Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute session, Geshe Pema Tsering opens by demystifying meditation: falling in love is already a visualization practice, and ruminating on a grudge is perfect analytical meditation on anger. After a brief review of earlier Lamrim ground — the mind’s potential, the need for a teacher, and precious human rebirth (likened to a cupboard of money you haven’t yet realized you can spend) — the session turns to karma. Geshe Pema walks through four types of karmic result: throwing karma that determines your next rebirth, habitual personality tendencies, personal experiences, and environmental conditions. A lively Q&A, sparked by the situations in Afghanistan and the Columbine shootings, pushes on whether this view is fatalistic or victim-blaming; his answer is that karma describes causation rather than desert, and that internalizing it is what produces a person like the Dalai Lama.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 Retreat.mp3
UUID: 6575651b-f5b5-459a-b4f2-da536e6058d7
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Retreat Jan (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.6 minutes
Words: ~8,763
Remembering our motivation just putting into our minds and it’s like this you know if you look into your mind now or don’t have look into your mind you’d feel it you know if you’re sitting here full of this overwhelming sense of urgency to become a Buddha as quickly as possible because you just can’t bear the suffering of others well then you know you don’t need to worry about thinking about your compassion, you’ve already got it but if we’re not like that, then this idea here is we’re trying to, you know, put these thoughts into the mind. Everything exists on the tip of the wish-fulfilling jewel the first step in doing anything is the thought so you know we don’t think of emotions like that but it’s true the first step is the thought so again we’re looking we’re looking at each of these points touching on the various you know views that Buddha has about what’s real and what’s not, you know. And again to remind us that the the the the the process for internalizing these ideas, just like the process for internalizing izing music, carpentry or anything is a question of familiarity, it’s familiarizing even the meaning of the word meditate in Tibetan it’s gom, it means to familiarize your mind.
So how you’re familiarizing your mind is through the context of meditation, which is a formal way. That’s all, a formal way of doing. But in the broad sense, sitting here listening right now, each one of us listening to this, nutting it out. We’re familiarizing our mind, aren’t we? It’s clear, you know.
Thank you very much. So the job is to familiarize our mind. Know, a sort of spiritual process, the way we’re talking here, the way the Buddhism would describe it, is nothing mysterious. There are certain kinds of meditations and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings that yes, would appear to be sort of fairly cosmic and not the usual way we would tend to use the mind. This is true with visualization and all that.
But even visualization as we did this morning, know. Even visualization is not something that’s totally alien, not unfamiliar to us. Every time you let’s say you’re in love with somebody, virtually you’re doing a visualization meditation. You’re you’re putting in your mind strongly the picture of this person and you’re thinking about them the whole time. Well, that’s all.
We just did that this morning with the Buddha, you know? Except it’s a foreign image, so it doesn’t feel the same thing. It feels like unusual. But it’s the same principle. All this process we’re doing here, using the mind in different ways, is something already that we’re doing in an ordinary sense.
Analytical meditation is exactly the same as when you’re familiar with that. If you think about someone you don’t like, you’re thinking of all the disadvantages and all the things they did to you, how they did it, and what they said, and what you’re gonna do, that is a perfect analytical meditation on anger. Truly, it’s just like this. So all we’re doing is using, you know, what we’re doing, the methods we’re using in Buddhism to internalize the stuff that we’re describing here, is Buddha’s views, is all the methods we’re already using to to lead our lives, you know. But we mystify these things so much.
We kind of put them up in the sky and think it’s something magical. Well, it’s not. It’s down to earth, in your face, hard work, you know. So the first thing we mentioned, is a really good starting point to even recognize what on earth is our potential and this where it exists, this potential exists in our mind. Which is we’ve said is something that isn’t our body, isn’t our brain, doesn’t come from mom and dad, doesn’t come from God or Buddha, doesn’t come from nothing, and is its own thing.
And as it’s not physical, it doesn’t need finally, there are subtler levels of our mind that don’t need a body for its existence. It’s obvious, you can see our conceptual and emotional levels of mental awareness, which is this way we experience things from day to day, obviously need this body. You know, if you didn’t have eyeballs, you wouldn’t have eye consciousness, would you? If you didn’t have a decent working brain, the concepts wouldn’t all come out straight, know, they’d be all scrambled. So clearly the body and the mind at the gross level are interdependent, and for the gross level of mind to function, you do need a body.
But Buddha would say that’s just the gross level, and it’s deceptive anyway, and we need eventually to access a subtle level, and that level as we’ve indicated already doesn’t need a body for its existence. It can leave the body. It goes from life to life. When we possess this Buddha nature, is how we’re saying it. Then we looked at the need therefore to, if this is our potential, to become this perfect person, which really is just the development of the positive qualities within us, it’s something kind of tangible.
Then we need someone to show us how. So ideally, need a teacher. And there are various ways. I’ll just touch on those very briefly, know. In the various texts, there are various ways to familiarize ourselves with how to devote ourselves appropriately to get the maximum benefit from the relationship, which means to become a Buddha as quickly as possible.
Pabongka Rinpoche, the author of a book that I recommend that if someone wants to go more deeply into this whole packaging of the teachings called the Lamrim. His name is Pabongka Rinpoche and he’s the author of the book called Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, which I think is available in the shop. He says, you better choose your guru very carefully because you’re going to end up like him. So I think it’s a good point. There you go.
That one there. That’s the big one. Massive. The big one. That’s the one.
So then, okay. So then we thought, then we need to contemplate again and again, which is a very unusual thing for us to do. There’s a lot of context there, but it’s this idea of really appreciating by thinking about it. This doesn’t come by saying, I appreciate my perfect human rebirth. Wait for it to happen.
You’ve got to analyze and familiarize your mind again and again with the various advantages that we clearly have if we compare ourselves even with other humans. And the various advantages, you know, the disadvantages we’ve avoided. Having. Again, if we merely compare ourselves with other humans, can see how fortunate we are. And of course the point here is, according to Buddha, we’re not fortunate because we’re just lucky.
We’re fortunate because we worked really hard to set this up, know, to add a great appreciation for the hard work of the past person. We should want to use this life. It’s sort of like, you know, we’re like a resource. We don’t think of ourselves in that way. We’re so involved in being me.
We don’t see ourselves objectively. But basically what we are, this body, this combination of body, mind, and various conditions, is an incredibly precious resource. And we all know a resource is something that you use, you don’t just look at it or appreciate it, you’ve got to use it. Just like, you know, if you have a cupboard full of money, and I’ve never heard of money before, and it’s in my house, I’ve got a cupboard full money, let’s say. I’ve got a bunch of boring bits of plastic with little numbers on the end, and I’ve got a clue what they mean.
I don’t like the design, I don’t like the color, I don’t like the plastic anyway, and I put it back in my cupboard and you faint because you see, Rabina, you’ve so much money there, you’re insane. Don’t you realize what you’ve got? It’s a really dumb example, but it’s a very simple example. We appreciate that when we even find one with a five in the corner on the road, we kind of feel happy. Like you just found something precious.
Not because we’re attached to purple or little pieces of boring bits of plastic. You can’t do anything with them, they’re so small. Because we know the value of it, it’s a resource. If you give that to someone, you’ll get five dollars worth back. Well, that’s the way to think about yourself.
You’re this precious resource, you know? So appreciating isn’t just kind of saying, oh, I’ve got five dollars and put it back in the drawer. What a stupid thing to do. You go spend it. So you use this resource.
To do what? To develop these amazing qualities, which all beings have, but which very few beings have the conditions to enable them to really generate, you know, to develop that that potential. So Buddha is saying, if we analyze it, we can see it’s objectively true. But as a human, it might be the best kind of type of life to have, but it’s certainly the most useful. Because we’ve got some choices, which is the miracle of having a human mind.
So I don’t want to waste this precious life, you know. Then we then we start the first the first step on the first scope, which is the one of meditating on impermanence and death. As we’ve briefly described. Which again is using it from our own experiences. We use things our own experience to kind of pad out these bare bones.
Again and again, hearing these things, thinking about them, contemplating. And then using this as the way you refer to what you see out there in the world instead of the usual deluded gossip kind of mind about people dying out there. You’re sorry for the ones you do like, you don’t care about the ones you don’t like, and you don’t care about most. That’s the usual view. So we learn to shift the way we see what we’re seeing in ordinary daily life.
You don’t need to look into deep Buddhist texts to understand about impermanence. Impermanence. Buddha gives us the clues, then we use that to refer to what we see out there every day, to interpret what we see out there every day and bring it to our own experience and wake ourselves up and realize we have to not waste to increase our wish not to waste this life, but to use it in a precious way, to get the results that we want. Then we contemplate the suffering of so many sentient beings. The types of lives the Buddha says all beings have potential to be born into depending on the karma that ripens, you know.
So really that’s a fresh idea for us, very interesting. But even if with some objectivity, we can still look at various creatures, ants, scorpions, rats, dogs, chickens, you know, cows, birds, and see them in a different way. See see their life in terms of how it is suffering, which is maybe a fresh idea, again a fresh idea for us. Like I said, we can see how little chickens who have their claws cut off and have to sit in little, you know, be battery hens all day, we can feel sorry for them. But when we see nature, what we call nature or the wild, we actually kind of glorify it.
I mean, excuse me, know, Buddhist point, if you’re looking at it, it’s like living in hell. Such mental suffering, such pain, such physical suffering all the time. Just seeing it freshly and then having a strong wish not to have that kind of life. Thank you. Then we looked at, okay, we think well whom do I turn to you know, to give me some methods so I can avoid this kind of life so I can get something reasonable for myself when I leave this body and take another one.
This is the first level of practice in the minimal level. So here we are, we talked about refuge, know, the qualities of the Buddha, Sangha, learning to rely upon them in our practice. So then we start putting our money where our mouth is. We start abiding by the laws of karma. Okay.
So what are these laws? And Buddha, again, Buddha is he’s not saying he invented karma. He’s not saying you should abide by the laws of karma because he said so. And I’m not criticizing. This is actually the teaching in Christianity in general, I I was discussing one time with a friend, Catholic.
We were discussing what is the nature of negativity, sin, you know, whatever. And he said it’s that which goes against the will of God. In other words, that’s what makes it negative. And that’s a very profound idea, know, but it’s not it happens not the Buddhist idea, that’s all. So sort of like the Christian view in general would be that you don’t go near the fire when you’re a kid because your mother tells you not to.
But the Buddhist idea, you don’t go near the fire because it’ll burn you. This would be the reason. So the reason not to be angry, not to lie, not to steal, not to kill is not because Buddha says so. The reason is because it’ll burn you, it’ll harm you. Not to mention other people.
We’re looking first at the most fundamental one of karma which is the results to oneself. We’ve to have a really strong sense of awareness of this process first before we can even begin to have great compassion for other beings. We’ve got to first have some sense of recognition of our own suffering and an ability to protect our self from suffering. So we have to understand the laws of karma. Is Buddha’s view of how things are.
Again, I’m not saying Buddha says you must believe it. Buddha of course is saying he’s right, otherwise he wouldn’t be saying it. He’d be very stupid to say he’s saying something he doesn’t think is right, wouldn’t he? He’d arrogant, be outrageous. Like if, you know, Einstein says, maybe e equals m c squared.
I haven’t really worked it out, know, it’s a good idea. Why don’t you believe in it? I mean, people would laugh him out of town. We all know that. So the same, you know.
Jesus Christ says what he says, because obviously he’s discovered that to be true. That’s his assertion of truth. Or same with Buddha, you know. But he’s not saying you have to believe it. He’s just saying, this is what I have found to be true.
You know, and so to hear it in that way gives it some credibility. It gives up some space to hear it well. So okay, Buddha’s view of how things are. Like I said earlier, the creative principle in Buddhism is this is called karma. Or as I have to say when I’m in America, karma.
Because when I say karma, everyone hears c a l m e r, you see. So okay, what’s karma? Well, like I said, the word, just the word itself is Sanskrit, and it means action. Simple meaning action. And the normal way we understand action doesn’t give us the feeling, But when we understand action in the dynamic sense of implying a reaction, then it has a really tasty meaning.
So everything we say, everything we do, everything we think is a karma. You can say it like that. So if every man if everything you say, do and think is a seed, then you have a real sense of something, don’t you? You recognize because you all know that a seed is something that just won’t stay a seed. We all know that.
Seeds, they’re nourished, become fruits. So if every single second of the day, every single moment we do with our body, speech and mind is a seed, then we’d have a great sense of anxiety to know what kind of fruits we’re producing, wouldn’t we? And the fruits are our future experiences. The experiences we have now are the fruits of the past seeds. Like I said, that’s the creative principle in Buddhism.
There’s no other there’s not as if sometimes things are karma. Is that actions, karmas, that are so called negative and Buddhism again would describe what’s negative is not because Buddha says so, but it’s in its nature negative. That comes an action that is negative, an action of body, speech, and mind that’s negative comes from an unhappy distorted place inside. And we all know the words, anger, attachment, jealousy, pride, fear, confusion, ignorance. We know these words, all clear.
Then we have to describe exactly how they function. We’ll do that in the second scope, sort of more, where you’re really more looking deeply into being your own therapist in the second scope. It’s far more psychological. So, you know, and then negative action will necessarily ripen as future suffering experiences. For whom?
For me, in this consciousness, when I’m called Fred or Mary or bird or dog or whatever. And what a positive action is, is something that’s necessarily coming from a reasonable place in here, which is called kindness, happiness, love, generosity, patience, you name it. Again, we know these things well. That will ripen necessarily in happiness for me in the future. This is basic principle of karma.
Another principle is that as we know with seeds, fruits, the results expand. Karmas expand. So a tiny apple seed brings thousands of fruits, doesn’t it? Begins the whole thing. Many fruits come.
So a tiny karma of good or bad one brings many, many fruits. Just energy expand. karma’s definite. It’s the same as seeds in the sense that if you plant a seed and obviously you give it all the appropriate conditions, then of course it will ripen. Equally, if you don’t plant the seed as much as you might give it all the appropriate conditions, you’ll you’ll never get a fruit.
It’s not possible. You can water the ground until doomsday. You won’t get an apple tree. You gotta put the apple seed in, you know. But equally too, you can have the apple seed in there but if you don’t let it meet the appropriate conditions equally it won’t grow.
But the seed is there waiting for the conditions to ripen. So if you want the result, want some kind of result, it’ll never ripen unless you plant the seed. And as much as you mightn’t want a result, if you have planted the seed, you will get the result whether you like it or not. Yeah, I understand. It’s a really good point about showing that regret, how that functions basically.
I’m going talk about how we purify karma later and it’ll come in there. So I think I’ll discuss it then. It’s very appropriate there. Thanks. So Okay, there are four ways you can say that karma ripens.
Four ways in which our actions result. Four types of results. Broad categories, okay? The main one, like I said already, is in terms of the type of realm that your consciousness gets born into. human, animal, God, spirit, whatever.
Okay? As I said before, that’s the karmic seed that would ripen at the time of your death, that becomes what they call the throwing karma, that throws your life. So the first kind of karma, they call it the throwing karma, or the fully ripened result. So any action that we do that has four particular conditions all in place brings a fully ripened result, and many, many of those. That’s the first main way karma ripens, which I’ll go back to in a second.
I’ll get to the fourth. Then the second one is in any life that you have, whether it’s a dog or a human, the next kind of karma and all these don’t always come at the same time, it’s highly complex you know. But this covers, this one is called actions similar to the cause. And it is a term that refers to all of our personality, our propensities, our thoughts, our attitudes, the wish to kill, the wish to lie, the wish to steal, the wish to love, be compassionate, be forgiving, whatever it is. All of those basically were a bunch of habits, aren’t we?
If we analyze it like that, we’re just this great mass of habits. From the time we’re a tiny kid, all the imprints are there. You know what this empty little thing that your mother then produces into Hitler or a Mother Teresa. Basically the Hitlerness of Hitler or the Mother Teresaness of Mother Teresa came from their own past karmic actions. So they brought with them those particular sets of habits.
So they both had a decent, you know, remember I said virtue is the cause of a human throwing karma. Virtue is a throwing karma that brings the fruit of a human life, for example. So obviously Hitler and Mother Teresa shared a similar throwing karma. Virtue ripened at the time of their previous death and they got the human form. Now obviously that’s where the differences begin, isn’t it?
That’s where the similarities end. Their actions similar to the cause is where the huge differences are, isn’t it? In their habits. Look at their habits, their mental tendencies. Completely different.
And all of them are due to having done them before. It’s very obvious. For twenty years, you practice being angry in this life. I mean, excuse me, you’ve really got down anger, haven’t you? You’ve really been you’ve you’re a master of anger.
You really have perfected anger. It’s obvious, we all know. Just like the piano or tennis. We all know practice makes perfect. So all our positive and negative emotional, you know, attitudes and whatever, they’re all the same.
You know? This is how come little kids have all those habits. Boom. Some kids just cry if they see something die, other kids happily kill another one. It’s not accidents, their mother hasn’t taught them yet.
Their mothers are as shocked as everybody else when they see either way. It’s due to their past karma, know, it’s habits. Bunch of habits. It’s a very kind of interesting, it’s very na- for me it’s a very comfortable explanation actually. It’s very logical when we look at it.
Okay, you gotta make that leap that your consciousness was existing in something before this body was, that’s all. This is where the thinking has to come in to really get to analyze how anger and love and kindness and generosity and the wish to kill and the wish to lie or whatever are not physical. It’s kind of fascinating, isn’t it? We think about DNA, genes and all that, they’re even mapping the genome, whatever they’re doing these days, mapping the genomes or something, whatever they’re doing, I think it’s amazing. But you check that even with all these things, the DNA and everything, they’re seeing that there are propensities for cancer for this and for that.
But excuse me, no one’s pointing out in genes the propensity for anger or lying or stealing. No one ever talks that way. And it’s obvious why, because Buddha says you can’t find it in the genes, you know? It’s not a thing that comes from your parents. And if it were, please excuse me, you know, means to be a stark kind of contradiction.
Even when we talk about the brain for a start, how that’s the mind, you know? Anger here, this, that. I mean we’ve already tried in the thirties isn’t it? Which are terrible results pulling out cutting out bits and pieces trying to form a nice brain so you cut out the anger and the aggression. You just end up getting a vegetable.
I mean we can cut out cancers without a problem, it actually brings the result we want. How come cutting out the bits of brain doesn’t work? It seems to indicate it’s not the brain. It seems to me that’s a conclusion you know. Somehow if their mind were the brain, check it out.
You you get Hitler’s brain and Mother Teresa’s brain, I bet if they got them mixed up they couldn’t tell the difference. You’re not gonna see anger, all the bits of brain with evil like and things, that’s all there’s anger, that’s Hitler, come on please. I’m not trying to be naive because I don’t know much science. But in front of taking these almost in a naive kind of innocent way but looking at it quite easily, it seems clear to me that the mind isn’t the brain. There are too many contradictions, you know.
It seems clear to me that anger and violence and killing and stealing and all those things the good qualities too don’t come from the parents. I mean it’s fine if you have, remember in America, know all those killings of the kids a couple of years ago. There’s one killing for example of one little boy, a little black kid, mommy was in prison, or daddy was in prison, mommy’s a junkie, oh yeah, that’s satisfying. Now we understand why he’s like he is. It all sort of fits the logic.
Excuse me, what about those two Columbine boys? You know those two nice white Christian boys with nice white Christian mummy and daddy, a thoroughly fine, ordinary middle class white life. And they become insane maniacs, living in some complete insane world of their own, of their own making, who go around multi murdering people. I mean, me, it seems bizarre when you look at their ordinary life and their good mother and father. You can see there’s no relationship.
So it’s obvious those imprints in them come from not from their mommy and daddy, not from their genes. It seems clear to me, which is why there’s so much agonizing in our culture about why, why, why? People can’t find the answers, you know. Because Buddha says they’re looking in the wrong place, They’re looking in the brain, they’re looking in the DNA. I’m not complaining about that.
Amazing is gonna help health and everything. But even that, even the DNA you might have the propensity to get cancer. It doesn’t follow you will get cancer. So even that can’t be proof. So anyway, your personality is a second kind of karma called actions similar to the cause.
There are the words, actions similar to the cause. You do what you’re used to doing. You know, like that. And the third one was much harder to take, very hard to take. The first one, this action similar to the cause maybe we can bear to think about that I’m responsible for my own anger.
Perhaps we can be brave enough to do that. But this third one, this is really too much for us. This is called experiences similar to the cause. Which is all the stuff that happens to you. A person who gets killed, because they killed.
A person who gets lied to, because they’ve lied. A person who wins a million bucks, because they’ve been generous. A person who has nothing is because they haven’t been generous. A person who’s sick because they’ve killed. A person who lives in an ugly looking old place is because they’ve done this and that.
I mean there’s actually this list they give of all the vision, actions and the kind of karmic results they all bring. I forget them all, I haven’t got it with me. This is called experiences similar to the cause. So if you look at the world, and you just point to any person you know can see, and that person has experiences. This is including dogs and rats and everything, know.
Every person, every being including dogs and rats, has a personality. So deer, for example, are an animal. They’ve got the throwing karma of being born in the animal realm. But then their personality, their actions, similar to the cause, are quite friendly. They don’t eat meat, they’re vegetarian, they’re kind of a bit nervous, know, they don’t hurt people.
Isn’t it? Deers don’t fight or anything, do they? Deer, do deer fight? They are. Oh they do, the boys do.
Okay, that’s usual. That’s not true. I’m the worst fighter of all. So you know, so we can see there’s different personalities. That’s the action similar to the cause.
You compare a deer with a lion, they’re quite different. You compare a lion with a mouse, know, a little mouse kind of shaky little nervous thing. Lions come booming out, know. We can see different personalities. Action similar to the cause different.
Experience is similar to the cause different. You know so you can have a person who lies and steals and kills, mean and nasty, but everything good happens to them. They get money, people are good to them, they die, they live to a nice ripe old age. Because these two karmas don’t always work in the same way together. You can have good experiences similar to the cause, everyone treats you nicely and trusts you and believes you and loves you.
Or you can have bad actions similar to the cause, lying, stealing, killing, harming. Or absolutely the reverse, which is the answer to why bad things happen to good people. These Tibetan lamas, holy beings, their life in virtue, now being tortured, you know. They have bad experiences similar to the cause, but they have good actions similar to the cause. So we can see, it doesn’t ever fit.
And the usual logic is, if I’m a good person, why do bad things happen? It feels very painful. Well, because it’s past karma, Buddha says, you know. In the ordinary worldly sense, I agree. There is not a scintilla of logic to the things that happen on this earth.
No wonder we’re all confused. No wonder we’re asking why all the time because in terms of just one life, there is no answer. And this is an interesting point, you know, talking about you and everything about reincarnation. I mean, I agree with you. But this is for me, the more I think about the the the the the unanswered questions that come from the view that the mind is merely physical, that forces me to have to look at another view.
It forces me to. Because I think I’d go mad if all the time I just had this view that which is what we have in the West. Well, nobody knows, you know. It’s just kind of luck. It’s all their fault.
I mean, it brings insanity. Somehow it’s interesting. Even if karma’s wrong for me, find it quite practical for my life. It helps me become sane. So good enough for me.
I mean, I can say that, you know. Because it’s an explanation that gives an answer, that therefore enables me to become less angry, less neurotic, less blaming. It doesn’t always feel evident to that. But when we internalize this view of responsibility and karma, and we have an answer to why that person harmed me, then it enables me to get on with my life and deal with it and accept it and move forward. But if I don’t have an answer, and I can’t see what I’ve done to harm that person, that person’s coming and harming me back, of course I’m gonna go crazy.
Of course I have the answer why are they harming me? Which is where we most of us are stuck. And why most of us, when we have injustice happen, go mad. But you look at any of the biographies of any of these Tibetan lamas who’ve been in prison for years and years, yes, unjustly in terms of this life, they come out of that experience more compassionate, content, more forgiving. I mean it’s kind of like bizarre, know?
You can’t work it out. I mean why do we think that Dalai Lama is such a nice person? Because he’s worked hard at accepting the view of karma for centuries, you know? For many, many lives. And has internalized his view and sees it no doubt as it is, which is the Buddhist understanding, plus as a result has enormous compassion for sentient beings including all the Chinese communists who destroy his country.
Because he knows why they’re harming because they have been harmed before for what are labeled now as the Tibetan people. So having that explanation gives an answer, it’s all interdependent. Therefore no reason for anger, therefore absolutely no reason for war because you don’t want more of the same in the future. I mean he’s not just nice because he’s got this nice cute nose and people think oh lovely, lovely Dalai Lama. He’s nice because he’s worked really hard at practicing in the way we’re describing here.
Here’s the fruit. Here’s the proof of the pudding basically. I think I said maybe on Thursday, if you were there then, that I remember in America very strongly, people love the Dalai Lama, like here, you know. But now they don’t want know about him. Because his answers are too difficult, you know.
It’s all very nice when things are going cool to say yes, isn’t it wonderful, forgive your enemies, excuse me, just, you know, drop one of their buildings. Not being rude. Eighty percent want to bomb the life out of the Afghanis now because this was full of anger and blame and fear. Believing it’s right, you know. Don’t want to know about Dalai Lama saying have peace now.
People even thinking what does he know? Mean one sixth of his population have been slaughtered. Can you imagine if fourteen million Americans have been slaughtered? They’re bombing the entire earth. I’m not being rude.
It’s interesting. This view of karma is This is what’s interesting too, this one of the end result of all this practice is what you get as a really nice person. That’s the end result. A person like the Dalai Lama, forgiving, kind, ordinary, practical, down to earth. That’s what the person looks like.
You don’t look all profound. But it comes, that niceness comes from this kind of stuff that we’re talking about. That’s what he’s internalizing, his being. Changes views of reality fundamentally. Then you become a nice person.
But of course interesting too, we know in the West there are many nice people. I mean look at the Mother Teresa’s of the world, pretty amazing examples. But what is so interesting, we never ask, wow, I wonder how she became like that. What am I supposed to do to become like that? That ought to be the question.
When you’re seeing any of these great tennis players and you start to aspire to be like them you know you’ve to go off and learn the techniques. But we very rarely ask what do I do to become like Mother Teresa. We just think well I’m born this way, she’s born this way, it’s potluck. I mean how fatalistic can you get? So okay, throwing karma.
The one that determines which realm you’re born into, which is determined by the karma that ripens at the time of your death. Then according to all the complex rules and the laws of karma which all work out themselves and no one determining it, there’s no one up there ticking things and judging, you know. Then you get a certain personality. Then you have certain experiences. And all of these are determined by your past karma.
The cause of the person punching in the nose, the cause of you getting a million bucks is your past actions. That’s the main cause. And the fourth karma is called environmental karma. And this is even where you explain how even the universe comes into being, like I mentioned before, know. It’s not Mother Nature or God or Buddha or accident or merely physical.
Not like that. Buddha says the coming together of all these external elements, the elements into this universe as we know it, you know. Whether it’s earthquakes or volcanoes or beautiful or ugly or harmonious or, you know, covered in, I mean, things like, you know, the polluted environment, we know the external causes of it, or even if you’re living in an environment where it’s covered in landmines and things, I mean, look at the suffering of so many people. This universe has got very many scenarios, and this is all due to the karma of the individual beings who experience it like that. So if you’ve got good environmental karma, you’ll be born into a place like Adelaide, you know.
Pleasing weather, nice changes in seasons, reasonably pure air, reasonably pure water, everywhere you look it’s very pleasant, you know? I mean that’s incredible. That’s the result of incredible virtue in the past. And how come some other little innocent kid who’s been sort of, you know, something else in another life gets born to some Afghani mummy starving to death with everybody hating them, especially the little girl, you know. And then you’ve got this ugly environment.
You walk down and you lose your feet for God’s sake. That’s due to your past karma, you know. Okay, the minds are there because people put them there. But the fact that you get born there, that’s the result of your past karma. This is how Buddhism says you know.
Yep. I understand. Okay, so she’s confused because it sounds fatalistic. So why don’t you tell me what you think fatalistic means then we can discuss. I understand.
So she’s saying that what she’s hearing is me saying that this is the way karma is. Tibetans are suffering now because of their past karma. And then she’s saying that she’s hearing me say well then this is just the way it is and there’s nothing to do about it. Well I didn’t say any of that second You’re deducing that second part. Do you accept that or not?
Okay I didn’t say that did I? Never once. But that’s what’s interesting, you’re deducing that. I haven’t got to the point about how you purify karma. We’re just looking at what the causes are first.
So if the first thing we have to do is look, if we’ve got a garden full of weeds, we’re always trying to work out what the cause of the weeds are. So we’re realizing that because we didn’t pull them out and because we left the seeds in there. So we’re looking at the very basics first. Do you see my point now? So take it one step at a time because it isn’t fatalistic.
Because we know we first have to establish what the cause of all those poisonous weeds in the garden. We have to really understand, don’t we, what caused them. So first of all Buddha is saying we’ve got a bunch of reasons in our mind now that aren’t correct. Okay, I’m just telling you what Buddha says. He’s saying the reasons we think the weeds are in the garden now is because someone else planted them.
So what we’re trying to do here is first recognize that they’re our weeds. We’ve gotta start taking responsibility. They’re our weeds because we planted them. So that’s all the point I’m saying here. We then get to the point of how we start changing those weeds.
Okay? Because it pardon? For the one that comes to me is the land mine too. Yes. For the land mine.
So what’s tell me about the problem with that. Well, the account is No, of course not. So then? That’s what I’m saying. What I said before.
What I said before. What I said before, one of the rules about karma and the laws of karma is that whatever a person experiences, so let’s use the example of Afghanistan, Afghani people, Afghan people having their, you know, environment destroyed and land minds and all the other terrible things that are happening, then the Buddhist view is, like I said also before, there’s nothing that any living being experiences that isn’t the result of karma. There is no force. So yes, the answer is of course it’s their karma. So what’s the problem with that?
You have a problem with that? I understand, but talk about it. What do you mean by evil? We all know people put landmines in. Yes, there are evil people.
You’re absolutely right. Totally agree with you. Yes? I totally agree with you. Of course it’s evil.
Of course it’s outrageous. So that I just said now, one of the kinds of karma is called action similar to the cause. So a person is kind because they’ve practiced kindness. A person is negative because they’ve practiced negativity. A person puts landmines in because due to the habit of having done that before in various ways, harming others, they continue to harm.
Secondly, they continue to harm because also they have been harmed. So they’re harming back the people who harm them. That’s this is the Buddhist view of how come things happen. Go on. Okay.
Well, that’ll come. That’ll come, I promise. As you can see, for our mind, you know, it’s not an easy one to get our head around all this because we have a bunch of assumptions at the moment. And please, no one’s saying you have to change your assumptions, I’m just giving you the Buddhist approach. So we have these other assumptions right now, you know.
And the main one that’s implying in what you say, which is the view we all mostly have now, which is kind of it’s and it’s kind of reasonable in a short term sense, that yes, of course, there’s evil. I mean, that’s very clear. Look at the world. So many people do such outrageous things to other people. The Buddhist answer though So most of our view is there’s just this evil, that’s just how they are and they are the cause of this suffering and so that’s why we hate everybody.
So you know, we have no choice. With that view we have no choice but to hate those people. It’s very hard to forgive because we can’t find a reason to forgive them. But the Buddhist view is when you with the view of karma, is a person is the way they are because one, that has been done to them before. Two, it’s because they have had the habit of doing it.
So they’re kind of locked into this old habit. So they keep doing it. I mean it sounds like simple words. It takes a while to really get your head around this one and start to use this in one’s life. But when one does, this is what I’m saying, you turn out like the Dalai Lama.
Kind, funny, intelligent, forgiving, compassionate, but never ceasing to try to change the world. Don’t sit back like some kind of wimp and do nothing. But it takes I mean, yeah, whatever. Yeah. Yes.
Environmental calamity. Yes. What do you mean not necessarily related to the environment? It’s the way the trees and the mountains and the stars and the rivers are. That’s the environment.
That’ll be called experiences similar to the cause. That’s that kind of karma. Much of it’s collective. That’s also experiences similar to the cause are also collective, definitely. This group of people here.
Look, a group of people who win the lottery, a group of people who have their country taken over, a group of people who are living in a good country like Australia. There’s collective karma of a group of people called Australians right now. Yeah. The Australians. Okay.
Okay. We won’t necessarily as a group of Australians because we first of all as a group Australians, we can say that every one of us in Australia didn’t do that action. So it’s the people who did it and who supported it, who in a future life will experience the result of that karma. But maybe it’s a bunch of dogs, maybe it’s a bunch of another nationality. I mean the Tibetans are experiencing the karma as a group of people labeled Tibetan, but they didn’t harm the Chinese as a group of Tibetans.
They probably were a thousand lives ago, who knows where that they harmed a group of people who are labeled Chinese now. It wasn’t as the Chinese that they harmed them. So now there’s a group of people called China who do due to history other way that things are happening. And there’s a group of people called Tibetans who due to history are now those people and boom, their karma is ripening. Same with the Palestinians and the Israelis.
It doesn’t follow that everybody who’s harming the Palestinians now as an Israeli, has been harmed as an Israeli or a Palestinian in the past. Okay assuming Richard was human one hundred and fifty years ago yeah? Well assuming I wasn’t here Oh you weren’t here right? No because you only can be No that’s fine. Well no, you won’t experience the result of what John Howard is doing because you’re not doing it.
I’m going talk now about how you create karma. And the only time you’re going to experience the result of something that John Howard is doing is if you agree with John Howard in your mind and support him one hundred percent. Then you will get the fruit of that karma. But you know, just because we’re labeled Australian, doesn’t mean we all do the same things. It’s gotta be your mind that does it.
I’ll talk about that in a minute. This is a really crucial point. So for me, I always have problems with the notion of And that doesn’t seem like compassionate or uplifting. I understand. She basically has trouble with the idea that your suffering is caused by your past negative actions.
It seems like you’re blaming the person for misfortune. Especially, like, Afghanistan. I understand. Understand. Okay.
Especially Afghanistan. Okay. The crucial point here that is the central point in karma that makes this one reasonable is the idea that the Buddha is saying there cannot be an experience that I have. There can’t be an experience that I have, that I haven’t created the cause to experience. The way my mind works now, having learned to kind of integrate this view and find this view reasonable, the best I can come up with so far for why things happen and the one that helps me become a compassionate, reasonably more compassionate content non angry person, the thing how my mind works now is that I find the fact, which is what the view we have now, that suffering is random because that’s really the only other option.
Because if I’m a good person and then bad things happen to me, the only explanation we can have is I have nothing to do with it, so therefore it has to be random. I find that absolutely outrageous to contemplate. I find that a million times worse. I find it very consoling and reasonable to say that whatever I experience has to be the fruit of what I have done. And don’t forget, we’re talking countless bloody lives here, not just as Rabina.
It’s obvious that Tibetan Lama that I can think of, just one person I’m thinking of who’s in prison and tortured for thirty years, it’s obvious as that person. He didn’t hurt a fly in his life, not even one fly in this life. So it is absolutely obvious as in this life. karma is an insane concept. It has no logic whatsoever.
So clearly that’s true. So from that point of view, of course you’re right. The little innocent Afghani girl has had her foot blown off. Of course she’s done nothing wrong. It’s so obvious.
Of course she’s done nothing wrong. You’re absolutely right. But Buddha’s not saying that. Buddha’s saying that she has had, like Hitler, like Osama bin Laden, like all the wicked evil people, has had countless lives from countless way back since beginningless time, countless karmic imprints. And at this moment in time, she got a human rebirth due to virtue, but she got a certain other karma called experience similar to the cause, which caused her to be harmed.
Now, I mean, it’s every reason to have unbearable compassion for all sentient beings when you start to think like this, not anger and blame and bitterness and they bet they deserve it, you know. I mean, the view we have now, this is the point, the assumption that we’re having now that is the basis of why of what you’re saying, I’m not being rude now, I’m just analyzing, okay, is that we have had one life, that we are innocent victims, and that things happen unfairly, and that of course if someone harms they’re a bad person and we must blame them, and if I’m an innocent person you must feel sorry for me. So as soon as we say well the Afghani girl has done something to deserve this, we feel, well, I have to think she’s a horrible person, therefore I have no compassion for her. So of course it’s monstrous. I agree.
But once we change the assumption that we’re all these living beings with beginningless countless lives, with countless karmic actions in our mind, with countless experiences, and they’re ripening because we’re blindly not realizing what we’ve done and your heart breaks for all sentient beings including the pilots on September eleven. More for them than for the victims. Because the victims are simply purifying their karma. The the the pilots are just beginning hundreds of lives of unbearable suffering. That’s the approach.
I know it’s a different one, it’s a bigger one, or whatever, maybe stupid, I don’t know, but I’m telling you the Buddhist one. To hang on a tick. There’s just, is there something more just to remind us to think about? Do you want me to? That’s still the issue though, do you say that an Afghan girl who’s had her foot blown off?
Yeah. That, And why would you want to tell her And why would you want to tell her that? I don’t know because I’m asking you, please, you’re suggesting it. Why on earth would you want to do such a dumb thing? Please tell me.
Because aren’t you putting forward Buddhism as a way to the end of suffering? Yes, but the intelligent thing to do is to say something to somebody who has a wish to hear it and who help. Well, that little Muslim girl who has had her foot blown off, I would no more say a Buddhist thing to her than a flight attendant in the middle. What I do is give her a hug and hopefully give her a foot as well. Do you see my point?
So just because you’re I mean, you’re hearing it because you’ve booked into a Buddhist course, you know. So therefore, you know, I have a right to slap, and you can walk out anytime you like. You understand? But she’s not here, so you don’t dump this on other people, of course you don’t. The our job is to be kind to others, and so that means doing whatever they need at any given moment according to what they need, you know.
So if a person says to me why is this happening to me and you really have a sense that the wisdom in you says yes, this could be helpful for them and it could really help their mind, please say it.