Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using a field-and-crop analogy — stones and fallen trees ensure no harvest grows — Khensur Rinpoche begins this 48-minute opening session of a calm-abiding retreat by explaining why mental preparation is the essential foundation. He covers setting up the shrine room, correct sitting posture, and a breath technique (black light exhaled, white light inhaled) for clearing a disturbed mind before proceeding to motivation. Drawing on Mañjuśrī’s advice to Tsongkhapa, he identifies three prerequisites for realisation: purifying negativities and accumulating merit, requesting blessings from the lama-deity, and meditating correctly. He then explains why sessions must begin short — fifteen minutes, building gradually — because without mindfulness and awareness working together, a meditator can lose the object of meditation without noticing. The session ends with a Q&A on blessings: faith, like sunlight on snowy mountains, is what allows the lama-deity’s transformation of mind to occur.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 Calm A 1990 06 08.mp3
UUID: b562eb17-ecfe-4a35-a057-b6c406f6d548
Teacher: Khensur Rinpoche
Collection: Calm Abiding Retreat (Khensur Rinpoche)
Date: 1990-06-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 48.8 minutes
Words: ~2,561
The actual setting up the place where we’re going to meditate, cleaning the place, setting up an image of the Buddha, setting out various offerings. Then we would go into the bodily posture, the way of sitting. You know the back is to be straight, way we hold our hands, way we hold our position, our head, etcetera. And then proceeding with an explanation of the, of this type of seat that we should sit on, something which is comfortable with higher in the back, lower in the front, that we’re able to sit comfortably on that seat for however long we wish to remain there, and then how to proceed first with the examination of our mind. And first, initially, examining the quality of the mind in order to adjust our motivation for proceeding in our meditation and what is the state of your mind?
Is it involved in afflictive emotions or is it in a neutral state, a positive state? If it’s involved in afflictive emotions, various discursive thinking going on, then making use of the inhalation and the exhalation of the breath. Imagine a black light breathing out a black light, breathing in a white light until this will have the ability to clear one’s mind. If it’s in a neutral or positive state we can go on to our motivation, thinking that there is no essence to cyclic existence whatsoever, and becoming aware of its various disadvantages and developing the striving to be liberated from cyclic existence but then turning our mind to the fact that all sentient beings are also like ourselves tortured by problems and therefore developing the inspiration to achieve Buddhahood not only for our own sake but for the sake of alleviating the suffering of all sentient beings that is to say to the awakening heart as the motivation. And by means of this motivation that due to my wish to achieve Buddhahood, I am going to engage in the practice of cultivating calm abiding.
And then we can proceed from there on to recite, for example, the seven-limb prayer. But whatever individual prayers that you might wish, we can make requests for example to the field of merit. Then offer Mandala. What do we have to do to develop calm abiding? It’s very important that we develop it and we need to develop calm abiding.
And as our mind stands at present it is covered covered over by various afflictive emotions by unwholesome factors. And in such a state we cannot induce positive factors in our mind. So we can make use of this seven limb prayer to first remove the various negative factors from our mind by purifying our negativities. And then by, for example, rejoicing in the skillful actions of others, we can develop a great deal of personal power. And in this way, we can develop all the conducive conditions for generating calm abiding within our mind.
This would be analogous to a field which hasn’t been properly prepared, is a bad land. That it’s covered over with trees, with fallen stones, and even though we plant a crop there, it’s not going to grow well. There are all of these faults within the field, these stones, these trees, etcetera, and this does not allow the growing of a good crop. So in Mañjuśrī, in answer to a question by Tsongkhapa asking, In order to gain realizations, what is necessary in such types of realizations such as the various grounds and paths? What do we need to do?
And in answer to that question, Mañjuśrī answered that first we need to create a great deal of positive potential and we need to purify all the various obstacles, all the various negativities. Additionally to that, we need to make requests to our spiritual master as inseparable from our meditational deity for their assistance in cultivating calm abiding itself. If we have these three factors combined, then we will gain realizations. If one of these factors is missing, we’re going to have a lot of difficulties. And this is what Mañjuśrī advised that in the future if one seeks to gain realization one should combine these three factors together.
The positive potential and purification of negativities, the making request to the Lama deity, and the actual meditation process meditating well. These three. So in terms of the actual time, the length of our meditative session, in what way should we meditate? In the beginning, our meditation sessions should be short. For example, we can begin with sessions of fifteen minutes.
And then if that goes well, then we can increase it to twenty minutes. If that goes well, we can increase it to thirty minutes. And then that going well, increasing it in intervals of five up to an hour, etcetera. But at first, our meditation sessions should not be long. So because we have we don’t have much experience in meditation, we should keep our meditation sessions short initially because many faults would occur if we had long sessions.
And why is that? In the beginning, our mind is very much under the influence of the afflictive emotions. It’s not very the factors of stability are not strong. Our mind is just like water being tossed about. So why is this?
Why is it necessary to keep our initial sessions short? Our mind is can be compared to like water being tossed about or the wind being moved about, constantly moving. And with respect to our object of observation, you know, there are two on the one hand, our mind is not is due to the influence of the afflictive emotions to which we are happy which our mind is accompanies our mind which to which our mind is habituated to. They are constantly influencing our mind away from the object. When we say calm abiding, it means to remain on the object, but due to the force of the influence of the afflictive emotions, our mind is constantly being moved away from the object.
We almost instantly lose the object of observation. We aren’t able to remain on the object of observation due to the influence of afflictive emotions tossing the mind away. That’s on one hand. On the other hand, our minds aren’t powerful. And speaking in this way, why isn’t our mind powerful?
Because we don’t have the power of mindfulness. It is the factor of mindfulness which assists the mind to remain on the object. So, on the one hand, the afflictive emotions are strong, tossing our mind about. We’re not able to remain on the object. On the other hand, our mind is not powerful because we do not have a powerful mindfulness which holds our mind to the object.
Due to the lack of power for our mindfulness is that which holds the mind to the object. And due to the fact that we have little power in our mindfulness, we will lose the object of mindfulness. We will lose the object of our meditation, but we won’t know that we did. And we will abide in a state where we’ve actually lost the object but where we don’t we aren’t aware of it. And this is a fault which occurs if you’ve lost the object but aren’t aware of it due to the lack of powerful power of mindfulness.
So if we were to continually meditate in this fashion where we abide in a state where we though we’ve lost object that we’re aware of it and we keep returning to the same style of meditating, we’re going to it’s as if we can become habituated to this this way of meditating is or habituated, addicted to this way of meditating, and this is a great fault. It’s like if we drink some alcohol and we think, Wow, that’s really great, and I’m going to drink some more tomorrow, and we become alcoholics. This way, abiding in this state is a great fault in where we’ve lost the object but we’re not aware of it. So it’s in the same would be the same as if today is Saturday and, you know, it’s a day of rest. We can take it easy and it’s quite pleasurable.
And tomorrow, oh yeah, I can rest tomorrow. I like that too. And so then we take off. We don’t work the next day. We enjoy that and pretty soon it becomes habitual.
We become addicted to not doing to taking these days off and simply laying around. I’ll sleep till nine o’clock and we get didn’t translate that very well. Then we get we begin to lengthen our time of sleeping, not yeah. I think I won’t wake up till nine o’clock. So if we are not allowing ourselves to become habituated to such a way of meditating, but meditating well for short periods of time.
So, not allowing, you know, not allowing ourselves to become habituated to these negative states. They quite naturally arise if we allow them to arise, a negative state arise then it will rise again and again and again and it becomes a great fault of allowing ourselves to become it becomes a habit pattern with us. If, so initially the sessions are to be short due to the lack of power of mindfulness but intermittently there are power of mindfulness will increase when we’ve attained that. It’s as if we were a powerful person and a strong person can easily discipline an unruly child can control an unruly child. So when that child gains its own power and it gets big, then no one else can subdue it, can control it, him or likewise when the when the factor of mindfulness becomes powerful then it it is able to control the mind.
So as the factor of mindfulness increases in strength, we can increase the length of time of our session twenty minutes, thirty minutes, forty five minutes and because of the power of our mindfulness, the mind will not go out of control. So this is the reason that we have short sessions initially. There are two factors which we are seeking to strengthen. One is mindfulness, the other is awareness. Mindfulness is that which holds the object and awareness knows whether the object is lost.
It is able to look to see how the object is being held. These two factors initially these two factors have little power therefore we should have short sessions. But as the power of these two factors of mindfulness and awareness increase then we can increase the length of our sessions. If, you know, we must think for ourselves, examine for ourselves how long our sessions should be. Texts make various suggestions as to the length of the sessions.
Some say fifteen minutes, some say thirty minutes, some say one hour, but in fact we should examine for ourselves. If we are continually losing the object, then we should shorten our sessions. If we’re not losing the object, then we can lengthen the sessions. If we lose the object, then temporarily shorten your sessions until your factors of mindfulness awareness have you some So what I’m wondering is why why is it that what’s so important about the blessings of every deity, and how is it important? So, you know, presently our minds are rather tough.
They’re under the predominantly under the influence of afflictive emotions and we have to somehow transform our mind into wholesome factors and this necessary to receive the blessings of the deity, the lama, inseparable. Therefore we make requests for their blessings and the word for blessings in which has been in Tibetan is Jinlap. Jinlap. And this actually means to transform the aspect of whatever object. We can bless various types of objects.
Bless any object and this has the meaning of that somehow the object is transformed and we need to transform our mind. And the quickest way that we can transform our mind is by receiving the blessings of the Lama deity. So, you know, we use the blessing of the mantra Om A hum and this is a very special blessing in the sense that it represents the Buddha’s body, speech and mind. And by means of it, we’re able to transform, for example, ordinary offerings into they become consecrated by this means, into non ordinary. It’s transformed into nectar by means of this is transformed into nectar.
So all of the impure factors are transformed into pure factors. That that sort of implies that how how does it work? Is it I mean, is it like There’s something that So the way in which the one is is in order to that the one be is to have faith. If there’s no faith then there’s no blessing. It’s just like, if the sun does not shine on the snowy mountains, then there’s no water which runs off into the valleys.
If the sun shines on the snow mountain, then water will run down into the valleys. So our faith is likened to the sun. When the sun shines then the blessings will flow forth. So it’s necessary to see the qualities of the spiritual teacher in the meditational deity, the Lama Yidam. And by seeing those qualities and by appreciating how wonderful those qualities are, one’s mind is clarified just in the same way that muddy water becomes the settling out of the pollutions of the mud of water.
At first nothing can be seen. The mind is clouded over by afflictive emotions. But by seeing these qualities and appreciating them, the mind is as if clarified. The mind is clear is cleared of afflictive emotions. And this is by the of one’s faith.
This is what we mean by faith. This cleared bringing the faith the faith is this clearing of the mind and being able to see these qualities. It is said in that in one who has no faith then the virtue the excellent dharma does not develop. It is as is like a burnt seed. So so through one’s conviction through conviction, one develops through observing, you know, the qualities of the on the Yidam, then the blessings arise within one’s own mind.
So by the force of seeing the excellent qualities of the Lama Yidam there arises in your mind faith. By this faith, this induces the blessings, their blessings. If this faith induces the blessings. Induces the blessings. I I guess what I’m getting at is the blessings arise within one’s own mind through within one’s own mind through conviction of that.
So almost like that. It’s like like something external. Yeah. So the the the blessing flows forth from the. So, and we can’t see the blessing but we can, there are signs when our mind has become wholesome this is a sign that we have received blessings.
So the, this as in, this as in the, you know, having planted a seed in the ground that it’s necessary that there that the sun shine on that earth and dependence upon this coming together then a crop will arise. Without, though we have a seed and that we have the earth without this additional factor of the, of the sunshine, there’s no crop will grow and blessings of the blessings of the Lama Yidam are the sunshine.