Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Khensur Rinpoche opens this 12-minute session with a vivid illustration: a clay Buddha left in the rain, covered with a shoe by one passerby and uncovered by the next — both actions positive, because both arose from positive intent. This story anchors the session’s central argument, that in Buddhist ethics the morality of any action is determined entirely by motivation, not outward appearance. Rinpoche then probes a harder case: a person who has the skill to resolve a workplace dispute but holds back out of laziness, fear, or self-cherishing. He distinguishes between that neutral failure of nerve and a genuinely negative motivation, clarifying where compassion ends and karmic weight begins. Accessible to practitioners at any level.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 Eye of A 1988 11 22.mp3
UUID: e35d449c-d8fe-404e-9852-7f37b3533059
Teacher: Khensur Rinpoche
Collection: Opening the Eye of Awareness 1988-1989 (Khensur Rinpoche)
Date: 1988-11-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 11.8 minutes
Words: ~372
So it wouldn’t be a negative action because it didn’t have a negative intention. So if there’s no intention, then there’s no negativity accrued. So as a way of example, a long time ago there was a small clay statue of the Buddha and it was outside on the earth And it was raining very hard. And someone came along and said, Oh, that clay statue is going to be destroyed by all this rain. And he said, I can’t let it be ruined like that.
He took off his shoe and covered the little statue with his shoe. His intention was very positive and therefore this was a positive action. Another person came along Oh, look at it, there’s a shoe on top of the boot. How could anybody leave a shoe on top of the boot? He took it off.
And his intention was also positive, so this was a positive action. If someone is capable of, say in a work situation, if someone is capable of and has the skills to help the situation in in a dispute, and they decide not to because of either laziness or they don’t want to get involved. Is I mean, is that cognitive action to decide motivated by laziness? Or laziness or just wanting a quiet life or fear or coward or self-cherishing. Things that I’ve seen.
Okay. [unclear] So having the ability to help someone with a problem, if they thought, wow, he deserves that, all that trouble he has, then this would be a negative action on his part. But if it’s simply he’s tired or he doesn’t want to be bothered, then it’s not a negative action, it’s just a lack of compassion. So the Dharma of the Buddha revolves around one’s motivation, the intention behind the action.
It’s not dependent upon the action itself or the activity. Whether an activity is negative or positive, it’s dependent purely upon our motivation. If our motivation is negative, no matter what we, activity it may appear to be, it’s a negative action. And if our active is positive, no matter what it may appear, activity may appear on the outside, the act the activity is positive.