possess Buddha nature. It’s like who we are. We don’t have a choice in a sense, Buddha says, know. We don’t have a choice but to become who we really are, to develop ourselves fully into a Buddha. Full development of wisdom, compassion, whatever.
Beyond which you can’t develop further. That’s what Buddhism says. So the purpose of being a Buddhist in this sense is to develop is to become that. It’s not just to sort of become more peaceful now, it’s not become relaxed, it’s not to become more mindful, they’re all the methods that you use to become who you really are, you know, and it’s not it might not happen just in this life, just this moment in time, because consciousness is a continuity that didn’t begin at birth, that didn’t begin at birth and won’t end at death, you know. This is a tiny fraction of our continuity of mental experiences.
So given that it’s my continuity of mental experiences, it’s my job to fix it up, you know. And then first level of it is and it’s perfectly reasonable. This is the first scope of practice. The first level of our real awareness the first level of our practice, the one of abiding by the laws of karma, is mainly in terms of ensuring that given that my mind will continue, continue, continue, then I better be very, know, I better be I bet I’m the one in control of it, of what it will be experiencing in the future. And that this concept of karma determines that, you know.
So it’s my responsibility. So this is just some of the main points about what mind is as a starting point, otherwise we’re gonna get very confused, know. We have to know what the mind is and what it’s not. This is the Buddhist view. Then okay, then the next contemplation, given that I’ve got this amazing potential, then I hope that the reasonable thing to do is to find someone who can show me how to develop it.
Now even to make a cake, we need someone to show us, don’t we? Our mom, you know, whoever. Even to make something as simple as a cake, it is we need someone to help us learn how to do it. It’s clear. It’s the it’s the most obvious way to learn something in this life is to ask someone who knows how to do it to show you, You know?
So of course, if you’re thinking in terms of becoming an omniscient, compassionate, all loving, all wise, all, you know, amazing being, my goodness, we definitely need to know the methods. You just don’t cross your fingers and hope for the best. We don’t learn anything that way. It’s kind of naive to think that’s what you do, and unfortunately with spiritual practice we tend to think that. It’s kind of kind of we get a bit gaga, we get a little bit kind of gaga when we think about spiritual.
We’ll go a bit vague, you know. Like I said last night, the Buddhist approach is it’s as practical as anything else. The methods, you know. Gotta have methods, techniques. So we need a teacher.
So in this approach here, you know, there are very particular ways of finding a teacher, recognizing and, you know, finding an appropriate teacher. So in our culture, this is what of course mean, we have to first establish what spiritual path we want to learn, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re in Tibet, ninety nine point nine percent of the people were Buddhist. Not just that, they were Tibetan Buddhist, so it kind of narrowed their options, didn’t it? They never worried too much, know, do I want to be a communist, want to be a feminist, I want to be a Buddhist, they get kind of, you know, the shopping supermarket full of things.
They had limited limited limited possibilities. So for us, we obviously need to, know, what’s what we probably many of us are doing in this course, to check it out, know, to see if something in Buddhism that I find useful. And that’s our job, that’s our job to discover. There are an awful lot of spiritual paths around, and indeed I bet plenty of them are not valid, plenty are valid, so we have to check carefully. So this is before we even find a teacher, we need to even find a path that is reasonable, you know.
So some of us might bump into a person who’s a teacher, and then we discover, oh, that’s our path. But many of the times we don’t often, we don’t do that, we have to check, check first. Is it Buddhism? Is it this? Is it that?
What’s it called? You know? How do I find it? That’s completely appropriate. Okay.
Finding a teacher. Well, you know, in the in the traditional this presentation in the Lamrim, there are very detailed presentations of of having found one. Oh, no. Even first how you find, how you check, how you assess, you know? And then having found, how you then devote yourself as they say appropriately to that teacher.
So there’s a series of things we want to talk about here. But first I think is to see the necessity for a teacher. Now I think as I said, know, the simplest thing we need to learn. We don’t often think of it like that. We don’t think, Oh gosh, where’s my teacher to show me how to make cakes?
You can’t go to a recipe book. Or I mean, who wrote a recipe book? It didn’t fall out of the sky like that. It came from some human being, isn’t it? So you can say, Betty Crocker’s your cake guru.
Whatever, wherever you learned your things, you all have to learn it someone else. It’s just reasonable. When you think how long it would take us to learn how to make a cake if we decided, well, I’m going do it myself. I’m not going get any instructions from anybody. Then someone just shows you a chocolate cake and you’ve to then go and do all the scientific investigation to learn the contents and how you put it together.
You spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and it’ll take you a long time. So much easy to just go ask your mum, know. Isn’t it? Mean, you know, it’s a very interesting point, I always use this as an example, but it’s a really good one me, when I first did learn to make cakes. This is exactly how it is to find a spiritual teacher.
And I’m not kind of joking, it’s quite true. Well, first of all, I wasn’t five when I learned to make cake, I was twenty eight, I remember. I was a hippie at the time, and I was living in England, and I had come home to see my and I decided I want to learn how to make cakes, because hippies make cakes, right? Some carrot cake or something. So, I asked my mum to show me how to make a cake.
Well, it turned out, I remember distinctly, I remember the day, the time, the kitchen, the feeling, everything about it was the most important moment. And this is the point. It was the first time that cakes became real to me. And that’s the function of the human being who shows you how to do something. And that’s the that’s the preciousness of a teacher, you know.
Incredible. I remember the time, it was actually an apple and walnut cake, it wasn’t carrot cake. But I remember the first time, you know, and also my mother was interesting, they say with a teacher, you know, Buddhism there’s a strong emphasis in not trying to make people Buddhist. You don’t tell people about it unless they ask you. And actually that’s just very skillful.
You think about it. We all know we don’t like having things shoved down our throat. We all know you bring a horse to water, can’t make it drink. So it’s very skillful psychologically. And it’s appropriate, you know.
It’s only when we are ready for something that we will go to it. Okay, if a person is skillful, they can say a certain word that might put the seed in our mind, but that person has to even know enough to know that it’s appropriate to say those words. Now my mother, knowing her daughter, knew there was no benefit in trying to push her to make her learn how to make cakes and cook and things when she was a kid, so she didn’t. So there I was, finally at this point in my life, ready to learn how to make cakes. So whom do I turn to?
Well, I know, this is know that my mother was a good cake maker, so this is the point about a teacher: you have to have confidence that they are the valid person, a valid person, they know their job. And how do you find that out? You just judge it on the fact that you like her nose, even the fact that she’s my mother! It doesn’t necessarily follow she’s the right person to teach me how to bake cakes okay, if you want to be kind to your mom, you’d get it to show you but from the point of view of having the right cook, you need to have the person who’s qualified, so you’ve got to check on the qualities of the teacher, you’ve to check that that person knows what they’re talking about, and how do you do that if you know anything about it, you can’t judge, so, you check on their reputation, you check on their students, that’s the proof of the pudding, isn’t it? In terms of my mother, the proof of the pudding was the cake, and the people who’d eaten her cakes, and the people who also knew cooking, her peers.
So, is how you check a teacher, you know. So, for example, someone like the Dalai Lama, let’s just say, okay, he’s got this, we can see, a pretty solid reputation over the years in the West now, when he first appeared in the West we weren’t so sure, we’d have to check up on him but now we can see, among any Buddhists you speak to, anybody else who’s considered an appropriate Buddhist, all would praise the Dalai Lama as being a valid source, know, so you’ve got some confidence that he is a good teacher But then in terms of, you know, we talk in Tibetan Buddhism about finding your root Guru, as they say. Your main teacher. This word Guru What to do? This word Guru is Sanskrit, and it means heavy with knowledge.
Guru, and this means a spiritual teacher. The equivalent in Tibetan is Lama, and La in this context means high, and Ma I think is like the feminine, sort of like mother. Often you can say, Hi, mother. There’s the Tibetan equivalent of the word guru. I suppose there’s no real equivalent in Tibetan in English, is there?
Mentor maybe, people use that term quite a bit. Spiritual teacher, whatever you like. So they talk in Tibetan Buddhism about having a close relationship with your own personal teacher. And they say this is the most crucial step to really learn, to really develop the qualities well. If we think of it in this way that I’ve been discussing, it does make complete sense.
It’s not meant to be some kind of holy idea. You’ve got to have a guru, you know? It just makes sense. It’s the most effective way to learn something. Again, it’s true, and this is relationship too with my mother, first of all my mother, as a skillful person, knew she shouldn’t push, so when I was ready, I requested her, and that’s how you learn, you request someone, please show me and there’s a strong tradition in Buddhism, of course, as I said, of not pushing, and so the teachers aren’t going to run around trying to come to us so unless we request, they’ll be quiet.
I mean there’s this very interesting story about one Lama who was living in New York, that I knew of some quite old Lama, he was a monk, he’s now a lay person, he came to America for many years, and there he was in New York living a very quiet life, sort of doing Tibet type things, you know, the Tibet society, this and that, but not doing anything that’s Buddhist, not doing Dharma, not teaching. And some people who met him heard he was this Lama, right? He was somebody Rinpoche, which is a term that they give to these certain Lamas, I’ll talk about that later so they requested him, please tell us about Buddhism and he said, oh, I don’t know anything, you know so they said, oh, alright, doesn’t know anything, said, that’s cool They sort of knew him for about fifteen years, this is roughly speaking the story. And then eventually one year he took him all on pilgrimage to Dharamsala, to India where the Dalai Lama lives and where the many Tibetan monasteries are now, and they started to notice that he was being treated with incredible respect by other Lamas, and so it kind of dawned on them that they had this holy being who was an incredible and great scholar amongst them, but because they’d asked once and he said, oh I didn’t know anything, and because they believed him, because in the West we accept a person, if the person isn’t well known, they’d say yes, alright, I know plenty of things, I’ll teach you but he didn’t say that, so they took him on his words, so they didn’t learn anything from him because again, there’s very much this attitude that you don’t, should be not arrogance and humility, and only when someone asks you, and the more we ask, we have to really want it, in other words we have to really want it then we really request so there’s a strong tradition in Buddhism of requesting many times requesting three times to learn something so, of course, in Tibet they don’t do that, in the West we don’t do that so we took him on his word and he doesn’t know anything, okay he doesn’t know anything, so they didn’t learn didn’t use him, didn’t know how to get the best out of him.
Actually, there’s a very strong Tibetan habit, there’s this one Lama who first came to the West and something else now, said, because when you’re offered food, you’d accept the food, and they’d say, would you like some more? And the polite thing is, oh no no no, you say no, so then of course you have to insist and the person eventually accepts, that’s the polite Asian way to do it. Well, Tibetan Lama couldn’t believe this delicious food he’d just been offered, he ate the lot, and they said, would you like some more? And he said, no no no so they of course believed him, he didn’t get any more, you know so we do things differently so anyway, we need to request to want it from our own psyche, because when we know ourselves, and we really want something, we’re going to pursue it but if someone comes along and tries to give it to us, we might want it, we’ll take it politely, but we’ve got to really be hungry for it ourselves, that’s very appropriate, so then we check out the system, we check out the paths, we check out the teachers, and of course the way in the west to do that is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack in a way, but you come to something, a course like this, and if you like it you go to another one like this, you go to another place, you check it out, and then you start to find, even within Buddhism there’s many, many schools of thought, in Tibetan Buddhism there’s many different traditions, you have to find your own home, and that’s just up to you, you know, You can get all the objective differences, but in the end it’s up to each person to check themselves, look, and think about it, and analyse, and come to the conclusion that this is where I belong, and then you meet the teachers, it opens up, it evolves like that.
Like I said in the traditional text, are various ways of presenting how you devote yourself appropriately to a teacher. The reason for this isn’t just to praise the person, the reason for this is to get the best out of relationship and so one of the key things is having checked, you know, I checked, I knew the qualities of my mother as a cake teacher, as my cake guru, you know, I tasted her cakes, she had a good reputation, I’d known over the years, so I had all this, the checking was done from my side, number two, I really wanted to do it, so everything was ready, so then please Mum, show me how to make a cake, so then we got all the things together and she started showing me, and as I said I remember it vividly. Now let’s just say, I’ve done all that checking, and then she tells me, well put two eggs in, you do this, and then I’d say, what do you mean two eggs? Don’t be ridiculous, why not four? I mean, if I’d done all that work checking out, recognising she was valid, then I start complaining about her and criticising, excuse me, I don’t get the benefit, you know, so this is why the strong emphasis in Buddhism is, it’s up to you, you do the checking, you do the thinking, you do the analysing, and when you are ready and you are sure that’s what you want to learn, this person is a valid teacher, I want to learn from them then you put your money where your mouth is, because then you’ll get the benefit so there’s no advantage in then having this kind of negative sceptical mind, you should have a negative sceptical mind first before you make a decision once you’ve checked, commit, you’ve committed, boom, then you start practising, then you really have a wide open heart and a wide open mind and you listen to the instructions, because you’ve checked already you know the person is valid, so when they tell you a certain practice to do that you can’t quite get, because you have checked, you have some wisdom to know that this person is valid, then you’re prepared to try it out.
But if you’re not really sure the person is valid, but you say, Oh, I’ll do what they say, it’s the wrong timing, you’ve got to have this commitment first. It’s very important. In other words, don’t just jump in emotionally, and that’s one of the things in the West that’s so common with spiritual paths, know, we jump in emotionally because we like the person, the person maybe seems charismatic, you get all excited, so we think wow amazing, far out, fantastic, blah blah, but then you know it’s only emotion, and that passes after a while, the neurotic emotion, then it gets all excited, then we go down, and then we start finding fault in the person, it’s just not helpful, we’ve to have some kind of stable, clear understanding, checking carefully, not just using our emotion. So you’ve to check the teacher carefully, know that it’s the valid path for you. But then you have to have the good heart feeling as well, it’s going help you, have a good heart feeling for the person.
But have strong intellectual basis for their validity, not just some emotional feeling, that’s very important. It’s interesting in the spiritual literature, certainly the Buddhist literature in Japan, Tibet, in India, there’s this strong, you know, this literature of the amazing teachers and how they kind of rough with their students, and really test them we’d love to read about that I mean, if you know the story about Milarepa, one of these great Tibetan saints and yogis, you know, he was given such a rough time by his guru, you know, testing him, really, really testing him, and really helping him purify and get realisations, by being rough and getting him to do this again, and build this, and pull it down, and build it again, whatever, and we love to read those stories, or how he was chucked out of the meditation hall, and, you know, I mean, can you imagine that happened to us, mean someone just has to look at us wrong, we practically want to sue them, you know? So I mean we have to have, we’d like to read about all these nice stories of other people, so we have to be very stable and clear, to really be on, and you even, I’m living in America, know, and you read all these stories about these different, what do you call, these coaches in sport, it’s like having a Guru, know, they have incredible devotion to these guys, they do anything they say, because they trust them that’s really what Guru devotion is, again we like to read about it, but it’s quite difficult for us when it comes to us doing it, you know, that’s why, if we’re going to be having that relationship, we’ve got to be very sure that person really does know what they’re talking about, you’ve to really trust that person and when it comes to sport, we kind of like to hear it, when it’s religion we get a bit suspicious, you know, but it’s the same principle, once you’ve checked, and that’s the crucial thing in Buddhism, check carefully, don’t just jump in, you know.
So then the next point that Atisha gets us to really contemplate. And there are ways one meditates on these things, I’m just talking about it in a very easy going way, but there are very formal ways that one would meditate on these things to make them many, many points, say for example in the Guru Devotion point, many points to really contemplate deeply. I’m just giving it broad strokes here. The next point Atisha gets to contemplate is this idea that we have what Buddhism refers to, what he refers to as using Buddha’s teachings as his guide, a perfect human rebirth. So what Atisha is saying here, based on Buddha’s teachings, that we have this incredible, this rebirth we have now, this birth, this person that we are sitting in this chair with this mind, these conditions, you know, these thoughts, this type of approach to life, with reasonable leisure, reasonable health, reasonable sanity, I mean, here, look at this, we’re not in a war zone right now, we’re not starving to death, we’re not a dog, and all Buddhism would say are these are all possibilities, but due to an enormous amount of hard work in a past life, we are who we are at this very moment, sitting in this chair, at this moment in time, it is no accident, know, so to contemplate what Buddhism, Atisha talks about as our perfect human rebirth, these various conditions that we do have, which we totally take for granted, and the various conditions that we have avoided having, the suffering ones you know, which again we don’t ever think that we could have had, because it’s all due to karma Buddha says, what we are, how we are, know, Buddhism would say if we really realize how hard we must have worked in a past life to be who we are at this moment, to have all these conditions together, we would weep at the thought of wasting a single second of this precious life.
The more we talk about karma, this will unfold, the importance of this one. But it’s this general attitude Buddha Atisha is saying, using this as a contemplation, a preliminary meditation to really contemplate, in order to give us the energy to want to even practice, to think about this perfect rebirth, how precious it is. We’ll talk about all of these as we go, more and more. I’ll just touch on the points here. Then we contemplate the first point in the first scope of practice, the first thing we need to learn to really realize.
Is impermanence, Buddha’s main teachings, impermanence. But what our teacher gets us to do here isn’t so much to listen in the extensive way and then to meditate on the very subtle levels of impermanence which are quite profound, and also quite most fascinating, this philosophical presentation is most fascinating. But what our teacher gets us to do here particularly, because all these points that we’re discussing, the way he presents Buddha’s teachings, is in such a way that they are to be experiential, to really kind of taste these teachings, not just to hear them intellectually. And so there is a way to meditate on impermanence in relation to one’s own death. This is seen as something that all of these points give us kind of like a wake up call.
And normally speaking we can see, the only time we think about death is when it happens to someone close to us, or if it’s going to happen to us, isn’t it? Maybe even some of us in this room have been told they’ve got six months to live, a year to live, or whatever. Until that time, you check, and this is what Buddha is talking about the wrong assumptions we have. Deep in our bones, he’s saying, we have this strong misconception, this deeply held assumption, that actually I’m permanent. So the way we discussed last night the cup, you know, we know this cup is impermanent, we know that, we know cups don’t last forever, although we wish they did, this is the point, that’s the permanent grasping in us, but we act as if it is permanent, we know it will break or it could get lost, I mean this is my third cup in as many weeks, I keep losing them, right, so they’re clearly impermanent!
So it’s like, you know, we know this, but in our heart, it’s like this loss every time your cup that you’re attached to goes, isn’t it? Or gets broken or whatever. Because, as I said, we have this assumption that even though we know here it’s impermanent, here we think of it as permanent. So Buddha is saying, Atish is saying, let’s look at how we think about our self, of all things, this is the one we grasp at most strongly as being permanent, the one we never think of as something that will die, we know perfectly well we will die nobody will be idiotic enough to actually be as foolish as to speak out loud, of course I won’t die because we know it’s a fact Buddha is sort of saying that’s about all there is, we know the words, you know, but it doesn’t touch our heart, it doesn’t impact In fact, we analyze the way we live our life, and this is what we need to do to see this, to analyze carefully, we actually act as if we won’t die. We live according to a deep held belief that we are permanent.
Mean, Lama Zopa Rinpoche he says, you know, you think I’m a living person, right? I’m going to visit Auntie Mary in hospital who’s dying of cancer. She’s dying, I’m living. You check what you feel when you hear about a person who’s got cancer or AIDS or something, Oh wow, Mary’s dying, you know, like some kind of special thing, Mary’s dying. It doesn’t include me, does it?
But if we look at it objectively it’s a complete fact that we are dying at this very moment we are dying, it’s logical! You got born and you’re moving towards death, we know we’re not moving towards birth again, we’re moving towards death! It is a fact, if we were to track it, each day is a fact, it’s one day closer to death, but we don’t think like this, do we? We don’t think like this at all, We know it’s true, but it never touches our heart. So therefore all the time we can see we’re living like in this bubble of artificiality, and this is what Buddha is saying exactly about the various views we hold deeply in our being.
That we don’t question. So what Buddha Atisha is doing us to do right here, even before we begin to really practice to understand karma. We’ve got to energize ourselves, so first of we think about the things about the nature of mind and its Buddha nature gives us energy, then we have to find the teacher, and then we contemplate that again and again and again, then we have to think about our perfect human rebirth, which energizes not to waste this life. Then we think about impermanence and death, which increases our wish not to waste this precious life. It energizes us even more, you know.
We need to meditate on this again and again, so there are three points that are used as sort of like the guidelines for the way we meditate on them. And actually this is important to talk about here too, what meditation means, okay? Let me just go for a minute into that. You can say in Buddhism there are two kinds of meditation, millions of techniques, you can’t find the end of the techniques, you can invent new techniques every day and that’s cool. Once you understand the types of meditation, then you know what you’re doing.
So there are two main modes of meditation. The first one, and we just touched on it briefly this morning, The first one is concentration meditation or we can call it stabilization meditation and you probably you could say that this is the kind of meditation this is what we think meditation is where you’re attempting like we did this morning, we attempted you know to watch our breath, to focus the mind, so the implication being you’re trying not to follow all the thoughts that are arising, which is of course what we do, normally speaking, or follow all the stuff, go to all the things out there, know, the sound, the sights, the sound and so on. Our mind goes off all the time chasing everything, doesn’t it? So what we’re trying to do in this first mode of meditation is get concentration. So what Buddha is saying is that we actually have the capability to go to levels of concentration way, way subtler than we would ever even imagine in our usual kind of Western cultural context you know.
But as we mentioned last night, we’ve got subtler levels of conscious awareness that virtually we never access, but which in the long term Buddhism would say we need to access in order to really shift to make this paradigm shift in our mind about how reality is which is the way Buddhism talks you know but meanwhile for us in the very beginning already we can see immediate benefit from just learning to focus your mind It’s not as if that’s the purpose of all of being a Buddhist, it’s just a tool that’s all. Because if you’re trying to do the job of transforming this mind of being your own therapist, it’s very clear you’ve got to have a focused mind to do it. Know you’ve to know what you’re doing, you’ve to be having some reasonable kind of focus. So in the first mode of meditation we learn to concentrate. And now the long term benefit of that, as I said, the long term goal of that, as I said, is to develop this subtle conscious awareness, so you can really begin to do the work of shifting the stuff in the mind, know, it’s the long term, but in the short term, immediate almost, the obvious byproducts of this type of meditation for us, is that we learn to see what the hell is going on in our mind.
Because in our Western culture it’s not our tradition too much in our ordinary culture, as we talk Thursday night, know, it’s not our way to learn to know well what we’re thinking we don’t really learn techniques since we’re kids to learn to know what we’re thinking and feeling so one of the advantages of this kind of meditation because even if in every morning you’re sitting there quietly watching your breath for five minutes you’re watching your breath that’s the ostensible job you’re doing but in reality what you’re noticing is all the crazy thoughts just coming up like mad you know and as you start to do this I mean they commonly say when you start to meditate you actually think your mind’s getting worse it’s not getting worse you’re just seeing it for the first time that’s it just looks more chaotic, know, so we’re beginning to see what we’re thinking and feeling, this is the beginning of the job, we have to do, we’ve got to learn to know how to look into our minds, so one of the benefits of meditation is this, so that’s the first mode, learning to focus the mind. The second mode, we call it insight meditation, so as we’ve been saying, what Buddha is saying is we need to learn to shift the way our mind sees things, we’ve got to develop insight into how things are, and they’re not permanent, they’re know things don’t happen causelessly, they happen due to the process of cause and effect, karma.
So we have to develop insight into these, you know. And so one of the various ways of doing the second mode of meditation, in this tradition, the Tibetan tradition, the ways we use are either what we call analysis, analytical meditation, which almost seems contradiction for most of us. In other words, once you’ve got some concentration, you then use analysis. And this is the example here, one of death and impermanence. All the points we’ve discussed so far can be done, can be meditated upon using analysis.
It’s a type of it’s using the conceptual mind, you know, thoughts, but just because you’ve got concentration to whatever extent, based on your first mode of meditation, you then, you know, that to think clearly, go through very clearly, in a more focused way, these various points. And what happens is because they’re very much to do with oneself, they cut something, you get the feeling for it, a little bell rings, well that’s an insight, a little momentary insight, and you get that, so often in your meditation you then hold that insight, and try and concentrate on it, revert to the first mode of meditation, and then you’d focus on that feeling, that sense of that thing that you just got from the head to the heart, and all insight eventually is when you’ve accomplished it, is when that’s irreversible, when you’ve got again and again and again from much meditation you’ve eventually got all the stuff from your head to your heart and this is now how things are for you then you’ve really got insight irreversibly you know just like practice practice makes perfect So this death and impermanence one I’m discussing here, this point, there’s ways of analyzing it, meditating on it with analysis.
The first point, there are three main points. The first point is to contemplate how death is definite. So, do you do this? It’s some secret. You just use, you know, the point is giving you a guide, and then you just use your own creative imagination to tell you, to convince ego’s dumb view, which at the moment thinks it isn’t, to convince it that it is.
So you think about the different examples and experiences from your own point of view, from your own observation about life, however it comes into being, definitely dies. This is the one certain thing. You can say from the second of conception, the only thing that’s certain for that being is that they will die. This is this is logic, you know. But you check with us.
This is what’s most fascinating. This is what Buddha is saying, we all have in our minds right now this profound assumption, deeply held as absolute truth that I am a living person, that I am a living person, which means, of course we are living in technical sense, of course I’m living, I’m not dead, that’s clear but it’s more than that, isn’t it? It’s that I’m a living person today, tomorrow, next day, I’m a living person, I’m living, I’m not dying, I’m living in that active, proactive sense a dying person has diseases, excuse me, I’m living Well excuse me, you know, just have to use a few arguments to prove how that’s nonsense! Many living people die before dying people, we all know that people have car accidents every day, on the way to the hospital to visit Auntie Jane who’s dying for goodness sake, you know? I mean these are things we just analyse to kind of cut across the ego’s view that holds onto this life that I’m a living person so what’s the disadvantage of that?
That’s the point as long as the Buddha is trying to get us to be scared, know, get depressed it’s all what we’re doing, all these points are leading us up to wanting to not waste this precious life, to use it to practice, to ensure at this first level of practice that when I do die my consciousness will continue on in a reasonable way, given that I don’t want to suffer and I do want to be happy. We’re not even discussing yet anything more profound than that. This is the very first level of practice, you know, that we need to really get inside our blood and bones. Then it gives us great energy to want to use this life, that’s the point. But because we have this deep assumption that, well, you know, the first point, I didn’t ask to get born, I just got plonked here by somebody, not my responsibility. What can I do?
This is who I am. These are the cards I was dealt with. What can I do about it? Already we have with us deeply in our being a sense of kind of hopelessness about life, as if it’s got nothing to do with us. So, various points we’re looking at, and by contemplating these, we kind of begin to shift this, and to start to get some energy about who we are, first of all by thinking about death, you know, the very first point, the mind, that I’ve got this amazing potential.
Wow, you know. Then it gives me some energy to want to find the methods of how to start developing myself, looking for the teacher. Then thinking about how this life is so precious, not wanting to waste it, energizing me to not waste time. Then thinking about death and impermanence is increasing my wish to not waste time but we need to analyze them, is the way we need to meditate upon these again and again and again to get it so strong that it’s spontaneous within us, you know? So this one of death and impermanence, this very first one, that death is definite.
As Lama Zopa says, the best is to think I’m a dying person. I will die today, he says. Not to make us scared, but to wake us up. And everybody I have met, who’s either got a disease, who’s been called dying, or the people I know on death row, let’s say, are the ones who are really practicing. They’re learning to see themselves, it’s true, as a dying person, they know that suddenly time is running out.
That’s why it gives us such a profound shock when the doctor says you got cancer or whatever, because suddenly you realize the truth, which was just as true the day before. But now we suddenly wake up to it, because we realize life is finite, you know? It is anyway. But it’s so fascinating how we don’t seem to think it is, even though intellectually we know it is. It’s very interesting.
So we need to give ourselves our own wake up call. It’s sort of like don’t wait till you be put on death row, you’ve got cancer, you get old and rickety, before you start thinking, Wow, I’m going to die. Again, not to make us depressed, what comes from this is the recognition of not wanting to waste the life. That’s the point, a sense of urgency. So the second point to contemplate, which gets us even more into this point, is that feels it’s as if I do know when I’m going to die because I have no sense of urgency about it.
Because the reality is, and this is logic, you know, if I really do not know when I will die. We can speculate, but it’s not facts we are dealing with, speculation is not facts. If I really don’t know when I’m going to die, then it does follow, doesn’t it, that I could die today? It’s logic. But who thinks this?
Not one single one of us I bet because why? Because Buddha says we have this deeply held misconception this one of permanent me grasping at permanent me because that’s our fantasy that’s our huge wish you know because the thought of not being me is too horrible. So we cling so strongly to this sense of a permanent me and we have made it now our truth, we have made it our truth. We believe it really is the truth and we never question. So for me, a really good analogy is like when you go on a holiday.
So now, first of all, we tend to think, well, if I think I’m you know, there’s a feeling in this very strong that says, well, if I’m impermanent and if I could die today, well then what’s the point of life? Why I just give up now? That’s not the point at all, it’s ridiculous. Just like, if you do go on a holiday, you know perfectly well it’s only gonna last for two weeks. You plan for it the whole year, you analyze it, you check it out, you work out exactly the place you want to go, what it looks like, how much it costs, what it will be like when you get there, what you’ll do every day.
And then you anticipate it all and you’re ready for it, you’re really ready for your holiday, then you get there, and then from the second you arrive, especially if it’s a gorgeous place, there’s such a delight, isn’t there? In using every moment, why? Because it’s only two weeks. You don’t say, What’s the point of a holiday? It’s only two weeks, You don’t ever say that.
But we tend to have this feeling of life, you know, it’s like it’s this permanent holiday, but we don’t ever think it’s going to end.