Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this wide-ranging public talk from 1995, John Landaw introduces Western audiences to Tibetan Buddhism by exploring how it occupies a unique middle ground between scientific materialism and theistic religion. Rather than asking for blind belief, the Buddha’s teachings encourage investigation and skepticism—testing the dharma like gold at a marketplace. Landaw traces how Buddhism presents itself as a practical psychology of mind rather than a belief system, emphasizing the mind’s creative power to generate either happiness or suffering based on ignorance or wisdom. He uses the Dalai Lama’s vision of compassion and his emphasis on kindness over doctrinalism as a touchstone, contrasting this with the dogmatic approach of Western religions. The talk moves through suffering and its causes, the paradox of losing ourselves to find ourselves, the nature of mystical experience across traditions, and the role of compassion in awakening. Addressed to newcomers and thoughtful practitioners alike.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1995 03 31 Public Talk Tibetan Buddhism part 1.mp3
UUID: 8ca3c6d6-8e6e-475d-9d84-43a7289e5e09
Teacher: John Landaw
Collection: Public Talk – Tibetan Buddhism (John Landaw)
Date: 1995-03-31
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~10,515
Which was back in nineteen eighty four. And when I came again in nineteen ninety two, I didn’t have the opportunity of coming here at that time. So thanks to you, I have a chance to enjoy this very lovely area once again. As I was leaving the parking lot and walking here I noticed that we have a choice tonight. We can either have a presentation of knowledge in the other building or hear a presentation on ignorance.
So I’m afraid the major teaching that you’re going to receive tonight is one on patience. And you’ve already been very patient just waiting for this to start. And I’m afraid I’m going to have to put you through some more patience training by the time I’m finished speaking. But I will try to leave as much time as I can towards the end of the time we have allotted for us this evening so that if questions or points of interest or discussion come up then we’ll have a chance to have some interchange. Otherwise I’ll just be throwing out some words towards you and that might get a little bit old after a while.
Let me ask first of all, is my voice clearly heard in the background? On both sides? Okay. And also, for my own curiosity, for how many people here is this either the first or one of the first exposures to teachings on specifically Tibetan Buddhism? Thank you.
And can I assume that everybody else is a grizzled old veteran? No? Okay. So the topic, the title that was chosen for this evening is Tibetan Buddhism alive in the West. And we can pretty much go go in any direction we choose with a title like that.
But I thought I would start by just sharing a view of the kind of place that the Tibetan Buddhism Buddhist teachings can have in a Western environment. I don’t mean to approach this historically but rather in terms of our experience as members of a Western culture. I must admit that being in the southern hemisphere near Asia and calling this the West is always something I’ve never been able to completely understand but I guess in this context West stands for anything that derives from European culture. I think if there’s one figure who embodies what we might call the central position that Tibetan Buddhism can have in a western culture. That person would be His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Many people are now aware of him especially since his reception of the, his receipt I should say of the Nobel Peace Prize in nineteen eighty nine. And he seems to be one of the people now who has a very profound understanding of just what kind of role such traditional teaching as Tibetan Buddhism could play in a western society. And on several occasions he said that he thought it possible for Tibetan Buddhism to occupy a ground in between Western scientific secularism on one hand and theistic religion on the other. And he went on to explain that he felt that From a Western scientific point of view, Buddhism looks like a religion. And from a Western religious point of view, Tibetan Buddhism looks more like a psychology or a science.
And therefore it’s possible that Tibetan Buddhism could be a bridge between these two splits in the Western psyche, the Western cultural approach, the purely scientific and the purely religious. The hope being that this would be a bridge of harmony, bridge of friendship. Of course, the other possibility is that Tibetan Buddhism could end up being despised by both sides. But I think that idea of serving as a bridge, a bridge not only between two factions of a culture but in a sense maybe two splits within the individual psyche. Whether we identify ourselves for example as scientific and rational and grounded in traditions of Western science or whether we identify ourselves as being pious and religious and grounded in one of the spiritual traditions such as Christianity or Judaism Islam or any of the other theologically based religions.
No matter what our mode of identification or if we identify ourselves as neither. In a sense those two streams, the streams of the scientific analytical approach on one hand and the more devout faith oriented approach on the other is part of each of our own makeup. We are not solely rational scientific beings nor are we solely devout believers. But those are amongst the many types of attitudes and approaches. Those are among approaches that the human mind and the human heart has towards its reality, towards its environment.
And so to talk about Tibetan Buddhism playing the part of a bridge or a meeting ground between those two modes, those two approaches, is not necessarily to talk about it between two separate communities, but in a sense to heal a fragmentation within ourselves in our own approach. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that and then open it up for whatever points of discussion or questioning might arise from that discussion. From what we loosely call the scientific point of view, western religion, western religious traditions are understood as being quite opposed to rational investigation and instead to be grounded in a belief system. A belief system centered upon the existence of a creating deity. A deity more often than not conceived as being separate from creation.
And that the various religious traditions with which the West is mostly familiar are traditions of either being a believer within the fold, a member of that faith and therefore having the possibility of salvation or a person is a non believer, does not subscribe to that revealed truth and therefore outside the scope of salvation. Perhaps one of the damned or the lost souls. Someone seduced by demonic forces or simply by ignorance. And so what we generally understand by a religious approach to life is one in which belief has central value. And in fact in the past history if we check back in European history far enough there were people who expressed that this belief not be grounded upon reason.
That if it were grounded upon reason then it was limited Because reality goes beyond the bounds of what simple conceptual rational thought can hold and therefore for a belief to be a valid one it had to in a sense be irrational, non rational. And in fact there was one church father whose name unfortunately I forgot whose credo was not Descartes I think therefore I am. But his credo was I believe it because it is absurd. That we hear something like that and we can almost it beggars the imagination how anyone, how any sane person could say that. I believe it because it’s absurd.
But in a sense it does point to something very significant or important about belief systems and that is the feeling that we’re that this belief system gives us entry into a world into a universe for which our simple rational thought grounded in logic based on mundane experience is just not equipped to understand. That there has to be a leap beyond the ordinary, rational, scientific, observable reality into another universe, the universe of the soul, for example. What is particularly interesting at least for myself is that Buddhism or the Buddha Dharma, the first noble truth of which is suffering. Buddhism does not present itself as a belief system. Not to say there’s no beliefs within Buddhism but that is not how it presents itself.
It’s certainly not how it presented itself to me from a personal point of view. I come from a rather I wouldn’t just say non religious but anti religious background. And when I went over to India originally to study with the various Tibetan lamas, and I was writing back home to kind of explain why their son was so many thousands of miles away with people with shaved heads and maroon robes and so forth. My explanation was that I was studying Buddhist psychology, not Buddhist religion, Buddhist psychology. Explaining in that way there was a bridge.
There was a way I was able to communicate with my family, with my friends. And also, I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t covering up the truth because for me what Buddhism was was an in-depth analysis about the nature of the mind, the psyche. And therefore it was a psychology that in one one of the most popularly, most widely spread teachings of the Buddha, for example, the Dhammapada teachings which some of you might be familiar with. One of the very first lines of that teaching is just as our mind is so is our experience.
If we cultivate the thoughts of anger and ignorance and non virtue then suffering follows like a shadow follows the body. On the other hand if we cultivate the minds of loving kindness and wisdom then happiness follows naturally. And so the primary importance is understanding the nature of mind or heart or awareness all of which are synonyms from the Buddhist point of view. And so from that way, from that point of view then Buddhism is a psychology. It’s a description of the mind of how what arises in the field of the mind, the various thoughts and emotions and so forth either give rise to the happiness that we do desire or gives rise to the suffering and the disappointment that we don’t want.
And then having analyzed this, it has many various techniques for combating those minds which are destructive and negative and enhancing those minds which lead to happiness. And eventually for coming in contact with subtler states of mind than we are ordinarily aware of. And perhaps we can say a little bit more about those subtler states of mind later. And so instead of the focus being on a creator deity who somehow or other is conceived of as separate from creation, the Lord of creation or the Lord over creation. The emphasis within the Buddha Dharma is on the creative power of one’s own mind, one’s own heart.
It’s one’s mind or the level of one’s awareness which is the creator in the sense that it is that’s what creates our happiness and satisfaction and well-being on one hand and it’s the same thing which creates our frustrations and disappointments and sufferings on the other. So not only does this focus on the mind’s creative potential displace a focus, let’s say, on a deity’s creative powers. But the way the teachings are presented encourage what my main teacher Lama Thubten Yeshe used to refer to as a skeptical attitude. That to a very, very large extent the Buddha Dharma, extent the Buddha teachings wish the student, wish the practitioner to cultivate a skeptical state of mind. Now by skeptical, Lama Yeshe didn’t mean a cynical state of mind.
A state of mind which is basically saying, I’m not gonna believe whatever you say. But rather a skeptical state of mind in which whatever was presented was within the context of investigation, of checking against one’s own experience. And this admonition to listen to the Buddhist teachings with this skeptical or investigative mind using the mind’s rational and scientific qualities. This goes back to the days of Śākyamūni Buddha, the historical Buddha, two thousand five hundred years ago. There’s a very famous image that Buddha used which I think a number of people here are familiar with and that is the image of gold.
Specifically of how one purchases gold. Buddha asked one of his disciples, for instance, as an example, said if you were to go to a marketplace and someone was offering for sale a metallic substance that looked like gold, would you pay the price of gold for it right away? And the answer was no because it might not be gold. It might just look like gold. And therefore it’s appropriate to apply certain tests.
And the traditional tests that are often spoken of is rubbing it to check the luster, cutting it and pouring acid on it. And if it passes those three tests one can discern this substance is in fact gold and then you pay whatever the going rate is. And then having presented that analogy the Buddha said the same thing is true for my teachings. He said, Don’t accept as true anything that I say simply because you have respect for me. Only after you’ve investigated it, testing it to see if it is gold should you accept it.
If you find upon reflection that the teachings are golden in the sense that they are valid, that they match up with your experience, that they’re logical and consistent, then put them into practice. And that kind of approach, that open easygoing approach, I myself personally found extremely attractive. I come from a country where there’s a whole vast region filled with preachers whose basic approach to religion is to scare you into believing it. They hold a text and they thump it, they smack it and they either try to convince you that you’re one of the unfortunate who hasn’t yet developed belief in it and therefore are damned or you just might be fortunate enough to be a believer in which case there’s a chance for you to be saved. And immediately there is a bifurcation, a split in one’s mind because no one wants to be damned.
Everyone wants to be saved. And the question is, can I believe in what he says? This preacher? Can I believe in this book? Or can I believe in his interpretation of this book?
But the Buddhadharma says that if that’s our approach to the Buddhadharma then we’re turning it into something else. We’re turning it into an ism. We might become Buddhists that way but we’ve never become Buddhas. We’d never awaken if that’s our approach. The aim of the Buddhadharma is not to create Buddhists.
The aim is to create Buddhas. Buddha being someone who has awakened from the sleep of ignorance. To see things as they are and having a heart which spontaneously and effortlessly gives forth compassion and wisdom in a skillful manner that is actually able to benefit others. Any person who removes the coverings obscuring the deepest nature of the mind, the various delusions such as hatred and jealousy and the like born from ignorance and has cultivated those positive qualities of love and compassion. Insightful wisdom and skill.
Any person who has actually accomplished that has awakened and is a Buddha irrespective of whether he or she is Buddhist or not. But if we take the teachings as they’ve been passed down, as they’ve been preserved in many, many different texts and commentaries. And if we say, I believe in this, this is my Dharma, this is my religion, I’m a Buddhist. Then we’re turning what might be gold into fool’s gold. It’s just another thing to become attached to.
Another anchor keeping us caught within the limited circle of our own ego identity. Before we’ve identified ourselves as one thing and have grasped onto that first security, a security which no identity can give us. And now out of insecurity we’re now grasping onto Buddhism and becoming Buddhist. So that whole attitude, that whole way of grasping onto truth, grasping onto belief in that blind way is completely contrary to the whole purpose for the Buddhist teachings itself. And Buddha pointed that out very, very strongly.
And all of the teachers who have followed have pointed that out. And the reason it has to be pointed out again and again and again is we’re very thick. Well, I’m only really speaking about myself but if anyone else can identify with that, it’s that there is that tendency of the mind to either want to accept or reject rather than investigate. Or in the words of Lama Yeshe, rather than checking up. It’s tiring to continually check up.
We’d rather rest within the circle and be a believer or rest outside the circle and be a nonbeliever. Believer. Either of those are rather easy positions to maintain. We just have to figure out what it means to be a believer or non believer. Do what all the other believers or non believers do.
See what it means to be a member of either of those clubs. But an investigator is someone who’s standing alone, who’s taking the received wisdom and using that as a tool to investigate me. Again, Lama Yeshe said, The Buddhist teachings aren’t about Buddha. They’re not about Buddhism. They’re about you, he would say.
In other words, they’re tools for investigating ourselves and that is very painful. That is something that even those of us who feel quite devoted to the path and attracted to it tend to avoid most of the time. Really applying the teachings, the analysis given, the commentary on life given to ourselves. Like for myself, if I’m listening to one of my lamas or if I’m reading some kind of text and there’s a particularly profound description of a psychological state being mentioned. It occurs to me that sounds exactly like George.
He’s always doing that. Or yes, Sally, she behaves that way all the time. She really deludes herself. She thinks that. So it becomes very, very It’s an incredible lens through which I can see all my friends and enemies very, very clearly.
But there’s one person that is very, very hard to see in this glass because it’s very painful. It’s very painful to apply. To be shown up to be a jerk. To be under the influence of the ignorance that’s being described, that’s being mercilessly described. So there’s a certain human weakness then in relation to any Dharma, whether it’s Buddha Dharma or Christian Dharma or Jewish Dharma or anything which purports to show a different vision from our life.
Because in a sense, we’re secure in our ignorance. We know ourselves in the sense that we’re familiar with our foibles. You know we do something silly in our life and we say, Oh, that’s just me. As though we’re kind of comfortable with that. It’s like an old shoe.
Yeah, I lost my temper again. Well, that’s just me. I screamed at the kids. I traumatized them. Oh yeah, that’s just me.
Kind of making an excuse for ourselves whether it’s lust or gluttony, any of the seven deadly sins. Yeah, that’s just me. Like that. Then if there’s a possibility that there’s a me or a self outside of those boundaries, if someone like His Holiness the Dalai Lama as he does in one of his teachings in a sense invites us to become yogis of space. Yogis, these adepts at meditation at deeper levels of consciousness abiding not on the solid ground of our preconceptions and what’s familiar but in space, a space filled with possibilities.
If we’re invited to be such a yogi of space, we don’t wanna go. I’m more familiar here in my accustomed limitation and misery, I don’t want to leave. But there seems to be a kind of a battle going on in the human heart. There is this, what I might call a I don’t mean to use political terminology here, but what we almost can call a conservative approach. That is resting within the limits of what’s known to us.
My own familiar habits, some of which are good and helpful, some of which are bad and destructive, but at least they’re familiar. At least they’re me. It’s the mask that I’ve been building up all my life, the persona that I project to others. There’s that conservative cautious tendency. And then there is something There’s a kind of a soulful longing for something else.
It’s the stuff out of which art is made. It’s the stuff out of which fairy tales are woven. This idea that there is something else available in the universe. Hard to describe, hard to put our finger on, but it is there. It’s journey, the journey of the hero, the journey of the princess who’s lost her kingdom and is wandering trying to find true home, her real home.
The soul search for the beloved. The intoxication that some poets speak of, which is not the intoxication of wine, but the intoxication of what? Of the godhead, of the higher self, of reality, of the Buddha nature. This kind of longing, this feeling, isn’t there something more? Isn’t there something more in my life?
So there’s a shrinking back into the familiar with a fear of the unknown. And yet at the same time, there’s a longing for something outside of ourselves. And people’s lives, it seems, is a ever shifting balancing act between these two tendencies. At times of great fear, of great uncertainty, the grasping comes, the holding onto the familiar. Even the familiar which is painful.
An example, very tragic but very widespread example of this is the situation of spousal abuse, abuse from one’s husband or one’s wife. There are many documentaries I’ve seen in the United States, for example, in which they’ll be interviewing a woman who has just been through very horrific abuse and beatings by her husband. And after spending some time in the shelter is going back to him. And the reporter is totally to totally dumbfounded is asking why, why are you going back? He’s done all this to you not once but repeatedly.
Why do you go back? Why? Because the not wanting to put too simple an answer onto a very, very complex situation. But in a sense, the pain of the known is much less than the fear of the unknown. That a person even within abusive painful situation has an identity, a role, a mask, a persona that is comforting in as much as it is familiar even though it’s painful.
And the thought of breaking out of that, leaving the situation, going into a completely unknown situation where the man or the woman wouldn’t know who he or she was, would have to learn new roles, would have to be in a sense a yogi of space at least for a little while, that is terrifying. That goes right to the heart of one’s identity. The other situation may be painfully, excuse me, may be physically painful, even life threatening on that level. But still he or she is holding on to a sense of recognizable self. Leaving it, leaving behind that pattern of abuse or suffering, whatever it might be, and entering into something new exposes oneself to the danger of mental annihilation, of just not knowing who we are.
So then there are these varied approaches or attitudes or modes of behavior that arises in our heart, in our mind. And the paradox from the point of view not only of the Buddha Dharma but from other spiritual traditions as well is that the only way of truly finding ourselves, ourselves in the deeper sense of our most profound potential, what we could become. The only way of finding ourselves is by losing ourselves. There are those moments in our existence, for example, and it happens to everyone whether they deem themselves spiritual or not, when there’s at least a momentary forgetting of who I’m supposed to be. We’re drawn out of ourselves by something.
This something could be anything from a magnificent sunset, a very totally engaging work of art such as a great drama that we’re seeing in the theater. It could be another person with whom we’ve fallen in love or someone who needs us very desperately. And for a space of anywhere between a few minutes to a significantly longer period of time, all that concern about me is overwhelmed. It drops away, not through any necessary insight, but just because it cannot sustain itself in the face of this almost terrible beauty or terrible love or terrible need. Terrible in the sense of terrific, overwhelming.
And so for a certain space of time, one drops out of self, the mask falls off. But instead of experiencing this as a deprivation. It’s experienced as an enhancement. People who have that experience even for a moment will often say things like, For the first time in my life I felt truly alive. And there’s the paradox.
We hold on to the self, the limited view of who and what we are because we wanna be alive. Ourselves. We wanna know our boundaries. We wanna have ego definition. We wanna be alive.
So we hold on to this idea, I’m this, I’m that. I am, whatever I conceive of myself to be, whatever others conceive me to be. We hold on to this. And yet, there’s those times in our life when we will say, I feel truly alive. And they almost invariably involve letting go of this petty self.
This limited vision of who and what we are and what we can become. So we have to lose ourselves to gain ourselves. This approach to matter spiritual approaches which is not based on believing a particular dogma or a particular doctrine, but in trying to understand the deeper deeper nature of our own mind. To see how when it is limited, it creates suffering and how when it’s expansive, it creates not only happiness and pleasure, but beyond that, a sense of fulfillment and joy. That is the province of what we might call mystical religion.
Now, the word mystical is not one which is necessarily in favor these days. It certainly wasn’t in favor when I first ran across it because mystical sounded like Ouija boards and something weird and strange high pitched music playing, very mystical. That’s not really what mystical means. That’s not the essence of what that word is pointing to. What that word is pointing to is union.
A real union between that part of our self which is longing for something bigger, more fulfilled, grander, whatever name we put on it, whether we call that Buddha nature or Christ consciousness or Krishna consciousness or godhead or the unnameable. Those who recognize there is no conceptual framework to hold it, they turn language inside out and just call it the unnameable, that which cannot be spoken of. And in many ways, a much better approach than trying to give it a positive name, you just give it a negative name. The unborn, the undying, the unspoken, the incomprehensible. Okay?
So the mystical is the union between that part of us which is longing for something outside the prison of the petty ego identity, identity, the limited sense of self. Longing be the the union between that longing and the expression of the fulfillment itself, however conceived. So for example, even within religious traditions which are theological in the sense that they’re built around a belief in divine being, a creator God, for example. Even within those contexts, theologically oriented religious or spiritual traditions. Within those, there are mystical strains.
These spiritual geniuses who have arisen who claim for themselves to have made contact with that essence in their life. So for them, God is no longer something separate as a separate external creating being up there on the cloud somewhere or separate from the universe of creation watching it or judging it or setting into motion. But God is the fulfillment of the innermost being itself. There’s the union. In Hindu terms, they talk about the union of Ātman and Brahman.
Ātman being the individual self, Brahman being the over self. And the aim of religion then is to have that union of Ātman and Brahman. In Christianity you have the great mystics like Meister Eckhart proclaiming at certain points, I am God. But a proclamation completely without egotism. Not I am God, learn from me.
I am God, follow me. I am God, a member of my religion, but I am God and so are you. That we all partake of it. If we could crack out of the limits of our egocentricity, we’d be able to experience this union, this ultimate union. Now, in the history of the West, many if not most of these mystics have really taken their lives in their hands to proclaim that mystical experience.
It’s been viewed as heresy. For many various reasons. Some of which many of which are in fact political in nature having to do with control. But when we start checking up carefully in the words and the deeds of those geniuses who actually founded the spiritual traditions themselves, we almost always find someone who was speaking from the mystical experience itself and was enjoining others to have that experience or trying to lead them into that experience or show them the path to that experience. But quickly it seems it calcified into an ism or an ity or Christianity or Judaism or whatever it ism it became.
A system of signing on the dotted line and becoming a member of a belief system rather than experientially based. So one of the interesting aspects of the Buddhist teachings is how thoroughgoingly mystical it is. That right from the beginning it declares itself to be a path for ourselves to discover the unmentionable, the unnamable, the greater self within the petty self. The fact that like other isms and ities that Buddhism also in many countries and cultures became a belief system, Well, that in the words of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, that’s human weakness. But the teachings themselves subtractive in nature.
That the whole point of the teaching is to peel away or subtract from our experience that which is inauthentic, that which derives from ignorance. So presented in that way then the Buddhadharma has this possibility of being a middle ground because unlike what passes for much scientific thought nowadays, a scientific materialism, Buddhism does point to a transcendent reality the way religions do. But unlike most religious systems and more in keeping with the scientific path, Buddhism presents logical, rational, experiential methods for touching that transcendence. Starting with a description of the trapped limited situation, the noble truth of suffering, the experience within the throes of egocentricity of continual disappointment and frustration. And starting at that point, slowly leading to liberation or emancipation of freedom from all such bonds.
And not just philosophically, but also experientially. That there are meditative techniques, for example, for calming the mind, developing single pointed concentration so that the distractions that which keeps us forever occupied in the petty concerns of egocentricity can fall away to reveal a deeper level of consciousness. And that can be developed, that one can actually experience that development. I wanna conclude just these introductory remarks again by quoting the Dalai Lama. Virtually all of the public teachings that I’ve ever heard him give, When he reaches the end of the teaching, he will say something to the effect that if anything that he said, anything that was brought up during that talk seemed reasonable, seemed helpful, then he encourages us try to put it into practice as much as we can.
And if on the other hand, it doesn’t appeal to us, if it doesn’t seem sensible or reasonable or make sense of our lives, then just let it go. Put it aside. That the main emphasis is to present something and to present it in several different ways so that it can appeal to the mind in the situation of beings, whoever they are. And if it appeals then it’s up to us whether we put it into practice or not. And if it doesn’t appeal then we just let it go.
It’s not a matter of being saved or damned. It’s a matter of finding something that makes sense for us. To this regard, it’s happened quite a number of times that His Holiness of Dalai Lama has even suggested or questioned whether Western Buddhist students of his should raise their children as Buddhists or not. And he was presenting very strong arguments that we shouldn’t. That instead if we come from a Christian culture or whatever, that we should raise our children as Christian.
It’s kind of unheard of when you think about it. The head of the recognized spokesman for Buddhism in the universe today one could say is most likely the Dalai Lama. And yet here he is suggesting very strongly that Western Buddhist followers of the Buddha Dharma might be better off not raising their children as Buddhist and presenting many arguments why that might be the case. Because truth is not singular in the sense that any one particular ism or ity has the insight into it all. That it’s a little bit like untying knots.
In a sense, all the beings who aren’t yet enlightened are knotted somehow. But we’re all knotted in different ways depending on our socialization, our past history, the events in our lives. We could even take into account past life influences, for example, for those of us who have some feeling for past and future lives. But even if we only talk about this one life, each of us has our own personal history. And so we each have knots of different complexities of different designs.
And no one particular method, one particular explanation is going to untie all the knots that some approaches are going to be more helpful to some people than others. It doesn’t mean that one system is better than the other. It just for in an individual or a culture or a particular time, one approach might fit this group and another approach may fit that group. I remember His Holiness, the Dalai Lama once saying that he regretted when he he was younger that in Tibet, Christianity never really took hold. There were people who did come in the last few centuries but it never developed a real following Even though there were attempts made to establish temples and churches and space was made for it, it never really took off for one reason or another.
I don’t think there were really that many people who came in but there were some who came in from European nations. But it never took hold. And the Dalai Lama on several occasions expressed a certain regret that it hadn’t. And his reasoning was that even though he found Buddhism best that it made sense for him, he couldn’t say that it would necessarily be the system that made sense for all Tibetans. That inevitably there would be those Tibetans who would thrive more in relationship to the Christian teachings than to the Buddhists.
But since the Christian teachings weren’t available, then those Tibetans would be deprived. So that kind of expansive approach of not trying to force a truth onto someone but to try to listen to discern what the method, what the best method for reaching each individual is and to provide the multiplicity of methods so that there’s a greater chance of beings benefiting from it, this is an expression of the compassionate intention of a fully awakened being. Someone who isn’t interested whether we become Buddhist or Christian but just that we become fulfilled. That we break out of this boundary of ego into something greater. Something in the nature itself of compassion, of wishing to truly benefit others.
And that’s why I think these days when the Dalai Lama speaks, he very often says, Basically, my religion is kindness. That instead of identifying himself even as a Buddhist, he’s a kindness practitioner. That’s his striving is to put those teachings into practice. And that’s why I think among what we might call spiritual leaders in the world today, he holds such an unusual position because he can touch people according to whatever their own language is because he’s not foisting anything on them. Because kindness implies listening, really listening to the situation of whoever’s in front of you.
And then spontaneously coming up with whatever is going to be of benefit to that person rather than taking a rubber stamp, my vision of reality, and stamping it onto everybody else, forcing them to fit into a mold. So from those different approaches, it’s possible when we talk about Tibetan Buddhism being alive in the West, it’s possible that it could be alive if its practitioners can maintain this middle ground of a, in a sense, a devotion to the transcendent on one hand with a very scientific and practical application for the methods that benefit not only oneself but others. But whether it does so or not depends on each individual’s effort. That merely subscribing to Tibetan Buddhism doesn’t assure anything. We just might end up being pseudo Tibetans, taking on the outer garment of a culture rather than stripping off the inner garment of egocentricity, which is the ultimate aim.
I’m not gonna push these teachings on patience for you any further. But maybe, maybe there’s some points that you’d like to raise as either discussion or questions. From a darkness into a greater darkness. Yes please. That is a very, very profound question that you’ve just expressed.
And it really strikes very much at the heart of the experience of trying to understand what the teachings, in this case the Tibetan Buddhist teachings, are really speaking about and how it relates to me, to my experience of the world. And I only hope that what I say is commensurate with the level of sincerity of the statement that you made. When when Buddha first gave his teaching and then for the remaining forty five years of his life when he continued to give further teachings, he always came back to this same theme of the four noble truths. I think that’s a phrase that a lot of people have heard of even if they’re not so well aware of Buddhism. These four noble truths.
It was the theme of this first teaching and it appeared again and again. These being the first noble truth of the existence of suffering. The second being the cause of that suffering, which is to be found within. The third, that there is a state of cessation of suffering. There’s a state in which that suffering is extinguished.
And then finally, the fourth noble truth which is the vast majority of his teachings we’re concerned with and that is the path leading to that cessation of how to leave a state conditioned by suffering into a state in which there is a cessation of that suffering. Within that context, suffering is the expression of limitation. It’s the expression in our experience of actions, not only our physical actions and our verbal actions, what we say, but most especially our mental actions, how we think, our emotional state of actions contaminated or governed by ignorance, a misknowing of reality. The subject of ignorance, ignorance manifests itself is a very vast subject in Buddhist teachings. But basically it’s a misconception of how things exist, of how I exist.
This holding on to oneself is limited, this edited vision of ourself as some kind of separate, solid, independent entity. In most cases viewed as somehow or other a victim of external circumstances. That this grasping onto a limited self is itself ignorance. And from this ignorance give rise to all the various defense mechanisms designed to promote this separate view of self such as aversion and hatred for everything that’s conceived of as a threat to me, my petty ego, giving rise to hatred, hostility, jealousy, and this covetousness or this desire for all of those things which we think would enhance or maintain this sense of insecure ego identity. And then from this repulsion and hostility towards that which is a threat and this covetousness or desire for that which supports this limited self, from that come all of the destructive actions, lying, killing, stealing and so forth, which creates harm for others and ourself, which perpetuate the experience of dissatisfaction and suffering.
So in a nutshell, this is the Buddhist description of the way life is permeated by suffering when the mind is contaminated by ignorance, a misknowing of reality. And the aim of the Buddhist teaching is to cultivate a wisdom cutting through that ignorance so that suffering ceases. But your question pointed to another kind of suffering which is not usually called suffering within the scope of the teachings but rather a sympathetic response, something born out of compassion. The Buddhist teachings this word compassion has a very specific definition. And it means the attitude that arises when we see someone who is suffering in which we wish that that person be removed from that suffering.
So, for example, it’s something which spontaneously rises in nearly everyone when we see a child, let’s say, fall on the ground and start crying. It doesn’t have to be your child. It could be the child of your enemy. In nearly all cases, when we see that, something in us immediately wishes how wonderful it would be if that child weren’t crying, weren’t in pain, were separated from that suffering. Compassion.
So that compassion, the depth of that compassion depends on the depth of our own realization of our own suffering. What I mean by that is that we can have a certain superficial compassion or an easy compassion for little children or dogs or animals that are grossly suffering. It’s easy for our heart to go out to them. But it’s harder to develop that same kind of compassion for people that we don’t like. What often happens when they’re suffering, we’re kind of happy about it.
We take pleasure in it. But when we look deeply into our own suffering nature, into what keeps us limited, keeps us unfulfilled, and we see that it is the presence of these delusions of anger and jealousy and attachment being born from ignorance itself. When we fully understand that, then we get motivated not only to be free of this gross obvious level of suffering and dissatisfaction. We become motivated to overcome the very roots of that dissatisfaction itself, the negative minds that give birth to them. It’s like medicine.
We not only wanna get rid of the symptom, we wanna get rid of the underlying cause. Not just the headache, but whatever’s going on inside which is causing that headache to manifest itself. So similarly, we become motivated not just to have a pleasant life because everybody wants a pleasant life, good clothes, nice family, or whatever, however we define it. But as long as our mind is dissatisfied, as long as we aren’t in touch with the true nature of the way things exist, as long as there’s something obscured in our vision then we still have the causes for future suffering. So the more penetrative our analysis becomes the more we are motivated not only to break free of obvious suffering such as physical pain, which everybody wants to get rid of, but even the subtle causes leading to mental and physical and emotional pain.
Now when we recognize it in ourselves that there are these subtle causes for our own disappointment then we can recognize this operating in others as well. And when we can recognize it operating in others then there’s a chance for compassion to arise because we can relate to that. Let me ground that in an example so this doesn’t become too airy fairy. There’s a very traditional teaching, goes back hundreds of years, in which a question is put forth. If a person hits you with a stick, do you get angry at the stick or the person?
And of course the answer is nobody would get angry at the stick because the stick was being manipulated by the person Even though it was a stick that actually touched your body and caused the welt, you don’t get angry at it because it’s being manipulated by the person. Once this is granted, then it goes a step further and says in the exact same way, the person is being manipulated by the delusions. The delusions of ignorance, hatred, attachment, and so forth. Therefore, if you’re gonna become angry at anything, if you’re gonna fight against anything, don’t fight against the stick, don’t fight against the person, fight against the underlying cause of the problem which is the delusions themselves. Delusions which are not the sole property of anyone.
When we notice them arising in our own mind, we can also see that they’re arising in the minds of others. So if someone does something very mean to you, of course we don’t like that. But the anger having anger directed towards that person is only going to make that situation worse. Instead, the only real way out of it is if we could, through the eyes of compassion, find an effective means for uprooting or helping that person uproot the delusion in his mind or in her mind which made them act in such a destructive manner in the beginning. Now some people when they hear that, it sounds they think, Oh, I can’t follow that because to become a Buddhist means to become a doormat.
Someone’s angry at you and you don’t fight back, just let them step over you. No, that’s not the implication at all. One does whatever necessary to confront the evil. But with what motivation? Is the motivation to conquer the bad person that he or she is the enemy?
No, it’s recognizing that the enemy lies within, that it’s in these unowned or we could even say shared delusions of the mind. And therefore there is the chance of reacting creatively to the situation. If it needs force, one can act with force. If it needs loving kindness and some gentility, we can act with that. There’s a greater chance then of affecting real change.
Okay. So compassion opens up the door for wisdom and skill. And compassion, for those who are really training the mind in it, is in the words of Lama Zopa Rinpoche, often unbearable compassion. And this is where we’re getting close to your second use of the word suffering. At a certain point, our sympathy for others can be so strong that we relate to their suffering as if it were our own.
That it’s just as hard to bear seeing others suffer as it is to see our own suffering. In fact, it is said for a Bodhisattva, a being who’s striving to awaken, to become a Buddha, who’s driven by this compassionate motivation, for a Bodhisattva, the suffering of others is much more unbearable than his or her own suffering. Because that’s just one person, I can deal with it. And so we do have the images. Sometimes it’s presented to us images of a bodhisattva who is crying seeing the sad situation of other beings.
Not just of one’s friends but all beings. In fact, the Buddha of compassion of which the Dalai Lama is said to be an emanation is very often depicted as having eyes that are red as if he had just been crying. And there’s a very, very powerful legend told that once the Buddha of Compassion, Chenrezig was crying so copiously that a lake formed in front of him, crying over the pitiful situation of beings whose minds were contaminated by ignorance and the delusion. And that from this lake Tārā appeared, the female Buddha of compassion. And Tārā said, Don’t cry, I will work unceasingly for the welfare of others.
So from this point of view, Chenrezig or Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva or Buddha of compassion is the compassionate intention to benefit others. Whereas Tārā is enlightened activity, that which actually gets out into the world and produces the desired effect. The female Mother Earth, Mother Nature with being type of compassion, active compassion like that. So then the question comes up, well, does that mean that by becoming a Bodhisattva that by developing this kind of unbearable compassion, we’re actually making ourselves more miserable than we were before? Is that suffering?
And that attitude of being so concerned with the welfare of others that we’re motivated to win enlightenment for their sake, that’s known in Sanskrit as the bodhicitta, the compassionate bodhicitta. Bodhi is enlightenment like the Bodhi tree, the tree of enlightenment. Ultimate state where all the coverings of the mind have been removed and all the good qualities have developed. That’s bodhi. And chitta is the attitude, the wish to attain that state.
So that precious bodhi chitta is the essence of the compassionate motivation. And no less authority than His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said on many occasions, Don’t think that by developing the bodhicitta you’re going to become more unhappy, more miserable. You’ll have more suffering. He says, Won’t it? It only makes you happy? So that is again another paradox that by opening ourselves truly to the suffering of others, even to the point where we find it unbearable in the sense that we can’t rest content, that we’re motivated to act for their sake, that still is not suffering.
It’s fulfillment. It’s a paradox in that sense. It looks like suffering. The tears look like they are tears but it’s that which gives birth to that Tārā energy that actually makes meaningful. And for myself, I can’t defend that situation logically.
I can only point to the teachers I’ve had who live for everything that I’ve been able to discern over twenty years, live in that state and are tremendously happy people. They’re so open to everyone but instead of being overwhelmed by that suffering, let’s say take the Dalai Lama again as an example. Six million people who depend on him have lost their country and their freedom and everything. He knows more about that than anyone. He feels that very strongly.
It makes him cry and yet he’s a very, very happy person. And he’s not happy in the mindless sense of enjoying his own bliss but he’s happy in the sense of being fulfilled and fulfilling to others. So I’m sorry for running off so long, but your question was a very, to me, was really very much at the heart of the matter and I thought it needed to approach it from those points of view that there is the suffering which is suffering and then there’s this other suffering which is not suffering. Okay, thank you. Now, I think anybody who still has a question and is brave enough to ask it, you either know very, very much or you’re very, very foolish.
Or maybe just brave. When we started this evening, the rough outline that was going to go from about seven thirty to nine We did start late, but it is approaching nine And I know many people have made have other things that they have to do this evening. So what I suggest now is that we give ourselves a short break and those people who wish to leave for any reason, please feel free to do so. But I’m going to stay here for a while longer. And if people as a group or individually have any questions or things they want to discuss, I’d be very happy to stay.
But for everyone who’s been here this evening, I want to thank you very much for your interest and your patience. And those who stay, I’ll try to keep my answers a lot shorter. These stories are for kids. A a number of years ago, I was asked to write a children’s story, The Life of Buddha. And yesterday, a member of one of the local radio stations asked me to retell some of these stories.
So, tonight at ten fifty I think on radio, I’ve forgotten the channel but it’s a university channel. I guess you know. Okay. Then anyway, there’ll be a program and I think the person who produces is going to combine some Tibetan or Indian style music and then I’m going to read some selections from this book. So just for those who might be interested.
Name it? Did you say Bodhi Jina? Like G I N A? Something back in my memory seems to be telling me that jina means conqueror, one who conquers. But I may be wrong.
Never, formally studied Sanskrit So it’s, just what my sieve like memory is bringing up. If I’m right, if it is conqueror, Bodhi Jina, then Bodhi is the state of enlightenment. Jina, if it means conqueror, that’s an epithet for the Buddha, the one who’s conquered the delusions, conquered the ignorance. So you could say the conqueror of enlightenment, not that you’ve conquered enlightenment, but that with enlightenment you conquer everything. You conquer.
So that might be what it means. Is there anyone who does know the Sanskrit? Jina? Yeah. I think that’s the case.
In which case it’s a very beautiful name, Bodhi Jina. Right, right. There’s quite a number of very important terms that have Bodhi as part of it. The Bodhisattva, the Bodhisattva is the being or the warrior striving for this enlightenment for the sake of helping others. The Bodhisattva’s motive, what impels the Bodhisattva is the bodhicitta, the enlightened attitude or the enlightened motive.
Then there’s Bodhi itself, as in the Bodhi tree or the state of Bodhi, which is Buddhahood or awakening. In the Theravāda tradition, the monks whose lineages come through Sri Lanka and Thailand and Burma for example, they very often have names which are either Sanskrit or Pāli. Again, you’ll see Bodhi as part of many of their names, again pointing to enlightenment. In speaking about mysticism as a union with the transcendent or experience of fulfillment, I threw out a number of possible synonyms from different traditions. And one was from a very orthodox Hindu vision that mystic union is that between Ātman, personal self, and Brahman, the over self as it were.
That’s not language which is used in Buddhism. You won’t find those terms used within traditional Buddhist teachings. But I was not really interested in so much of the philosophical niceties of the nature of Atma or Brahman or so forth. But rather the commonality of finding or fulfilling something, however we name it, that is both within us and without us. It’s within us in the sense of the potential.
It’s outside of it in the sense that it is beyond the bounds of what we ordinarily recognize as me or myself. And so those various terms in the various spiritual traditions to me are all pointing to that same movement, though some define it in theological terms and others non theological terms. There’s different ways of The words put about that experience are different, but the basic, the experience itself, forgetting oneself to find oneself, if we could say. This seems to be common. In fact, if you’re really interested in that subject, there’s an extraordinary book written by the English novelist, Aldous Huxley called The Perennial Philosophy.
Anyone ever read it? It’s not known here? Oh, I highly recommend this book. It’s an anthology of spiritual writings from around the world but organized according to different themes. And the title of The Perennial Philosophy comes, I forget where he said it originally came from.
Was from a Latin phrase used by I think a Renaissance scholar to indicate that basic mystical quest for the higher, the deeper, the more transcendent. And it’s this brilliantly written and brilliant anthology of mystical writings where he’ll take something that Buddha said and put it next to something from Saint John of the Cross and something from the Hindu Upanishads. And you’ll read it and you’ll see that except for the terminology being used, the action being described is the same. The Perennial Philosophy, it was out of print for a long time but I think it’s back in print now. By Aldous Huxley, you know him from Brave New World and The Island and so forth.
Very highly recommended. But there was another part to your question and that was unknowable. Well, there’s Again, within When we use words like inconceivable or unknowable or unspeakable, sometimes it gives the impression that it’s not something we can know, it’s only something we can find out through belief. Sometimes it gives us it’s used in that context and that impression. But as I understand it, within the scope of the teachings I myself have received, that is not really the emphasis.
The emphasis is more that that part of our mind which uses images relates to things conceptually. Relate to whatever it is that we know through an image that we manipulate about that thing. So there’s an indirect knowing. Now a lot of what is involved in intellectual and even spiritual development up to a point is to get better and better concepts or images that are more in accordance with the way things are. But at some point, eventually, that conceptual way of knowing transforms or must transform into a direct cognition, a non conceptual direct awareness of reality.
And within that experience of that direct cognition, it’s intuitively understood that no concepts or no words that you can come up with are going to be fine enough to describe that experience. But that’s not to say it’s unknowable. It’s just that the Alan Watts writes about this very well in some of his writings, specifically The Way of Zen and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. In those works, he talks about that the net of conceptual framework is just too wide to scoop up this ineffable reality. But we can still know it.
We can know it. It’s just it’s not expressible through words. Like for example, an example is in some traditions they’ll say, It’s all one. You hear that repeated a lot. It’s all one.
Everything is one. And that’s a helpful way of looking at things for those minds for whose experience is fragmented and everything seems so different and unrelated. Then saying it’s all one may be a way of somehow helping loosening the mind to see the interconnectedness of things. But from a higher point of view, even saying that it’s one is just another concept. So typically in Buddhist terminology we’ll read things like it’s not two.
It’s non dual. So reality is described but it’s described in this negative stance because there’s a worry that whatever words we describe, no matter how good they are as concepts, will be held on to, you know, and then making a thing out of it which completely goes goes against the whole subtractive approach to begin with. So there’s a saying which I believe comes from Zen but I’m not sure. And it says, don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon. There are teachings, there’s methods to point one in the right direction.
But eventually we have to look in that direction. We can’t remain focused on the finger, the pointing finger. Or there’s another image which goes way, way back that relates to the teachings as if they were a raft or a canoe to get to the other shore. But once we’re on the other shore, we don’t then pick up the raft and carry it on our back over the countryside. We leave it, it’s accomplished its aim.
So all this points that there is a certain mode of reasoning, of intellect, of conceptualization, which can take us so far, which is valid. But at some point we reach an awareness which is also valid, is direct, is just that the net of words is not fine enough to describe it. Then words become poetry. That’s when you start having the mystics singing or writing poetry, spontaneous poetry in which language is purposely evocative rather than descriptive. And then there’s a taste, A taste of what’s pointing out.
So it’s not saying it’s unknowable in the sense that there’s no way you can understand because you’re too dumb or limited. It’s rather that it’s appealing to a direct cognition which goes beyond conceptual thought. Yeah, ultimately. But you can be directed towards it even before you’ve had the experience. See, my own feeling Now this is not gospel.
This is not something I’ve heard from my teachers. But my own feeling is that we have many things that happen in our life that point to something beyond itself. That it’s like a foretaste of the final experience. They themselves aren’t enlightenment, but they are in the nature of an enlightenment. Like we might have a very concrete limited vision of our persona of who and what we are or how we project ourselves to society.
And something may happen or some experience may be gained or some wisdom may be gained and we just don’t hold onto it as tightly as we did before. Now that itself is not enlightenment. That’s not a direct understanding of emptiness. But it’s in the family. It’s like a distant cousin.
It’s related somehow. There is a letting go involved there which is of a similar nature, it seems to me, to the more profound experiences. And so we can build on them. We needn’t think that until I reach a certain stage then I can’t do anything because I’m not really a Bodhisattva. I’m not really a Buddha.
What can I do? But I think every day in our life there’s experiences that rise up in which we can use them as signposts to this larger experience, this enlightenment, rather than having to feel, well, I can’t possibly understand it until I become a Buddha. No, I have a feeling we can understand it. I think there’s something in us that intuitively understands it anyway. We just have to give it more creative strength.
But that’s just my own supposition. I might be wrong. The importance about a teacher. As opposed to getting it from the book. Can answer personally.
Maybe that’s not the only way. Before I met any teacher, my teachers were books. I mentioned Alan Watts before and Suzuki Roshi. Quite a lot in the area of Zen I read. Not much in Tibetan Buddhism.
There wasn’t really much available when I first started. And a few translations of the teachings of Buddha himself. And I was very impressed. It seemed very clear, very logical. It appealed to parts of me that I liked being appealed to rather than fear.
But I had real major doubts in my mind and they were very specific too. And that was that in the teachings that I read they kept talking about