Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The story of the Indian master Asaṇga — twelve years meditating to see Maitreya Buddha, failing, then meeting a half-rotten dog crawling with maggots on a roadside — anchors Khensur Rinpoche’s 49-minute commentary on verse four of the Eight Verses of Thought Transformation. Rinpoche contrasts worldly enemies, who harm only in this lifetime, with disturbing emotions, which drive beings into lower rebirths across many future lives. He then outlines three methods for subduing them: avoiding objects that trigger afflictions, meditating through the graduated Lamrim scopes, and cultivating the view of selflessness to cut self-grasping. Verse four instructs practitioners to treat those with bad character, grave sins, or serious illness as found treasure, not people to avoid — their visible suffering makes compassion arise without effort, exactly the quality that finally purified Asaṇga and let him see Maitreya.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 8VTT 1999 06 13.mp3
UUID: a83641c9-0cf7-44ae-a2d5-1e835bf30dd2
Teacher: Khensur Rinpoche
Collection: 8 Verses Thought Transformation (Khensur Rinpoche)
Date: 1999-06-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 48.6 minutes
Words: ~2,917
Try never to be very kind to disturbing emotions. If you’ve been very kind to disturbing emotion, kind or nice, and give disturbing emotion a freedom, then it will there’s a reason for that it will never be kind for you and it will bring suffering to you and takes you towards the bad rebirths or bad states. So the worldly enemy and the enemy of disturbing emotion is different because the worldly enemy is like, I mean some, I mean they stay enemy for a couple of years and later they don’t, no longer remain as an enemy and also sometimes those enemies becomes very close to you or become more friends towards you by showing kindness or being nice to the enemy. So and if you become very friendly to I mean if you be very friendly to to some emotion then that always, it will always bring you suffering and for, mean bring you lots of suffering forever. Enemy can only harm you physically or mentally, but just only for this lifetime.
It cannot harm you in future life. Whereas the enemy of disturbing emotion is not harm you in this life but it also harms for many future lives as well. And they say the whole beings of the gods and demigods, all beings of these realms, all become enemy to you and they all come together and lift you up and wanted to throw you to the hell or the lower state but they can’t do this. But whereas for the disturbing emotion even a single disturbing emotion has a potential to bring you to or take you to the lower state, lower rebirths and cause you the limitless suffering. So there is a huge difference in those two kinds of enemies, the enemy of disturbing emotion and the worldly enemy.
Say the disturbing emotion, the enemy of the disturbing emotion which we need to abandon it and if one is being able to abandon or eliminate the disturbing emotion by applying antidotes and by challenging it. And once it’s abandoned then it will never come back. Whereas the worldly enemies, which is abandoned or challenged or captured for a certain time but it may come back again. So disturbing emotion is not mild. It’s hard to capture.
Once you’ve been able to capture the disturbing emotion then it will never return, it will never come back. So one has to abandon the disturbing emotion. To avoid, so the method of, there are many methods of abandoning or applying antidotes towards the disturbing emotion, which becomes towards the disturbing emotions. So there are main three categories saying that the abandoned, abandoning the disturbing emotion by, say, aspects or through the activities or through activity and through and then through meditation and through the third one. So through the views.
It’s so for here the great master, Vasubandhu has stated that and say the first one which is eliminating the disturbing emotion through activity which I said could be behavior or aspects saying that to avoid that, to avoid what we, I mean just avoiding the disturbing emotion or negatively afflicting emotion by not encountering with the object, this is what the first one now. So the objects, for example, some like the anger and attachment comes by meeting with the object, by seeing someone and who one disliked or like to just seeing the certain faces or person you generate the anger. And by seeing some beautiful objects you develop attachment. So there are certain things I mean eliminate the disturbing emotion by not encountering or meeting with the object. So So it said it’s good to do this practice to avoid the disturbing emotion.
So if one came to know that one feels that one will develop the attachment or the anger by seeing certain person or meeting with the object, then the best thing to avoid that disturbing emotion, hatred or anger, say to try not to see that person or see that object and close the door of one’s sense organs and of seeing that, meeting with that person and just convert one’s mental sense organs to its other object or other things which does not develop any disturbing emotions, no? What it means is that I mean, So here so this for yes, so for that reason that the, because of the lower vehicles they are not permitted to look far far distance they are not allowed to see, not look more than one and a half foot I guess. Yeah, no. Because if they look far distance, there’s so many things and there’s danger of developing. Yeah.
So the first one is to the avoiding through, it sounds like it’s the avoiding disturbing emotion through the precepts like we showed you. It’s not a vow, it’s like precepts saying we’re not allowed to watch, taking sort of like precepts, seeing farsighted, keeping close distance. And the second one is through meditation. And they are meditation, they are like, through meditating on the different levels of path one can, one abandons a different level of disturbing emotions like they are small, middling and the greatest paths. And by meditating on the small path one can, I mean abandon the disturbing emotion, lowest state of disturbing emotion and then the middling meditation will abandon the middling disturbing emotions and as for the greatest, abandons the great by meditating on the. So by meditating upon the path of the different levels of scopes, so by meditating on this, the path of small scopes you can abandon the disturbing emotion which through the small scopes and by meditating on the middling scope you can avoid the disturbing emotions according to the middling scopes and as for the greatest scope it also?
So by meditating on the part of the great scopes it abandons the great negative actions or disturbing emotions. So and then eliminating the disturbing emotion through the view. It means the view because most of the disturbing emotions are the wrong views or negative views because they are not they’re not seeable, they’re not say they’re not visible, Say for example like the self grasping. And so these to avoid that self grasping attitude, so to avoid the self disturbing emotion of self grasping attitude through the view instead meditating upon a view of selflessness. So through this one can abandon.
So this process of eliminating the disturbing emotion is through the views. So we’ve so up to here we finished the that means we finished the fourth verse. So it doesn’t mean that we finish the fourth, we are on the fourth verses. So and saying that if one asked the question, so I mean it is very difficult to cherish the person with a bad nature. Doesn’t it hard to cherish or pay respect to the person who has bad nature and a person who is having, who has committed great sin or great negative actions, and then person who’s underwent a huge self, I mean like very dangerous disease like leprosy so forth.
And here the bad nature, the being of bad nature is meant to a person who lacks merit, means who hasn’t accumulated any, haven’t accumulated the merits or the virtues and one who is very easy, full of anger and is very, very responsive, fight the no, Very violent. So that person with a bad nature and he commits a great crime or negative deeds like killing his or her parents. So due to that, so by killing, so committing heinous crimes like the killing one’s parents. And so that person with a great negative action or committed great sin is very has very difficult finding a want to advise him. Yes.
And so that particular person who commit and find very difficult to get help from others, and not only that, as a result of them committing such crime, say later part he caught a disease called leprosy and everyone, they are more or less likely to say that, everyone might say that, ah that person, he deserved it, he needs that, and then we’ll try to more likely to avoid that person. So what the verse number four says that the So when one encounter with such person, one should not avoid or abandon that person and instead advise that person to avoid him or her from committing the negative actions and then try to bring and serve and offer the food or shelter and then help to give medicines to cure the disease and should pay huge respect because the person is a sentient being and sentient beings are very, are more valuable than the wish-granting jewel. We should hold that person very dearly and think that feel rejoice and give him a warm welcome and by should think that you have found a very valuable thing that, I mean, yet think that you have met or found a very valuable treasure or ornament.
So for example, one is digging a gold mine or say one is digging the earth and then later say and found a huge gold underneath. So at that moment one feels so happy and pleased with one’s self, one would start very hard to get very hard to, I mean try very hard to get that gold and once one would get one feel very happy and leave I mean always happily or will and he’s very pleased with the gold now. So likewise, a practitioner of great vehicle or Mahāyāna vehicle, so one should feel great, happy or rejoice the same as finding a goal when one a practitioner of great Mahāyāna or vehicle should always feel rejoice and happy like finding a goal when one met with the person with bad nature and a person who has committed great sins and who has undergoing through dangerous diseases like leprosy, know. And should always hold that person and feel very happy that feel happy that you have found a very valuable treasure. It’s it’s So why the practitioner of the Great Vehicles should feel very happy by meeting the person of bad nature because it is because we cultivate, the practitioners cultivate the compassion.
We normally cultivate the compassion and so forth through meditation. So by meeting with such person, a person with a bad nature and so forth, they are very weak and so they are in very poor state and very weak and just by seeing that person one can develop compassion without any meditation. Due to that, one should feel very happy, like same, like finding a great treasure because because it helps you to develop the compassion without any meditation and cultivating the compassion. And the compassion is one of the main main practice of Mahāyāna or in Mahāyāna path. So for example, the example we can give here is that, say, the Papatomi, his Tibetan word, in Sanskrit is Asaṇga.
The good master Sangha he found that the teaching of Mahāyāna is declining and he wants to develop the or increase the teachings of Mahāyāna tradition. And in order to do that he cultivate to see the Buddha, Maitreya Buddha, the future Buddha. And so he meditated for twelve years. No? Twelve years.
Oh, No. And so so so he he meditated for twelve years to see or to see Buddha Maitreya and he failed in twelve years. Yes. So he meditated for twelve years and he still couldn’t see the Maitreya Buddha. And finally he quit or he gave up and think that he will never see Buddha Maitreya and he gave up and then he was on his way to home.
And while on the road he saw a dog with the lower half of its body rotten, the half part of his body has been wounded and full of germs and so forth. Like, you know, the little germs or organisms in it. You you know this stuff. And and then and the upper part is fine. It’s barking.
And so when he when he’s yeah. When he see that because we get. So so when he’s so he’s he see that very dog and the dog is in a very poor status or very weak position. And so at that moment, he feels he developed a great compassion towards the dog and thinking how to free that dog from that suffering. And so and then as the bottom part of the dog is wounded and it’s not wounded, so whatever.
I have a problem with this. So germs I need and then bacteria and so forth. So he doesn’t want to harm both the bacterias or germs as well as want to free the dog from the suffering. So and he was thinking if just simply take the bacteria out of, I mean from the dog then the bacteria will die. So at that moment he generated great compassion towards both the dog and then the germs or bacteria.
So finally he has an art, due to that compassion he has an idea of cutting a flesh from his body or his parts and then take the bacteria out from the dogs to his flesh. So the has cut what I mean he’s cut a flesh from his leg and try to take the warmth or bacteria out from the dog. And then it’s very but he’s so conscious or very conscious about how he can take out the bacteria out from the dog because he feels that if he picked the bacteria with his fingers it might harm the bacteria, because they are very tiny little. So finally he decided to pick it with his tongue and then so the bottom of the dog sounds awful and she can’t see, bear to see it, you know. So what he did is he just closed his shirt and tried to pick it with his tongue.
So he closed his eyes and tried to reach his finger, reach his tongue to the dog, and he closed his and he just keep bending and bending, and he never reached that the dog’s bottom. So so he closed his heart and tried to reach his tongue to the dog, say the lower part, not the bottom. And then so he tried so he can’t reach the spot, alright? And later on he just said, I mean, where is he? And he just suddenly opened his eyes and came to know that the dog was no longer dead.
The Buddha the Maitreya Buddha was in front of him. So and then he suddenly called the Buddha called the Buddha Buddha Maitreyaya and then said that you have no you have very small compassion because I have cultivated you for twelve years and you didn’t show I mean, show up to me. No. Maitreya Buddha gave an answer there, no. I was in that cave from the beginning of your meditation, from the first day of your meditation, it was your fault because you have strong negative action or no, no, no, you have been obscured by the negative actions you have accumulated in the past.
Due to that due to that, you can’t see me there, I have been always there, and I was there since from the beginning of your meditation. If you don’t believe, just check here. Look at here. So it it says that so it seems like when yeah. So when Asaṇga was doing a meditation and he was walking around the cave all over, so and so like he’s so there are marks of his spits, you know, on the on the clothes of Buddha Maitreya and his hands everywhere.
See, it’s just showing this is the proof. He was spitting. So and and then the Buddha, Maitreya Buddha told him to hold from his upper robe, corner of his upper robe, and then he took him to the land, his place, land of Tuśita, Tuśita land. And from there he taught him the teachings, give a teaching like the Ornament of Realization sūtra and many teachings as well. And then after that, he come back to the world and and he served the Buddha teachings of Buddha and so it is it is one of his kindness.
We still have we still we still we still have the teachings of Buddhas to practice. I mean, it still exists. It’s one of his kindness as well. So he was not able to see Buddha Maitreya in his meditation for twelve years and then he’d been able, but he the Maitreya Buddha just on the road. It’s because of that great compassion he just developed by seeing that dog.
And so it’s a power of that compassion. He’s able to cultivate great compassion and through that compassion he accumulated a great merit which purifies all his negative actions and as a result he saw the Buddhah Maitreya. So one should not avoid or abandon those, the person with a bad nature or person with the dangerous disease or person who commit huge crime or huge sins because they help you to cultivate or develop a great compassion and feel that you have by seeing them feel like you have met with the very valuable wealth or treasure. And always try to whenever you see this person should not avoid it and instead of that try to cultivate more or greater compassion than you usually give.