Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 34-minute talk, John Landaw introduces the three principal elements of the Sūtra Path—renunciation, Bodhicitta, and wisdom—which form the foundation for all Buddhist practice, including tantra. He begins by illustrating genuine compassion through everyday examples: the mother who acts with superhuman wisdom to save her child, or the friend who suddenly speaks profound counsel from deep concern. Landaw then systematically develops Bodhicitta motivation, tracing how meditation on interdependence and the equality of all beings leads from intellectual understanding to genuine heartfelt concern for others’ happiness and freedom from suffering. He describes the shift from wishing others were happy to taking personal responsibility to bring them benefit—the “superior intention.” From this arises the resolve to achieve enlightenment oneself in order to help all beings maximally. He then outlines the Six Perfections—generosity, ethics, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom—which practitioners cultivate on this bodhisattva path. Landaw uses vivid comparisons: the transformation of diffuse light into a laser beam to illustrate concentrated mind, and two wings (method and wisdom) needed for flight toward enlightenment. He emphasizes that without grounding in these three principles, tantra lacks foundation. The talk closes with a dedication of positive energy for all beings’ welfare.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 Intro to Tantra Day 1 no date.mp3
UUID: f1606a19-9f7b-4525-8e52-9562b4a8f9c2
Teacher: John Landaw
Collection: Introduction to Tantra (John Landaw)
Date: 1984 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,620
Except that at that moment let’s let’s use an example of that being the mother. At that moment, the mother was outside of herself. She was outside of any normal identification with what she was because her entire energy was focused on the welfare of the child trapped, and therefore did something superhuman. Now, something like that may have happened to us. For instance, someone that we know might be in great mental trouble, and we’re not a psychologist.
We don’t know very much about that. We don’t know much about mental health. We’ve never studied anything, I’d say. But because of our incredible concern for this person, we suddenly hear ourselves saying something remarkably wise and incisive, something we didn’t know we knew, as if our concern for that person helped us tap a source of wisdom which up to this point had been dormant. I think all of us have had some taste of an experience like that to indicate that there is a treasure inside that’s waiting to be tapped.
And the key is to turn outward as well as turning inward. It’s a dual path. One turns inward to help clean up the mess and cultivate the good qualities, but one turns outward with one’s motivation and benefit. So when we speak of that third level, that highest, that so called mahayana, great vehicle level of motivation, this is what’s being talked about, this overcoming of selfish concern and replacing it with a concern for others. Now, as before, there can arise an objection that, well, if I don’t take care of myself, if I only take care of others, then I’ll get lost, people will take advantage of me, and so forth.
But these are not realistic worries. They only become worries when there is no proper training or proper approach being taken. One has not truly developed a Bodhicitta motivation. One’s concern for others is still at a very emotional, you might even say hysterical level. It’s not based on having first looked inward to understand one’s own positive and negative qualities and trying to redress the balance between negative and positive, but instead is a kind of emotional outpouring, which looks like compassion from the outside, but may in fact just be a proverbial form of selfishness.
But if we’re able to tap this source of genuine concern for others, on a basis of a certain emotional maturity in ourselves, then there’s the promise of this treasure. There are different methods for cultivating this Bodhicitta. I think many of the people here have heard different ones. There’s no time to go into great depths, but basically these methods start by generating a very in-depth appreciation of our interrelatedness with others, of really sensing how everything that we have, everything that we are, all our possessions, all our enjoyments, were not something that we created by ourselves, but are there due to the kindness, the hard work, the sweat of countless other beings, so that we’ve been the recipient of an extraordinary amount of benefit from others. We can do this by, if we take the argument of past and future lives, then it’s possible to develop a meditative train of thought in which we recall in our imagination the mother child relationship that we’ve had with everyone, that everyone at some time or another has been like a mother to us, a mother in the sense of a primary nurturer, someone whose intention was necessary for us even to be alive.
Then there are other streams of meditative thought which stress the benefit and the kindness we’ve received from others, not specifically when they were our mothers, but at all times. To use an example, if we are about to eat a spoonful of rice, if we stop to think of how many beings, sweat and labor were involved so that we can do this action, so that we were free to do this action, to take nourishment from this, we realized that it involved the concerted effort of hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of beings just for the spoonful of rice, and then looking at our surroundings, how it could be that we could have a course in this room, and so forth. Again, it’s not solely because we ourselves did it. We have to rely on the work of others. So cultivating the mind in any of these various ways, we gain a very strong sense of the interdependence of our life with all other life.
Something to be cultivated over a period of time. And so we cultivate a sense not only of the interdependence, but also of a certain basic equality, that just as I want to be happy, the same is true for everyone else. Such an easy thing to say, but often such a hard thing to realize. We have this tendency in our mind that, even though it doesn’t verbalize it, seems to think that of a crowd of people, we’re the ones who deserve somehow to have the benefit, to have the happiness. And we don’t give full humanity, we don’t posit full humanity to everyone else.
We may, to a few of our friends, people we’ve been really intimate with, we may say, oh, yes. He or she also deserves to be happy because he or she is just like me. We have the same kind of heart. But we don’t give that to everybody, just to a few people. We don’t give it to the stranger on the street.
We don’t tend to give it to the person who gets us angry. And yet, there is no essential difference. The only difference is that we’re friendly with some and not friendly with others. Were we to become friendly with the others, we would see also that their heart was the same as ours, wanting only happiness and wanting nothing but a cessation of suffering. So these meditative lines build from one realization to another, trying to keep it from merely being intellectual, but a heartfelt appreciation of the interdependence with others, the equality of self and others, and then, from that, understanding the tremendous advantages of having concern for others and the tremendous disadvantages of being concerned only for oneself.
How having a mind which is only concerned for oneself doesn’t lead to happiness, but sets up the causes for dissatisfaction whereas being concerned for the welfare of others only leads to experiences of happiness. From this line of meditative progression comes the generation of an attitude of love, which truly wishes others to be happy, and the generation of compassion, which is a bit like the flip side of love. Compassion is an attitude which, when it sees other people’s suffering, wishes they were separated from that suffering. So eventually the mind reaches a state in which every time it views another being, it does so with a spontaneous wish that they be happy and removed from suffering. And yet this itself is not enough.
To this level, it’s still remaining just a wish. Eventually, there comes a feeling in what’s sometimes known as a supreme intention, and that is it’s not enough to wish that others be happy and removed from suffering, but that I myself must do something about the situation. I must take an active role in helping increase other people’s happiness and helping in the decrease of their suffering. It’s not enough just to stand by and wish it. So once this superior intention, this selfless wish of taking responsibility onto oneself, once that grows in the mind as something natural, not something artificial, then it’s time to do another inventory.
This time it’s an inventory which asks the question, Well, am I really capable of bringing that kind of benefit to others? And if I’m not, who is? So from making inquiries in that direction, what we discover is as long as our mind is limited, we barely have the ability to help ourselves, much less help others. But to the extent our mind is enlightened, in the sense of having overcome selfishness and gaining the qualities of wisdom, skill, as well as compassion, to that extent, then people are able to be of benefit to others, and true benefit, not just something temporary. So from this entire line of meditative progression comes a thought to become enlightened oneself, to remove even the last vestige of confusion and obscuration in one’s own mind.
Why? For the purpose of being beneficial to others. For purpose of being able to benefit others. And that thought itself, that thought of wishing to become enlightened, to become a Buddha, if you will, for the sake of, from that space, being able to benefit others to the maximum degree, that is the Bodhicitta wish. That is the Bodhicitta motivation.
With that motivation, then one engages on the three higher trainings. Before, we engaged on the three hire trainings because we were miserable and we wanted to get out of all experiences of misery. Now, basically the same practices are engaged in, but now the motive is: Other beings are miserable, and I won’t be happy until I’m able to be of some benefit to them, some maximum benefit. Now on this level of practice, on this third level of practice and motivation, the trainings are no longer called the three higher trainings. They’re expanded and they’re known as the Six Perfections.
But if we check carefully among the Six Perfections, we’ll see that they’re very similar to the Three Higher Trainings. But by dividing them into six, we give greater scope for this mind wishing to benefit others. We give it a more prominent place. So just to list their names briefly without belaboring the point too much, the first of the six perfections is generosity, sometimes called charity. And again, you have to remember that what we’re talking about here is not so much a physical act of charity or a physical act of generosity, but this is definitely part of it.
But basically what we’re talking about is a mind which has the willingness to give. Not only a mind willing to give material benefit, but a mind willing to give guidance, to give protection, to give mental comfort, to give Dharma, to give teaching. So this generosity or this practice of giving is a very expansive state of mind. Then the second is sometimes called ethics or moral discipline. Keeping a reasonable pattern of behavior, clarifying one’s activities of body, speech, and mind.
It also relates to if one has vowed to behave in a certain way, to do this and to avoid that, then ethics or morality is keeping that vow pure. So what is the root of all ethics or moral behavior? It’s to avoid harming. If we had no great philosophical structure in our mind, merely tried as much as possible not to harm others, this is considered the highest of all ethical disciplines. Thirdly, there is the practice of patience or forbearance, the ability to put up with the difficulty, An antidote for the kind of mind which gets angry at obstacles, gets angry with other people, gets angry with one’s practice for being too slow.
So sometimes it’s called patience or forbearance. Neither of these words carries the full flavor of what this practice really means. Because in our mind, maybe because of our western type culture, patience is thought of in a kind of a negative way, just some sort of patient endurance. Something heavy is going on and we’re just patient with it. It’s almost as if something is festering inside but we’ll be patient.
It’s almost like the virtue of the weak is to be patient. But here patience is a much more active virtue than that. It’s referring to a mind which sees the disadvantages of anger, sees how irrelevant and destructive anger is, and with tremendous fortitude is able to persevere and put up with the situation without giving in to this destructive quality of anger. Then fourthly, there is a quality which is translated variously as effort or enthusiastic perseverance. And just as patience mainly was directed against the delusion of anger, so enthusiastic perseverance or effort is mainly directed against the delusion of laziness or incapability.
At some points they seem to be very similar, but actually there is a difference here. Laziness, the feeling, the kind of mind which cannot take pleasure in doing something positive, something constructive, but finds it extremely easy to be diverted by any number of amusements. Or laziness in the sense of a delusion of incapability, a kind of a perverse pride, an upside down pride, which means I can’t do anything. Why try? All of that is overcome by this effort, this enthusiasm, perseverance, a mind which actually takes joy in spiritual development.
Then fifth limb, the fifth perfection, sometimes just called concentration, sometimes it’s also called meditative stabilization. This refers to the quality of mind that can be developed of single pointed concentration. At the moment, we have a very difficult time in placing our mind on any given object, be it the breath or something to analyze or something to think about or visualize, we have a very difficult time to place the mind there and keep it there. It always seems to be distracted by something. And when it’s not distracted, then the focus is rather dull.
So true concentration is the state of mind where the mind can be placed with clarity, stability, and sharpness. When we possess such a mind, it’s as different from our ordinary mind as a laser light is different from a fluorescent light or an incandescent light. If we check an incandescent light, what we see is that all of the vibrations that make up the light patterns are all going in different directions. So the resulting light that’s given out is diffuse. Now to turn that into a laser, basically what’s necessary is a series of mirrors and filters.
And through the proper manipulation of these things, the light becomes polarized. In other words, all the light vibrates in the same plane, same direction. And so instead of having this soft, hazy, diffused light, we get this penetrative, laser sharp beam. And that’s a very, very powerful analogy for the training in the Fifth Perfection concentration. That normally our attention is very diffuse and very scattered, but it’s possible through training to develop the kind of mind which can penetrate like a laser.
It can stay focused single pointedly on the object and then penetrate deeply into the nature of that object. Eventually what happens through the power of concentration is that the gap between subject and object is eliminated. What I mean by that is that sometimes the impression we get from our meditation teachings, or from any kind of spiritual activity that we do, is that we’re over here doing the activity, and over there somewhere is what we’re thinking about or what we’re meditating on. And so there’s a gap between the subject, the mind that’s doing the meditating, and the object, what’s being meditated upon. There’s a feeling that what we’re meditating on isn’t really touching ourselves, or we’re not really touching it.
There’s some distance, some gap. But the more we develop concentration, the more we overcome the gap. And eventually, the subject mind and the object, whatever it is that’s being meditated, become of one flavor, become of one taste. And this is what actually transforms the mind. If we choose to meditate on love with such a mind, the mind becomes love, the mind becomes compassion, it becomes bodhichitt, it becomes skill, it becomes wisdom.
It’s no longer a matter that the mind is over here looking and over there is some beneficial quality. The mind and the beneficial quality mix indistinguishably, and this is a result of such concentration or meditative stabilization. So these five perfections, or Paramitas as they are called in Sanskrit, taken collectively are known as method, the method aspect of the path to enlightenment, in the nature of compassion. And the sixth perfection is wisdom, the perfection of wisdom. Wisdom here, not referring to knowledge in the sense of an accumulation of facts and so forth, but the kind of mind which is capable of making distinctions between the true and the false, the correct and the incorrect, the real and the imagined.
And so it’s said that the path to enlightenment is a path combining method and wisdom. A compassionate method of working for the sake of others, developing these various qualities with effort, perseverance, concentration, moral discipline to keep from harming and generosity. And then, together with this method, this compassionate method aspect, wisdom, the ability to see clearly. And so these are sometimes referred to as the two wings, the wing of method and the wing of wisdom. Just as a bird can’t fly properly if it only has one wing, so too we can’t achieve enlightenment if we have only wisdom on one hand or only method on the other.
But with combined method and wisdom, then it’s possible to achieve enlightenment. So this, though it may not sound so brief, is in fact a very, very brief summary of the entire path, starting from the very beginning with an appreciation of the preciousness afforded us by our present human opportunity, our human form, and then continuing through three progressive levels of motivation until the full Bodhicitta motivation is cultivated and one engages in these six perfections, eventually leading to that clear open state that is called enlightenment, a state in which it’s possible to benefit others to the maximum degree. So this is the basic so called Sūtra Path, or the Path of the Perfections, the Gradual Path. And of the Gradual Path, there are three principal elements which tend to sum it all up. Now we’ve already talked about the second and the third to a fair extent, the second being Bodhicitta and the third being wisdom, the correct view.
We haven’t given a name to the first yet. It’s often translated as renunciation, so that the three principal aspects of this path are a sense of renunciation, the bodhicitta motivation, and wisdom, specifically the wisdom of emptiness. I have a little bit more to say about that later. But this term, this first term, renunciation, I think is a term a little bit like patience. In and of itself, it’s not bad, but it often carries the wrong connotation.
Because often when we think of renunciation, we think of giving up something. Basically, we think of giving up something pleasurable. You know, I’ll renounce eating food or I’ll renounce good clothing. That’s often what comes to their mind. Especially if we think of renunciation as a religious practice, it’s often associated with some kind of self mortification or some ascetic practice, giving up something pleasurable.
But that’s not what renunciation means here. Renunciation means giving up the source of suffering. And the term which is translated renunciation probably would be better to be translated more literally, in which case what it becomes is definite emergence. The two syllable word which is translated renunciation from Tibetan, Those syllables I’ve forgotten exactly what they are, something like Nejong, but I don’t know how to spell. These two syllables actually mean definite emergence.
So it’s the mind which makes the definite decision to emerge out of this cyclical pattern that we talked about before. This movement from one state of dissatisfaction to the other under the influence of ignorance, under the influence of ego grasping. It’s a realization that as long as we remain trapped under the influence of our ignorance, this ignorance, this wrong misconceived view of self, as long as we remain in that, then whatever pleasures we experience are all poisoned by that ignorance and lose their ability to give pleasure. And so there develops this sense of renunciation or the sense of definite emergence, the desire and the determination to take the mind out of this unsatisfactory situation and achieve true cessation of suffering. Then, in addition to that, there is the Bodhicitta, which extends that kind of quality of wishing to emerge from unhappiness, takes it and applies it not only to oneself but applies it to all beings, spreads it out equally to others.
And then thirdly, wisdom, which is the actual antidote which cuts through ignorance, the root cause of all suffering and dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction. So during the remainder of the talks, tomorrow and the day after, in our meditation teachings and so forth, we will be referring back to these Three Principal Aspects, since without them, if the mind isn’t trained in them to some extent, then the Tantric Path is like a fairy tale. It’s nothing that has any reality. It has no firm foundation.
So it’s good to finish an activity such as this, even the activity of merely listening to someone talk for such an inordinate amount of time, with a dedication, thinking that whatever positive energy has been generated by trying to wrap one’s mind around these topics, Let that energy be dedicated to the welfare of others, to our own attainment of enlightenment for the welfare of others. As well as for the long life of those beings who are actively pursuing the welfare of others, such as the great teachers, the enlightened gurus. So whatever energy we may have generated that’s positive, we should let it radiate forth, dedicating it towards the welfare of others in these ways.