Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute teaching, Geshe Sonam Rinchen guides practitioners on how to transform daily life into meaningful spiritual practice. He begins by emphasising the rarity and preciousness of human rebirth, then pivots to practical instruction on setting daily intention—beginning each morning by recognising you’ve survived the night and committing to beneficial action for yourself and others. Rinchen demonstrates how mundane tasks like housecleaning, cooking, and work can become Dharma practice if approached with kindness and genuine concern for others’ welfare. He outlines the three disciplines: restraining physical actions from harm (killing, stealing, sexual misconduct), verbal actions (lies, harsh speech, gossip), and mental actions (decreasing greed, anger, covetousness). Throughout, he stresses that authentic practice lies not in withdrawing from ordinary life but in infusing it with honest intention, constant ethical checking, and the conviction that positive causes produce positive results. He closes by addressing the role of reflecting on death—not to induce depression but to create urgency to practise now.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 CtM.mp3
UUID: ca18dc7a-dfdb-41dc-b3f5-6a5c86a16b8c
Teacher: Geshe Sonam Rinchen
Collection: Calming of the Mind (Geshe Sonam Rinchen)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.7 minutes
Words: ~4,482
Yesterday we were talking about the fact that of the two kinds of rebirth, a fortunate rebirth was much the rarer. And among the fortunate rebirths, that as a human being was extremely difficult to find. And then among human rebirths, the rebirth that is endowed, the precious human rebirth, endowed with all the different assets that we were talking about yesterday which enable one to undertake spiritual practices, which enable one to practice the Dharma is even rarer to find. So even if we do have such a precious human life as we have now, which is endowed with all these different assets, which facilitates the practice of the Dharma, nevertheless, we may be someone who is unable to retain what we hear. So that can be something that is quite possible, that we can listen to instructions and hear them, but we forget very quickly.
And even if we are able to remember what we hear, we may not really grasp the meaning. And then even if we can remember what we hear and we are able to grasp the meaning, we may not be able to utilize what we have heard and understood in our practice and may be unable to generate the insights for ourselves. In other words, gain a personal experience. So this can happen even if we have such a perfect human life. And then, on the other hand, we may be able to have a good retention of what we hear.
We may be able to understand the meaning and we may actually be able to generate some insights. But still, we could be concerned only with this life, with the things of this life, with achieving fame and so on. So we could be completely concerned with such things and not have any concern, not really understand and be concerned with the next life or future lives. So it’s really important for us to think about what we have now, to realize its preciousness, to realize what we can do with it, and to feel overjoyed as if we had found a priceless gem. Recognizing and realizing the preciousness of our present body and mind that we have now, recognizing the preciousness of our lives and the potential with which we are endowed is the foundation for all further spiritual growth.
So one has to think again and again about this because it is the basis and foundation on which other spiritual realizations are founded. And it’s just like a house, if the foundation isn’t solid, then it will tumble down. Yesterday, we talked about these things and I’ve tried to explain to you. Are there any things that you would like to ask a question about? Is there anything which you haven’t understood in what I said yesterday or that you would like to question me about?
If there is something you want to ask at this moment, then you can do so. Otherwise, we may find that at the end we don’t have time for questions on specific areas that we discuss. So it’s a question of emphasis, of course. And also, it depends very much on how you approach your daily life. The really important thing, the most essential thing is the kind of motivation you have, the kind of intention you approach your daily life with.
And that should be one which is kind. Like kindness should be the main, the predominating notion in your your mind at all times. The first thing we need to think about when we wake up in the morning, we should begin then right away. We should think that it’s great that I’ve woken up this morning and I didn’t die during the night. That’s the first thing you should think.
And then the next thing you should think, and this is first first thing in the morning, you should think, well, I’m going to make this year meaningful, this month meaningful, especially this day, today, I’m going to make it meaningful. I’m going to do things beneficial, which are useful for myself and for others and which do not create any kind of harm. So actions which are in no way violent. And then again, one should think I’m not going to just be concerned with my own personal well-being. I’m trying to think beyond that.
I’m going to try and do things which are useful for the people around me as well. So if you can begin your day like that and try to maintain such an intention throughout the day, then whatever you do, whether you’re cleaning your house, whether you go out to work, whether you’re going shopping, whatever you do if you’re working to do something within society, whatever your function is, whatever tasks you’re involved with, they’ll all become meaningful, they’ll all become powerful and they will amount to a practice of the greater vehicle, a Mahāyāna practice. If on the other hand, we don’t do anything about formulating an intention, making a determination of this kind in the morning, Even if we sit all day in meditation posture and we recite the refuge or if we verbally say that we want all living creatures to be happy and so on, if we go through the motions as it were, and at the same time we’re involved, we’re thinking how we can get our own back on somebody or things like that. If we think that sort of thing, then what we’re doing sitting up straight and reciting something is going to be quite useless.
In fact, we’re going to be creating negative energy while we’re doing it. So this is how you should start in the morning thinking that you want to do things that are useful and creative, constructive for yourself and for others. And then you should get on with your daily life, involve yourself wholeheartedly in what you have to do. And then as the day wears on and you have moments when you can just think about what you are doing, then you should look to see whether what you are doing is something which is harmful to others. So that’s the thing to check up on.
If what you are doing is in some way harmful to yourself or harmful to other people, then it’s necessary to do something about it. Then you must try to stop doing whatever it is. Yeah. And if it is something which is slightly negative, but the long term, if the long term effect is going to be beneficial, then you have to be prepared to make a sacrifice and do something which is not so creative. I mean sometimes we find ourselves in such a position and you have to do something which is slightly negative in order to achieve a long term benefit.
Something which benefits either yourself or others, I mean in the best possible way on a long term basis. On the other hand, if it’s something which is good in the short term but going to be harmful, going to be detrimental in some way in the long run, then you shouldn’t do that thing which is beneficial in the short term. So what this should make us understand is the importance of checking constantly. First of all, you have to formulate a good intention and then you have check what you are doing. We need to be really mindful about everything that we do and check what the effects of each action that we undertake are.
This is our main task. So when you’re cleaning up your house, you think that you are going to do certain practices in your house, try to do some meditation in your house. Then you imagine that you remember that you are going to invite the Buddhists and Bodhisattvas to come to your house when you sit down to do the meditation practice. So you are cleaning it up for a good reason. Never mind about Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.
If you clean up your house nicely, if you make your house look attractive and beautiful, then whoever comes into it will feel happy. So that’s important too. So the boring everyday tasks can be transformed if one has enough imagination to do so. And even like if we have to cook for ourselves, you know, and sometimes you don’t feel like cooking for just one person or whatever. And then when you cook, you can think, need to nurture my body in order to be useful, in order to achieve what I aim to achieve, what I want to achieve, in order to gain insights, to understand more, to gain knowledge.
One needs a strong body and also in order to do things for other people, to be helpful to other people, one needs good health oneself. So I’m doing this to nurture myself, to look after myself because I need this body and mind for my own well-being and for the achieve others’ well-being. This is if you say you are working as a shop assistant and your task or your job is to sell things to other people. If you are honest and you are friendly to your customers and when you sell them the things you really hope are going to be useful to them. If you approach your work in that way, you know, with kindness in your heart, then everything you do, even those things become part of your practice.
So if you are friendly, you find that people come back to buy more from you, so your work will be going well and if you are friendly, the people who are buying customers feel happy when they are talking to you, when they are getting their things. If you make other people happy, that’s something constructive and you are creating positive energy. Even something quite simple like that can be turned into a fruitful practice. And even if you’re involved in some branch of government and you know maybe in one of the social services If you don’t just look at it as a drag, you have to go to the office every day and fill out these forms and do all the administrative work. But if you think of it as something that you’re doing for other people, you know, you try to think of the people that you’re doing it for and you know, you approach your work in this way and you work enthusiastically, your employers, whoever working with and the people that you’re with and your superiors are going to be happy about your work.
You are actually going to be able to do something which is efficient. You will be efficient in your work and will get your salary at the same time and you will be doing something which is constructive. It all depends on the attitude with which you approach the work. It doesn’t just become a Dharma practice, it can even become Mahāyāna Dharma practice, a great vehicle practice because you’re concerned with the well-being of all living creatures. You can encompass them even though you’re only working for one section at a time.
You can be thinking of working for them all and so you’re creating positive energy, positive potential and it will make you happy too. In the western countries, people are very educated. They are much more educated than people in the third world countries. But in addition to our education, in addition to our knowledge, we need to be kind, we need to cultivate kindness, need to cultivate a good heart. And if we can cultivate that, everything will be achieved.
We will achieve happiness in this life and in future lives. It just comes automatically if we are able to do this. So we need to combine our knowledge with goodness. So we can see that with some imagination you can transform every daily task that you do into something which is positive, which is constructive and which creates good energy. And it doesn’t mean to practice the Dharma doesn’t mean that you have to just become totally uninterested in your daily life in the things that you would normally do.
What we need to avoid is the approach which is just concerned with one’s own personal comfort. Neglecting others, thinking what happens to others isn’t important thinking. The only important thing is what happens to oneself. So that’s the approach that we have to avoid. How you should do it is, first of all, in the morning try to direct your day.
Try to find a direction, a good direction for your day. And then during the day, you should check up and do whatever you are doing with kindness, with a good heart. And then in the evening, you should look back over the day. And if you have done nice things during the day, you should feel pleased with yourself. You should feel happy about what you have done and think, Well, I am going to try and do this again tomorrow.
I am going to try and do even more tomorrow. So if we do that, our daily life becomes practiced and it will get better and better. And so if things have gone well, that’s what you should do. And of course during the day, things don’t always go well. So when things haven’t gone so well and you’re looking back over the day and you see that maybe you got angry with somebody, maybe you said something nasty or you know something went wrong, then you should think, well that wasn’t so good, you know?
And you should feel real regret for it. You should feel sorry that it happened. If you can feel that, are able to cleanse that, you are able to get rid of it. If you then maybe recite some mantras or just think something constructive, if you think about others and you know that you really would want them to be happy. If you think some constructive thoughts or recite some mantras, do something like that.
It’s possible to clean up right there and then. You can counteract it, you can clean it up, get rid of it. And that’s the true work of a Dharma practitioner. So although we may be free from these eight fetters, the eight fetters that we talked about yesterday, these eight factors which hinder one from practicing, nevertheless there are other hindrances. There are many other hindrances that can spoil our practice or make things difficult for us.
So the ninth fetter is the hurry we are always in, in western countries. So that is a great impediment. But if you can learn to transform all those different things that you have to do during the day which you can’t avoid during the day. If you can learn to transform them into practice in this way, then you can free yourself in a way from that fetter as well. A real Dharma practitioner is one who is able to improve his standard of living, his spiritual standard of living.
In other words, he is able to keep enhancing his lifestyle. He keeps enhancing his lifestyle in such a way that other people can’t find fault with it. Other people begin to admire it and to see its worth. And then a real Dharma practitioner is constantly working on his mind changing his thoughts into something positive and constructive and cultivating kindness. So that’s what real practice is about.
And that’s how we can attract other people to the Dharma as well. Because if we ourselves are living in a better way, if we live in a way which other people begin to notice and begin to remark as being good, they’ll wonder why. And when they look, they’ll see that it’s got something to do with one’s practice, with what one’s involved in, one’s involvement in Buddhism. They’ll see that it’s somehow developed out of that and then they’ll want to find out more about it too. So it’s a natural process.
It’s not a proselytizing process in normal way. You just attract other people because of who you are and how you are. And if you don’t have to sit on a high seat and attract people to the dharma, bring them into the dharma by talking to them, if you can just turn people on to what you’re doing because of what you do yourself, how you live, how you act. If you could do it that way, that’s the best way of all. It’s something really strong.
So we don’t need to talk about Buddhism or Christianity or any other religion. If you act as a practitioner, if you act as a truly spiritual person, then that’s enough. Makes you a Dharma practitioner. Right? It doesn’t need all the labels.
If you act that way, then you are a dharma practitioner, whether you have a label or not. So this is what we mean by making use of this precious human life. It doesn’t mean that you have to cast away everything to do with normal living. That you have to give all that up and somehow, you know, go into another completely different way of life. It doesn’t mean that.
So just think about that. Since it’s not really necessary for us to go into deep philosophical matters all the time. The important thing is how you can use the teaching practically in your daily life. How you make your life better, how you can improve your way of life, how you approach life, how we can improve our daily living. Because if we can approach our lives with honesty, with kindness, with the wish to help others, If we approach life in this way and act out those thoughts, then the future lives will look after themselves.
So that’s what we need to concentrate on. So we said before that this precious human life is very, very important and meaningful and hard to come by, so we mustn’t waste it and do something useful with it. And the important thing is to start now. Not to procrastinate, not to put it off, but to not begin now. Practicing.
What does practicing mean? Practicing now means transforming your body, speech, and mind, turning them, steering them towards positive towards positive action, positive activity. So making your body, making your physical activities good doesn’t mean that you put on some war paint and do your hair up nice and put on some pretty clothes. So making our physical activities positive has to do with stopping anything, any activity which harms others, which is violent towards others. And there are all kinds of physically violent action such as killing and taking that which hasn’t been given to you.
In other words, stealing, different forms of stealing, and certain kinds of sexual conduct which are harmful to which is harmful to others. So you have to decrease those kinds of physical activity, steer away from those kinds of physical activity, and Similarly, with verbal activity, there is a violent verbal activity. Violence in that context means lying and deceiving people through one’s lies, trying to deceive people through one’s lies, or being abusive, using abusive language, causing dissension between people, causing people to become bad friends or causing people who are already bad friends to be even worse friends, and gossip. So wasting other people’s time with a whole lot of useless talk. So these are all violent verbal actions.
In other words, they’re destructive in some way. So we need to So how you transform that kind of activity instead of being abusive or using hard, harsh language? We can learn to speak to people in a pleasant way. We can try always to speak to people in a pleasant way to say things to them which they are going to find nice to hear. So that’s important.
And then it’s important to be really honest, to try and be honest without being hurtful, honest with people. These are positive verbal activities. Then we have to watch out because we said one of these destructive actions was to cause dissension, create a rift between people. So even if what you are going to say is true, even if it’s true, you have to be careful because it may be better not to say it, to refrain from saying it if it’s going to cause people to fall out. Right?
If it’s going to cause people to fall out or cause people who are already on bad terms to be on worse terms. Even if it’s true, you shouldn’t say it. You should restrain yourself from saying it because that in itself is a destructive action. That’s what practice is if you decrease the negative or harmful actions and increase the positive and constructive ones. That’s practice.
And then to do our mental activity, we need to decrease our desire, our covetousness for other things, for things that we don’t already possess and we need to decrease our harmful thoughts which most of us have at some time or other. So we need to decrease this kind of activity. So we need to decrease this discontent. We always have this longing for more and more things. We just have to decrease it a little.
And we have to decrease the anger, the irritation we feel if somebody says something that we don’t like or looks at us in some way that we don’t like, we immediately feel irritation. At least we should make sure that that anger and irritation isn’t lasting. It doesn’t last. That’s what we have to do. So we have to work at decreasing the harmful thoughts and the covetousness.
Yeah. So we all tend to be greedy to want things that we actually don’t necessarily have a right to or that we don’t really need. So this greediness we need to decrease. Conviction regarding the relationship between causes and results. Because if we if our actions, our physical and verbal actions are positive and constructive, we’ll experience, we’ll very soon experience a positive fruit from these.
Even in this very life we’ll experience the positive fruit from these and that in itself will be convincing that there is a relationship, that there is this relationship between causes and their results. And we’ll experience ourselves that if we’re warm and constructive and helpful to others, we ourselves will be loved, people will love us, people will give us regard, people will give us help when we need it. And we know perfectly well that if somebody is violent, if somebody kills and threatens other people, if they speak harshly to other people, everybody keeps away from that person. That person finds themselves isolated. So these results can be experienced in this immediate life.
I mean, we can experience them here and now. What the law of causation is about is that negative causes and unwholesome causes produce negative results. They produce unhappiness and suffering and that positive causes, constructive causes produce good results, pleasurable results, happiness. So we know we already know this from our own experience in a limited context. If we take our own experience as the basis, our own understanding that this does actually work in this way, that it does work in this way.
If we take our own personal experience, we can infer that if we create positive causes in this life, our future lives must also be positive. These positive causes will fruit in happiness in something good and pleasurable. Conversely, causes, negative causes will fruit in unhappiness. We can infer this from our own present personal experience. So in this way we can remove our wrong conceptions.
If we can behave in such a way, if we can behave in a truly non violent way, then our own life will become happy. We’ll be able to make people around us happy. We’ll be able to co exist harmoniously with our family members, with the people who are our neighbors, people whom we live with in society. And it will have a wide reaching reaching effect. So whether things go well or whether they go badly, it’s in our hands.
It’s our responsibility to make things go well. None of these things are things that we can’t do. They’re all within our reach. So what about asking yourself, do you want to make yourself into somebody nice or do you want to make yourself into somebody nasty? So if you want to yourself into somebody if you want to be into somebody nice, it’s quite simple.
You just need to follow that recipe. Nobody would say they want to make themselves in somebody nasty. But if you want to be somebody nasty then you just do the opposite of all those things and you’ll be somebody nasty. Wherever you go in the world, conventionally people will consider you as somebody nasty if you do those things. You will be considered as somebody nasty and you won’t be considered as somebody nice.
So that’s just the beginning and that can be enhanced infinitely. We grow and grow and grow until we reach our optimum development. And it’s possible for us to do it right now and we need to begin immediately. And we have everything that it takes. We have the working basis for reaching that optimum development.
And no other kind of rebirth is going to provide us with such a perfect opportunity because we won’t have the ability to think and we need this ability that we have now to think and be rational. And we need to be aware that death can come at any time, that our time is limited, that we may die at any time. So when we talk about the unfortunate states of rebirth, when we talk about death, it’s not to make people feel depressed, it’s not to make people unhappy. It’s just to make make one It’s not supposed to induce unhappiness. It’s just supposed to act as a spur.
It’s to make us realize that we we need to start right now. The only reason why you meditate, you think about death is to make yourself get up off your behind and do something. Right? That’s the only reason you do it. If you don’t actually want to involve yourself in spiritual practices, if you don’t want to give yourself a push, spur yourself on, then there is no point thinking about death because it’s just going to depress you.
So if you’re interested in developing yourself, in growing, in growing, in gaining insights, then you need to think about death. And it’s not just enough to think, Oh, I’m going to die, I’m going to die.