Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute talk recorded on 7 February 2000, Jampa Kaldan offers a structured map of the entire Buddhist path for newcomers. He walks through a schematic that arranges all Buddhist teachings into logical progressive stages, grouped by spiritual perspective: preparatory foundations; the introductory scope (ethical living for better rebirth); the intermediate scope (seeking personal liberation from suffering); and the great scope (developing compassion and the wish to achieve Buddhahood for the benefit of all beings). He then deepens the discussion by focusing on two key topics: emptiness — the mistaken belief that the self and all phenomena exist independently, when investigation reveals they arise only through interdependent causes and our mental labelling — and a brief introduction to tantric practice, emphasizing that both paths share the goal of uncovering the pure nature of mind. The teaching balances philosophical precision with accessible examples drawn from relationships, flowers, and everyday experience. Suited to absolute beginners seeking an orientation to Buddhist practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2000 02 07 03 Introduction to Buddhism 7-2-00.mp3
UUID: 4b5aa176-4afa-44ac-95bd-abfd785054dc
Teacher: Jampa Kaldan
Collection: Intro to Buddhism (Jampa Kaldan)
Date: 2000-02-07
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~6,238
Is there enough? If there’s couple If there’s a short. Yeah. If we share you could share for now and then we could at the end, we could get an extra copy or two made. Is that too loud now?
Is that okay, or is it too loud for someone now? It’s a bit louder than before. Whatever you think, David. Is that alright? Whatever.
As long as people can hear okay. Yeah. So the path. I think I’ll be a little bit ambitious tonight, too ambitious tonight in how much I wanna get through. It’s the last night and your heads might be spinning a bit by the end of this.
We’ll see. But I thought it would be good to try and pack in a little bit too much and not enough because some of you may want to move on to other things and I wanted to try and help you make as much sense out of some of those other things that are happening around Buddha House as I can. So if we go a little bit beyond nine and someone has to leave at nine, please don’t feel embarrassed to leave if you need to. But if others would like to bear with it and stay a little if it turns out to go a bit longer then please do so. Is there?
Yes. Oh, okay. That’s a good incentive to stay, isn’t it? There was a big party here for Tibetan New Year on Sunday and there was a small mountain of cakes left over if I remember. So that might be a good reason to stay back.
On this sheet it’s basically divided into four columns and the column titled main components is the main list of topics if you like. And it’s that list of topics other than the first one called Guru Devotion which I haven’t mentioned now but I will mention a bit later is what I worked through in my motivation setting at the beginning. I basically talked through that list as it is there and discussed each of the points to more or less detail some of them a lot more detail than others. So what this list of points is, is all of the different teachings within Buddhism try to be systematically arranged in some logical sequence so that a practitioner who knows nothing about spiritual practice can have a map of the whole path that’s available. What are all the options that one can practice?
And it’s not meant to be it is sequential in one sense that working on the early ones helps to make the subsequent ones flow more easy in your practice of them. But it’s not meant to be a rigid thing where you must work on the first one for five years and then when you’ve mastered that you graduate onto the second one. It makes sense to work through them systematically one after the other, but then the normal process is that one just keeps going back and going through over and over again as your practice goes on over many years perhaps. And some of them you may feel much more initially attracted to others and that’s fine. Some parts here you may feel that it doesn’t really relate to at all but other parts may go right to the heart of what you’re wanting to deal with.
So it’s very appropriate to begin work on that area. And then as you begin work on that area, probably other areas that in the past seemed less appropriate or relevant may begin to take on some new meaning for you at some later stage. It’s a logical systematic setting out, but the way we grow as humans, just like the way we physically go, it’s like an organic process and it’s not a rigid step by step process. So the column immediately to the left of main components is titled the perspective adopted. Another word that could be used for perspective is scope.
And down there several times I’ve written the word scope. The word scope is often used in a lot of the books. But what this is highlighting is various sections of these main components which belong together in groups. And they are grouped together because they are a group of practices that a person of a particular type of spiritual perspective or scope will undertake. So you can see there are a couple of preparatory things that generally belong to the whole path, namely the guru devotion which we haven’t talked about yet and this precious opportunity that we have now as humans which we have talked about.
Then under those two preparatory things there is the introductory or the small scope, so the introductory perspective about spiritual practice. And this group of topics is primarily concerned about this idea of taking charge of one’s destiny in the sense of trying to make your futures as happy as possible, trying to maximise your chances for future happiness in the everyday sense by looking at those four topics. And this perspective on spiritual practice is probably what we would most closely associate with traditional religion. I will try and be a good person now so that it turns out well for me in the future. That sort of mentality.
Now the second of the perspectives, you’ll notice that it’s the band that indicates what topics it is covering includes those introductory ones, but goes on beyond that. It doesn’t just stop with those. It doesn’t abandon them, So it shares them with the practitioner of the introductory perspective, but it goes beyond that to look at the more profound issue of what’s dissatisfaction about, what causes it, what’s the way out of it, and what am I going to do about it, and what vows might I be able to take to help me do that. So that’s the intermediate scope, intermediate perspective. In other words, the practitioner who develops a very clear determination to awaken but is primarily interested in individual practice to sort out my own problems and to bring liberation for myself.
Then continuing down, ignore the words liberation and arahat for the moment. I’ll come back to those. But under that is the word great. So the great perspective or the great scope, this is where one shifts one’s attention from oneself and one’s own spiritual attainment out to others, and one’s relationship to the world and others. So one here engages in the topic, the mind training to do with love and compassion, the development of this, the awakening of one’s heart to work for the benefit of others, The development of this wish to achieve Buddhahood to be a benefit to all others which is called Bodhicitta.
So that involves the practice of the six perfections that I did mention. The patience, the generosity, the morality, the joyous effort, and the concentration and wisdom. Thank you. And also then the wisdom one, I’ve separated out the word emptiness. This work and meditation and study on the nature of ourselves and reality.
And I’m going to talk about emptiness later on in a little bit more detail. And then under that is the tantric practice, the two stages, the generation stage and the completion stage of tantric practice. And we’ll also talk a little bit more about those later. So then in the column right to the left now let’s go to the right hand column, the three main insights. This is sometimes called the three fundamentals of the path.
These three key realizations that one is able to develop on the spiritual path. The first one as a result of the practice through the topics listed marked with the little bar is the determination to awaken. Coming to this determination is one of the key insights or realizations that one can have on the spiritual path. The second one is the awakening heart, the waking up of one’s heart to the big perspective, to the universal perspective, all the other people and beings. And the third one is the awakened mind, the direct insight or realization into the true nature of oneself and reality the realization of emptiness, it’s often called.
That probably won’t become much clearer by the end of the night, but at least you’ve heard the words. So these three main insights or three fundamentals of the path. And in this tradition, those are often referred to. I think there’s actually a verse in here, a poem of about ten verses or something written by the founder of this particular Tibetan tradition, Je Tsongkhapa, who I mentioned in the first night. He wrote this poem called The Three Fundamentals of the Path.
And that’s where I’ve taken these three realizations from. Then in the far left column, the type of vehicle. It’s a bit of a weird name. I don’t really like it but I can’t think of a better one. I wanted to them in because they come up all the time whenever you start doing any reading.
The words Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna often come up in the books and sometimes they’re translated as literally the small vehicle or the great vehicle. Now it was the great vehicle practitioners who, in hindsight, came up with this distinction and called the others in other words, the Theravadin practitioners called them small small vehicle practitioners or hinayana. So that’s why I’ve used the word individual vehicle. It doesn’t have such a negative connotation as small vehicle. And it’s individual vehicle because the practices at that level relate to the intermediate scope of practice.
In other words, the medium, the individual vehicle, or the Hīnayāna, is that approach or that set of practices or that vehicle of spiritual practice that leads to an individual’s liberation. Whereas the Mahāyāna, the great vehicle or as I’ll call it here the universal vehicle, is all built around this seeking to grow into the full state of Buddhahood so to be able to benefit all others. So it’s a path that tries to carry everyone along with it and that’s why it’s called the universal vehicle or Mahāyāna. And then down below, the result of the practice of hinayana or the individual vehicle or of the intermediate perspective or the middle scope, the result or the outcome of that practice over a period of however long it takes one to achieve it is individual liberation or nirvana or one becomes what’s called in Sanskrit an arahat. When you liberate yourself from your ignorance according to the practice of this path then you become an arahat in Sanskrit and you’ll often come across that word as well in the books.
So down below universal vehicle in the left column is Tantrayāna and you’ll come across the names vajrayana and Mantrayāna. These all mean the same thing. They are all names for tantric practice. Sometimes it’s also called the practice of secret mantra because a lot of these things were traditionally kept secret from practitioners until their spiritual master decided they were ready to be told about them. So Tantrayāna Tantra is more like the name of the group of texts that these practices were elucidated in down through the ages.
vajra, Mantrayāna is self explanatory because it’s also the type of practice where mantras are often used in conjunction like we did tonight with the meditational practices. And the word vajrayana vajra is a Sanskrit word that literally means both diamond or lightning bolt, something very powerful and strong and hard, potent, cut through anything, smash through anything. And there is a symbol of vajra. Behind me here, you can’t see. One of the many, many symbols that’s a bit overwhelming in Tibetan Buddhism is the vajra symbol.
And on this golden thing, you can look later, It’s not very clear, but there’s a crossed one. They’re often made as implements that you can hold in your hand to them. I haven’t got one to show you. Anyway, vajrayana. So I’d like to talk about two things particularly from these lists that we haven’t discussed really in any detail.
One is the business of emptiness and the second one is tantric practice. So I want to talk a little bit about each of those. Emptiness is a word that you’ll see. Sometimes it’s also called voidness in the books. The Sanskrit word is shunyata.
In Tibetan it’s tongpa nyi. You’ll often see shunyata in textbooks, but you won’t often see the Tibetan written. But emptiness is probably the most widely used. And it leads to all sorts of confusion and misunderstanding and it can be quite difficult to understand. And one of the difficulties is that there are different schools of thought within Buddhism about what emptiness actually means.
And there’s no apology for that. It’s actually seen as a very useful thing to be able to see these different perspectives, become familiar with them all, and then develop an overall better understanding of what’s been gotten at. It’s actually seen as an educational process in the monasteries to thoroughly work through and understand the strengths and weaknesses of each of the different philosophical views of emptiness. I’m just going mention two tonight the most straightforward one and the most sophisticated one which is the one that is taught traditionally in this tradition as the best and, if you like, the complete understanding of emptiness. Emptiness really means just what it means in normal sense.
Something’s empty of something. That bowl is empty of anything except maybe air but it’s empty of any particular thing. It’s just lacking. It’s not meant to be some metaphysical entity that’s really there that we’re calling a funny name, emptiness. It’s just empty.
We all know that and take it for granted. And let’s try and think like that when we’re talking about emptiness here even though it’s been used in a technical way in Buddhist philosophy. Emptiness, at the end of the day, is not referring to some metaphysical entity that you have to somehow get in touch with. It’s simply saying something is lacking just like this is empty. Something’s lacking.
And what Buddhist philosophy is saying is that we ourselves, our self and, in fact, all of reality are lacking or we’re empty of something that we instinctively feel that is there. We instinctively feel something is there. We instinctively feel something is in the bowl, but actually it’s not. It’s actually empty. But if this analogy may not be exactly perfect, but if I imagined hallucinating and saw something in there, I instinctively feel there’s something in there when in fact there isn’t anything there.
It’s empty of what I saw in there. So we instinctively tend to put onto our self and to everything in our reality something that’s not really there. Let’s start first and talk a little bit about our self. I think that’s easy. Maybe we can relate to that fairly easily.
And let’s talk about the selflessness of the person or the emptiness of our self. So when think of ourselves and the way we act and live, we tend to act and live and be emotional and think about ourselves as if there’s somewhere in there not sure where, but somewhere around here, there’s a real me. There’s a real true, somehow independent self somewhere living in there. We instinctively have this feeling. It’s maybe a bit like a manager or a chief executive officer sitting in the control room.
It’s getting all his data in and he’s got to write memos and send things out and push buttons. But there’s some controller sitting in there and we believe that’s our self, our real self, and it’s truly there we feel. That’s our really instinctive feeling. It’s the thing that makes all the decisions. It’s the thing that has our free will somehow.
Now in the first of the different philosophical positions about emptiness, they only concern themselves with analyzing is that self, the way it seems to be there, is that true or not? Or is that another one of the myths that we live by? It doesn’t worry about all the other world and the phenomena. All it worries about really it says all the other things are there. Flowers and books and the wind, they’re all there.
Let’s not worry too much about that. Let’s just worry about this problem in here, the self. And it says, if we carefully investigate, well, what are we made up of? If this self is really there, we should be able to find it like anything else. If we put our mind to it, we should be able to actually observe it, specify exactly what it is, put our finger on it somehow, find it.
If it’s really there the way we instinctively feel it is, we should be able to find it somehow. However, when we investigate this collection of things that make us up our body and all of its parts and our mind. This continuum of our mind, it’s got emotions, it’s got thoughts, it’s got feelings and memories and dreams and all sorts of things in this constant flowing stream. And so that constant flowing stream of our mind is intimately integrated with our body, unbelievably intimately integrated. In fact, some ways it’s probably artificial to separate them.
They are so closely interlinked. But if we investigate what makes us up, those are the things we have to investigate. That means that if we were to find the self, this self that we instinctively feel really has to be there somewhere like the manager of the whole works, It must be somewhere amongst all that. It either has to be one of those things that we could point to if we investigate and we can’t find it then the implication of that is maybe it’s an illusion. Maybe it’s a myth we live by.
Another one of these things we live by instinctively and habitually but it’s causing us a lot of problems. It’s tripping us up without ever having the faintest idea that it’s happening. And in fact Buddhist philosophy I guess this is one of the most unique this area of discussion now is one of the most unique things about Buddhist practice compared to any other spiritual or religious practice. This concept of selflessness of the person and emptiness in general. In other words, what we are empty of is this illusory self, the one that feels like it really should be there like the boss making the decisions.
But when we investigate, you can’t find anything like that. And there was an extraordinary show on the science show this week on Saturday and it was playing again tonight from seven till seven thirty on exactly this topic. I thought it was absolutely extraordinary that in the last fifteen years in science, the latest thinking in psychology, artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind are coming to precisely these conclusions. And the main theme of the Science Show on Saturday was about the selflessness of the person. That we are this incredibly complex set of systems of processes all going on parallel and running together.
But when you take all them away, there’s nothing left. There’s no real me sitting in there that’s running the show. The show runs itself. So we are empty of what we imagine to be there but that doesn’t mean that you all don’t exist. And that’s a big misunderstanding that people often have about Buddhism, that it’s saying everything’s void.
It’s all just not there. And in Buddhism, is very, very clear that you are all there. I’m here. You’re there. We all agree on that.
But the way in which yourself is there, even though it’s there and we refer to each other as me, I, that’s so and so, and he’s really there and she’s there and how’s she feeling? And all that’s quite legitimate and not being questioned. What’s being questioned is this instinctive feeling of something more than all that. It lives in there and we instinctively feel that and we act on it. This is not just philosophizing.
We emotionally act as if that’s the way it is. Look what happens. What does it feel like when suddenly someone makes you angry? There’s this inner sense of the real me has been offended and I’m going to defend it. Or when you fall in love with someone, the sense of me just becomes so strong.
And Buddhism is powerful. And Buddhism is saying that we have to get by our investigation and our meditation, we have to get down beneath that and cut. Cut and by directly seeing it working in our mind to cut through that illusion about selves. And that doesn’t mean you just turn into all components of the complex of body mind just turn into a meaningless mush. Maybe if you suddenly realized it out of the blue, maybe you would.
Maybe you’d go insane because you couldn’t handle it perhaps. But when this is experienced as a part of a spiritual practice with an enormous amount of preparation, then all that preparation seems to be preparing you to be able to handle it so that then you become a liberated being. Someone where just talking at this stage at the level of an Arahat or someone who retains liberation of themselves, when the attachments and anger and stuff come, they no longer take over your mind and drive it this way or that. But all the processes of experience still go on and you still remain a functioning person. But you’ve cut through this thing that causes all the problems in your mind.
So that’s basically what the most straightforward philosophical view says. And then skipping to a couple of others, let’s go to the most sophisticated one, the highest view as is taught in this tradition. To do this, we’ll go out from ourselves and we’re now talking about everything. We’re not just talking about the self, we’re talking about our body. We’re talking about the flower, the book, the pain in my leg, you.
Every phenomenon in our lived experience comes under the analysis that I’m going to talk about now. But as an entree to that, I want to just do a minor sidetrack to help you understand what Buddhism is saying the mind does here. Basically what it’s saying is that our mind tends to put onto things something that’s not there, like we said about the self. Yes, you’re there, but our mind has this trick of generating and holding as if it’s really true this illusory self. But the highest view says it doesn’t only do that to the self, we in fact do that to everything in our lived experience.
We actually lay on to the flower, the cup, the clock. We actually lay on to that in our habitual mental way our mind works something more than what really is there. And let me give you a taste of our mind actually does that. And let’s talk about the example of our relationships where we have certain people are our friends and loved ones and others are the people we can’t stand. Let’s try to date the extremes.
Our lovers and our enemies. So you can really very easily relate to, yes, please, more. No way. Not that sense. Now, what we’re doing in these two types of reaction is we are actually generating a label and putting it out there onto the object.
Now that lover is not inherently a loved one, somehow in his or her own right. Now we instinctively feel that he or she is. When you’re in love, the sense that this person is inherently lovable in their own right, and they just ooze lovability. They just are the essence of lovable. That’s part of nature.
But I’m being very provocative in saying they aren’t any of that. They’re just what they are. But what we’re putting onto them is this label. We’re viewing them through these very heavily tinted glasses, and we do exactly the same to our enemies, the people we can’t stand. The person does something wrong to us and we develop this label, we rehearse it, and then we throw it out at them.
And they turn into an ogre that we don’t want anything to do with. We’re doing this with our mind. And you might say, well, hang on. That’s going a bit far, isn’t it? Doesn’t come off that bad.
I mean, he’s lovable. I can’t stand her. She’s really and everyone knows that. But isn’t it funny how they change? You know, in a month’s time, suddenly he’s become a demon that I never want to have anything to do with again.
Four weeks ago, I was madly in love with him. How is that possible? If he was inherently lovable, it couldn’t change. It would be something essentially about him that would be unchangeable. But he’s just a changing phenomenon like everything else.
And at one moment, I’m throwing onto it lovable because he’s giving me everything I want. And the next minute, she can’t stand her anymore because she’s not giving me what I want. And I’m putting this label out there onto her. And then you might say, oh, but hang on. It’s going too far.
People change. They’re lovable. They don’t have to be fixed lovable. He was really lovable then. Now he’s become unlovable.
But it’s in him. It’s not in me. But why is it that I’m madly in love with her but he can’t stand her? If it was inherently in her, then everyone would see you the same way, surely. So just some provocative things to get you thinking about this idea that the way our mind works is to tend to throw out there more than what’s really there.
So how does that relate to the emptiness of all phenomenon? So as with the self, we actually misunderstand or we’re confused or ignorant or bewildered about the true nature of our experienced objects. We tend to put onto the experienced objects more than what’s really there. So let’s use the example of a flower. This flower here.
What this flower is, we could say, it’s a dependent arising which is a word that’s often used in Buddhism. In other words, it’s something that arises dependent on all sorts of factors. It comes about because of all the bits that make it up, all the causes and conditions that had to come to be for that flower to be there. The seed, the water, the soil that it grew on, the bush that it grew on, the air that it took in, the sunlight that absorbed through the leaves that helped it to photosynthesize so that it could produce a flower. All of that and millions of others of causes and conditions came together to lead to this phenomenon that we see in front of us here.
And it also depends on our labelling it as a flower. We have to throw out this label or designation that this thing that’s arisen from all these causes and conditions and all of its parts coming together that we throw out onto that the label flower. That’s what it is. It’s a flower. We can all see that.
We agree. But then we can ask, well, what is a flower? I mean, if I ask someone, where’s the flower? Where’s the flower? What do you point to?
This? That’s not the flower. It’s a leaf. This is not the flower. It’s a stem.
The petal? A petal is not the flower. It’s a petal. So when you say, oh, this flower, it seems very straightforward, doesn’t it? This flower.
We all know what we’re talking about. What are we talking about? Can anyone point to me what the flower is? It’s not any one of the parts, is it? Why can’t you take it as the totality?
Okay. That’s a great suggestion. So could we take it as the collection of all the parts that make it up? That’s the flower? That makes sense doesn’t it?
So if I pull all the petals off and chop the stem up and put it in a pile in my palm, the collection of the parts, is it a flower? It was a flower. Is it a flower? It’s a ruined flower. It’s a ruined flower, exactly.
But it’s not a flower anymore is it? So yeah, something’s happened to it. It’s transformed. It was a flower and now it’s become something else. It’s become a dissembled flower or a ruined flower.
So just having all the parts together isn’t what a flower is and then maybe there’s another way of interpreting what you said. Well, let’s be a little bit more clever than that. It’s not just the parts in a lump but it’s got to be obviously the parts a correctly ordered form. Maybe that’s what the flower is, a composite. The correct composite of parts is the flower.
But does that mean that the composite of the parts somehow exists separately from all the parts? If I take away the stem, it’s not the composite of the parts anymore, is it? So the composite of the parts only exists because all the parts are there and exist. But that’s actually not the case. The interesting thing is that when you draw a tree So what you’re suggesting is it’s the it’s the shape of the composite of the parts that is the flower.
But let’s just finish with the idea that it’s not the shape of the composite. It can’t be the composite of the parts as such because the composite of the parts depends on all of the individual parts. So that can’t be what the flower is because that would have to exist somehow separately to the parts, but it doesn’t. You can’t have a composite without the parts. But the suggestion about the shape.
Is the shape of the composite the parts? And what I’m suggesting is that you draw the picture and everyone knows the picture is a flower but it’s not actually a flower, is it? It’s a drawing of a flower or it’s the shape of the flower but it’s not actually a flower. So what is the flower? I think the essence is that flowerness Okay.
So when you start talking about relationships, you’re talking about what our mind is putting onto it because they don’t exist without some sort of point to arranging the relationships, which is a conceptual activity, which leads exactly to the point that when you investigate the flower, what really is the flower, you can’t find anything. All you can find is that it’s a label. It’s a set of relationships that we throw out onto that, that we designate onto that collection of parts. So what the flower is is our mental imputation, our mental throwing out, our mental labeling onto a set of parts or a set of relations or whatever. And this is quite hard to understand and actually can be a bit scary and various other things.
Because we’re not saying just the flower. We’re saying all objects are like this the mug, the cup, you, everyone. But the point that’s been got at here is that in this philosophical view, the root problem in our mind is this instinctual tendency to treat everything as more than what it really is. We’ve just concluded, if our logic is right, that what this seems to be is something that we’ve thrown out as a label. That’s what the flower is, a label onto its parts.
Yet we treat the flower like we treat ourself, as something that’s really there. It’s out there in its own right, independent, somehow inherently being a flower, truly and naturally existing out there. And yet when we investigate it, we can’t find it. The more we question and look, it just seems to disappear from us. What about the people that go out and look for specimens in in forests something.
They find find a fern Yeah. And it’s not in a catalog anymore. So it hasn’t been labeled. It’s not the fluffy fern or Yeah. Whatever it is.
So it it hasn’t got a label yet. So what is it before it’s labeled? Maybe it’s a sort of tentative over. This is the strange thing. I don’t know what it is.
But because of all the other labels I’ve got around me in the world, I know it fits somewhere around that category of plant like. But then if you’re looking at Sorry, I wonder if it’s already ten past nine and there’s still a bit to go. I wonder if we should save questions and discussion if some people want to stay back. This is the sort of topic that requires years and years of work. It really does.
And I’m just trying to give you a quick feeling for an overview. Maybe let’s not try to get bogged down in it. There’s just a huge amount of material to come to terms with here. Please excuse me. No, that’s not happening with that because it does take years.
Yeah. Yeah. So the whole point of this is not some dry philosophical exercise. The whole point of investigating and studying and then meditating in this type of manner is to get to the root problem of what’s going on in our mind. Because if instinctively our mind tends to spin out this illusion of every phenomenon in our lived experience as somehow being there in its own right, but ignores the fact that our mind’s actually putting it there in a sense by this throwing out of labels on everything like we were doing with self, like we were doing with she’s so lovable and she’s so hateable, then it becomes very important to transforming our lived experience.
Because if we can’t come to terms with that, then we can’t get to the root of our problem. What emptiness means is the emptiness of inherent existence. The lack of the flower being there the way it instinctively seems to be there to us. It doesn’t mean there’s no flowers. There’s nothing.
It doesn’t mean that. There are flowers. There’s one we all agree. We can all see it. And it functions very well for all the jobs of being a flower.
But it’s of this extra that we lay on top of it, that it’s somehow really out there in its own right. And therefore it needs to be reacted to with the whole gamut of our afflictive emotions. If someone steals it, I have to get upset about it because it’s my real flower. Okay. Now this topic is a very nice lead in to talk about tantra because understanding these issues about emptiness thoroughly is one of the key preparatory things for the practice of tantra because the practice of tantra is absolutely riddled with the assumption that the practitioner has a pretty good understanding about emptiness and is constantly being mindful of it in their practice.
So tantra, this understanding of the nature of reality, yeah, central. I’d like to read a quote from Lama Yeshe. Please, if anyone else needs to go, it’s ten past nine. Please don’t feel embarrassed. I want to read a quote from Introduction to Tantra by Lama Yeshe, who you may remember I mentioned was the founder of this centre and some others around the world now.
And his book Introduction to Tantra he says this: According to Buddhist teachings no matter how confused or deluded we may be at the moment, the underlying and essential nature of our being is clear and pure. In the same way that clouds can temporarily obscure but cannot damage the light giving power of the sun, so too the temporary afflictions of body and mind, our confusion, anxiety and suffering. They can temporarily obscure but cannot destroy or even touch the fundamentally clear nature of our consciousness, Dwelling deep within our heart and within the hearts of all beings without exception is an inexhaustible source of love and wisdom and the ultimate purpose of all spiritual practices whether they are Buddhist or not is to uncover and make contact with this essentially pure nature. According to the Sūtrayāna, which is another name for the practice of the other parts of the path other than tantra, so according to the other parts of the path, the path to fulfilment is a gradual process of cleansing our mind of all its faults and limitations and developing in their place such beneficial qualities as love and wisdom. This path consists of creating specific causes.
In other words, behaving ethically, developing our powers of concentration, training in meditative insight and so forth for the future attainment of full awakening. Because of this emphasis on creating causes for getting a future result, this gradual approach of the Sūtra path Sūtra, the early teachings, the various Buddhist teachings are called Sutras, so it’s called the Sūtra path.