Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 41-minute talk, Geshe Sonam Rinchen teaches the Buddhist doctrine of karma as personal responsibility for actions and their consequences. He opens by establishing the Four Noble Truths as taught by Buddha at Sarnath, then explains why the Buddha presented results before causes—so practitioners first recognize their suffering, then seek its origins. Rinchen walks through three levels of suffering: gross suffering like pain, the suffering of change where pleasant experiences contain embedded dissatisfaction, and pervasive suffering inherent in a body and mind shaped by past negative actions. He then systematically describes how negative karma operates: ten destructive actions—four of speech (lying, harsh language, division, gossip), three of body (killing, stealing, harmful sexual conduct), three of mind (covetousness, ill-will, wrong views)—and their four-fold results including rebirth in lower realms, shortened lifespans, poverty, and ingrained habits of harm. He contrasts this with the fruits of restraint: long life, health, abundance, and compassionate instincts. Throughout, Rinchen emphasizes that practitioners must stop blaming external circumstances and recognize their own past actions as the seed cause of present experience. He concludes by linking negative karma to fundamental egocentrism and the illusion of a solid, independent self, suggesting that genuine change requires developing concern for others and understanding selflessness.
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Teacher: Geshe Sonam Rinchen
Collection: Karma- Taking Responsibility for your actions (Geshe Sonam Rinchen)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 41.3 minutes
Words: ~3,585
Today, I’m going to talk about the Buddha Dharma such as was taught by the Buddha Śākyamūni who attained enlightenment in Bodh Gaya in India. After the Buddha attained enlightenment in Bodh Gaya, he went to Varanasi, which is Banaras, in place called Sarnath, and that is the first place in India where he taught. And in Sarnath, he taught first the four truths, and the four truths are accepted by all Buddhists. The four truths are true sufferings, true origins of suffering, true cessation, and true paths. But if we look at how how they actually arise, we see that true origins come first. In other words, the causes come first, and then from those causes spring the suffering and problems.
But when the Buddha taught, he taught the result first. He pointed out the result first and then its cause. The reason why he did that is because it’s essential for us to recognize, to identify what is meant by suffering first. And when we’ve when we’ve succeeded in identifying what is meant by suffering, what is meant by suffering and problems, then we can look for the causes of those suffering of those sufferings and problems. So in general, we can talk about suffering from three points of view.
There is gross suffering such as we can all recognize very, very easily. And then there is suffering of change and suffering which is just in the nature of things. We we say pervasive suffering because it exists simply by the very fact that we have this body and mind. Suffering, the gross kind of suffering is something quite easy for us to identify. It’s things like having headache, pain in general, and that kind of suffering, unhappy feelings and so on.
We can have those, animals can have them. They’re very easy for us to identify. The suffering of change is much more difficult for us to identify because actually it’s the alleviation of a gross kind of suffering. So you begin by experiencing something pleasurable because a state of suffering has been alleviated, has been remedied. But actually that pleasurable feeling, if it were to continue and develop, would become another kind of suffering.
So this is what’s called the suffering of change. The pleasurable feeling is a state of suffering in embryo. This is easy to understand from a simple example. For example, if we’re very hot, if the sun is beating down on us, then we seek a cool place. And if we go to a cool place, then we feel relief.
And actually at that moment where we’re experiencing the relief of reaching a cool spot when we were so hot, a new lot of suffering is beginning. Right? It’s an embryo at that point, but we mistake that for happiness or for pleasure. So we mistake it because we’re feeling relief at that moment. So if it really was true happiness, if that was really true happiness or a truly pleasant experience, then it should be enhanced.
The longer you experience it, it should get better and better and better. But instead of that, instead of it increasing and getting better and better, it in fact changes to something which is unpleasant because if you stay too long in a cool place, you’ll eventually start feeling cold. It’s exactly the same if you’re very hungry. When you get something to eat, you feel a bit better at that moment. If that food were a cause of real happiness, then the more food you ate, the more happy you should get.
We all know that if you overeat, then you’re going to feel sick, and so it’s the beginning of another lot of miserable experience. Of the contaminated pleasure that we exchange, that which we normally consider pleasure, which is actually contaminated pleasure, has as its nature this kind of change. In other words, it doesn’t get better and better and better, it gradually diminishes. Alright? So it doesn’t stay stable or increase, it changes.
It changes into something unpleasant. And this body which we have now, this body and mind which we have at present, is the result of negative emotions and the actions which have sprung from those negative emotions in the past. So this present body and mind is the fruit is the fruit of contaminated action. And therefore, actually, it is in the nature of suffering. It’s it is something which presents us constantly with problems.
So we know even if at this moment we’re not overtly suffering, even if we don’t have any big problems at this very moment, we know that in an instant something can start. We know that anything can happen. We can get a toothache. We can get a headache. It’s just ready to go wrong.
External event can precipitate physical suffering in the same way just a thought flitting through our mind can make us feel unhappy. Just like a box of matches, a box of matches isn’t actually far, but it’s ready. I mean, the moment you strike a match, you have far. And in the same way, the moment we meet with certain small external conditions or even internal conditions as soon as they arise, we’re ready to feel miserable or experience problems, difficulties, and pain. Body and mind that we have now is like rather like a magnet attracting suffering that is to come in the future as well.
That’s why the Buddha said that these very aggregates, in other words, are body mind combination, is true suffering. So our body our body and mind that we have now is like a bundle of thorns, and this bundle of thorns is painful. Right? Whatever way you put it, whatever way you try to adjust it while you’re carrying it, it’s painful. It causes you discomfort.
And we can’t get rid of that discomfort until we are rid of this kind of body and mind. Since it’s impossible to experience comfort, since it’s impossible to experience ease while you’re carrying that bundle of thorns, it’s necessary to find some way to put it down. Right? You have to get rid of it.
And in the same way, we have to find some way to end to end this kind of existence that we have now. And the reason why we’re tied to this kind of existence is because of our negative emotions and the actions that spring from them. It’s important for us to learn to identify, to to find out what suffering is, to to recognize it and identify it for what it is, because only then will we try to look for its causes. Whether we occupy a powerful position, or whether our position is humble, and whether we’re poor, whether we’re ordained, whether we’re monks or nuns, whether we’re ordinary people, lay people, everybody is beset by problems and difficulties. So we know perfectly well from our own experience.
People look different. Right? They’re wearing different clothes. They have a different style, a different way of talking. But actually, when you talk to people for a little while, you soon discover that they have problems.
They’ll soon be talking about their problems, their difficulties, what’s what’s going wrong in their lives. So people who have money and who have a powerful position, have a a responsible job and so on, people like that have primarily mental suffering. Of course, they have physical suffering, physical problems as well, but their mental problems are predominant. And for people who are poor, they have physical problems, they have physical suffering, they have the problems of finding food, finding a livelihood. But in any case, whether you’re high or low, whatever your position is, daily you’re overwhelmed by difficult different problems and suffering.
Each one of us has to accept that. I mean, if we look at our own life, we’ve experienced it. If we don’t want to experience these difficulties and problems, we have to look we have to look and see whether or not they have causes. The problems that we face, the difficult situations and hardships that we endure may have immediate circumstances which precipitate them. But actually, the underlying cause is something negative that we’ve done ourselves in the past.
So they are the fruit of some negative action, whether physical or mental or verbal, some something something negative in the past. Buddha said that if you don’t want to experience suffering, you must prevent the causes of that suffering. In other words, you have to stop the negative action that creates it. Several categories. For instance, there are four negative kinds of activity connected with our speech.
Categories connected with speech. The first is deceitful speech, in other words lies, lying, so where you try to deceive somebody else in some way. And the second is harsh or abusive, hard language. And the third is divisive language, language which causes words which cause a rift between people who are actually good friends or which causes people who are already slightly hostile to each other to become even more hostile. And the fourth kind of negative activity connected with our our speech is gossip.
And then they’re three connected with our physical activity, so killing, killing, taking that which hasn’t been given to one, in other words stealing, and some forms of sexual behavior which are destructive, which are which are harmful to others. And then there are three connected with our mental activity. And the three connected with the mental activity are covetousness, that’s desiring things which aren’t your own or being really attached to things which are your own and and you know being you know being sort of looking at them again and again and sort of going over them in your mind. And harmful intention, harmful intention towards others, harmful thoughts towards others, and distorted views of reality. So for example thinking that the law of causation is invalid.
Completely, I mean, being convinced that there’s no such thing as the law of causation, that cause and effect have no relationship and other such things which are real obstacles to one’s spiritual development. So the Buddha advised us to give up these forms of activity, and the reason was that immediate immediate result of those is that they harm others. They’re a form of violence against others. So I mean, it’s easy to understand if you take killing as the example because every creature, no matter how small, even the smallest insect values its life. So killing is quite obviously something which is harmful to the other.
So because every creature values its life, the Buddha advised us not to kill any living creature. So it’s easy to understand the examples to do with physical activity because obviously if you take away things that belong to other people, it’s damaging to them and certain forms of sexual behavior are damaging to others. So it’s quite clear that those things are harmful to others, since they’re detrimental, and since Buddhism is involved with a nonviolent way of life, it’s important to give them up. Physical and verbal activity which is negative in the way that was described is directly directly and very obviously harmful to others, whereas mental the mental activity, the negative mental activity is harmful in a in a more indirect way. But all three kinds of activity constitute violence.
They constitute a form of violence towards others and therefore need to be given up. So directly, they harm others and indirectly, I mean, in immediate in immediate instance, they they harm they harm others. And indirectly, in the long run. So in the short term, they harm others. And in the long term, they harm ourselves.
Constructive activity, or whether it’s a destructive activity, yields four results. So there are four different kinds of results. The first of these is the actual maturation. The actual maturation. So if we do a very strong negative action, then the maturation of that is that we’ll take a rebirth as a hell being.
And if we do an an a negative action which is not quite so strong or serious, then it yields a rebirth as a hungry ghost and if we do a negative action which is of the least weight as it were, not quite as grave as the other two, then it yields a rebirth as an animal. So the maturation is rebirth in one of these three states. The second kind of result the second kind of result is actually or the second and third, we can say, are results which are in accordance with the cause that created the experience that one now has. So these results are conditioned by the action that was done. And so there’s similar experience, there’s a similar experience, and there’s action which is similar action.
In other words, you have a habit for the same thing. So if, for example, the action was killing and then the maturation was a rebirth in in a a hell state, and then when that hell existence has come to an end, one may again take rebirth as a human being. But when one takes rebirth as a human being, one’s going to have a similar experience. In other words, one ended the life of a living creature. And so what’s going to happen is that when when one is finally reborn as a human being again, one’s going to maybe have a short life or a life beset by sickness.
And then one will have the habit of killing. So it will be instinctive. One will enjoy killing. So it’s useful for us to think about what we’ve experienced or we’ve seen maybe some people, some children are really fond of killing from an early age. They just do it instinctively.
They enjoy killing. And we know of people who are always plagued by illness and you know many who have died young. So one can infer from this that they must have committed action in the past which has yielded this kind of result. The state of existence, and then when one again becomes a human being, when one is again reborn as a human being, one may be very poor or people may steal one’s things or one may lose lose one’s possessions in some way. And maybe also one will have a tendency to kleptomania.
So when we think about you know people who actually have possessions but somehow don’t get to enjoy them who who can’t find time or the chance to enjoy them or who who have them stolen before they’re able to enjoy them or who lose them in some other way. We should understand that this is a result of such an action in the past. So we should when we observe things like that or when we experience them ourselves, we should realize that this is the fruition of certain actions in the past. So as a result, on the other hand of restraining from killing. So if we can restrain ourselves from killing, if we refrain from killing, it leads to a rebirth as a human being or as a celestial being.
And what is the result which accords with the cause? We’ll experience a long life, a healthy life, well-being. And again, we’ll our instinct or habit will be to rescue life, to rescue creatures, to spare life, to preserve life. And same thing, if you restrain from taking things which belong to others, then it yields a result that one will experience, you know, just receiving possessions, things will just land in one’s lap. So whatever problems and difficulties we experience, they are the fruit of some kind of negative energy we created in the past through our actions.
So our problem is that we are unable to recognize this. We don’t acknowledge or see this and look constantly for the causes outside ourselves. We’re always looking for the causes of our misfortunes outside without. So if we say we feel sick, well, we immediately say, it’s something I ate or, you know, I haven’t been looking after my health in the right way or somebody did something bad to me. You know, we’ll we’ll always put the blame somewhere else.
Of course, external circumstances are partly to blame. External circumstances, as it were, trigger it, trigger it. But cause the underlying cause for our experiencing that is actually our own negative karma. So something that we have done in the past is responsible for our experiencing this fruit now. When when we want a flower to grow, we need certain certain conditions must be present.
The soil must be fertile, and we need heat. We need moisture. So we need various factors like this. These are contributing factors. They’re contributing factors.
But the main cause is actually the seed, the seed that we plant. The seed is the main cause, and then these are the things that are contributing factors. And without that seed, the flower wouldn’t grow. So if you put the seed in the ground and then you provide all the other conditions, then you’ll have your flower grow. So it’s exactly the same way with our problems, with suffering that we experience.
The seed is actually there. It’s implanted. It’s already been implanted. There’s been a negative imprint implanted, and that’s just waiting to be triggered. That’s just waiting to be triggered by certain conditions, certain certain situation.
So if we really don’t want to experience suffering, if we don’t want to experience problems, then we have to make sure that this seed of suffering, this seed for suffering is not implanted on our consciousness. So if we don’t want suffering, we have to make sure that the negative seed of suffering, the negative seed of unwholesome actions is not implanted on our consciousness. So whatever we experience, whether it’s pleasant experiences or whether it’s unpleasant experiences, they are triggered. They are precipitated by immediate circumstances, by immediate events. But the underlying cause of these are our own actions, our own actions, both positive and negative, wholesome and unwholesome. And then these negative actions, these negative actions ultimately root in this very strong egoistic self concern that we have, our egocentricity, this self concern that we have, and a basic misconception of the self, a basic misconception about how the self exists.
Develop an attitude which cherishes others, which is concerned for the happiness and welfare of others. And ideally, an an altruistic mind, an altruistic attitude which seeks to reach enlightenment or optimum development for the sake of all other living beings. So we know that even in dream, we have a very strong conception of the self. The self seems very real, very solid to us. Even in dream, it appears in this way.
Instinctive it’s a habit that we have. This view of the self as as something very intrinsically in existence, as something very solid. And every living creature has it. Even the smallest insect has has this very strong feeling of its identity. And the moment it’s poked or anything like that, it responds very quickly because it has this very strong sense of identity of itself.
Times when the self, when this solid idea of the self becomes more apparent. I mean, usually think of the self, we normally think of the self in this way. We have a basic misconception of the self, but we’re totally unaware of it. And the way it appears to us is becomes more exaggerated. We can see it more clearly when we’re in a crisis.
For example, if we’re in a and if we’re just about to have an accident, we have this very, very strong feeling of the self of of our own identity. You think I’m going to get hurt, and the eye appears very, very concrete and solid at that moment. And it doesn’t appear at all as something which is merely attributed to a certain basis of designation to this body mind combination. It doesn’t appear as something which is labeled to that or attributed to that, but it appears as something very independently, intrinsically existent. So we normally think of the self in this way.
We normally think of it as it normally appears to us as existent in this very in solid or independent way. And that’s our basic mistake that because we’re not actually perceiving its true manner of existence. The self, of course, does exist, but that’s not how it exists. So that kind of self doesn’t exist at all. There is no self of that kind, of the kind that regularly appears to us.
And so we’re making a basic error. And when Buddhists talk about selflessness, it means the absence of that kind of self. The self doesn’t exist in this independent way in a way that it normally appears to us. If we allow ourselves to to think about the self, you know, when we when we watch the self arise in moments of crisis or when you’re having strong feelings, it appears as something very independent. But actually, it doesn’t exist in this way at all.
It is something which is totally dependent on other factors. It’s something which is dependent on other factors, and therefore, it doesn’t exist in the way that it appear.