Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A question anchors this 46-minute session from Khensur Rinpoche’s Precious Garland series: having resolved to personally free all beings from suffering, can we actually do it? That honest self-examination establishes why full Buddhahood — eliminating all faults, perfecting all qualities — is the only foundation equal to the task. The session moves into Q&A on karma as the origin of everything in the world: why the environment reflects collective human action, why human rebirth with leisure is far rarer than mere human birth, and why environmental deterioration tracks deteriorating ethics. Two vivid examples test the role of motivation: a carpenter whose work harms insects incidentally (not negative), and a mother beating a dog to protect her child — compassion mixed with anger and attachment, not the real thing.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 PG 1990 10 30.mp3
UUID: 21660186-5fa3-4035-8b24-9843166a7732
Teacher: Khensur Rinpoche
Collection: Precious Garland 1990-1991 (Khensur Rinpoche)
Date: 1990-10-30
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.3 minutes
Words: ~1,320
We are trying to further extend our love and compassion to the level of exceptional resolve, to special attitude whereby not only may sentient beings be free from suffering and have happiness, but I myself take the responsibility that they be free from suffering and have happiness. Though these are extremely wonderful, healthy states of mind, qualities of love, compassion, and exceptional And if we sincerely wish to free up someone and then we have to ask ourselves, do I actually have that ability? Can I actually bring that about? And I think upon examination, you may say that I cannot. I don’t have that ability.
But who in fact does? What type of person would have the capacity? And coming to understand that only an individual who has eliminated all their various faults and brought to consummation all their excellent qualities can do so. And how does such an individual bring about the welfare of all the sentient beings? Having eliminated all their various faults and brought to consummation all their excellent qualities, they have the ability to emanate hundreds of thousands of bodies. These bodies are able to display themselves in such a way that they are able to teach the Dharma to hundreds and thousands of individuals.
And it is by this means, this teaching of the Dharma that finally individuals are able to. Rinpoche was just about to ask you a question. He just made this statement that Buddha said that everything in the world arises out of karma. Is that the case? Is everything in the world arise out of karma?
So in accordance with the verse of the Buddha which was quoted that whatever is positive in the world has risen out of positive karma, whatever is negative in the world has risen out of negative karma, whatever the quality of whatever has arisen is risen arising in dependence upon the quality of you mean that when you say things are getting worse, do you mean that people are getting worse, or are you experiencing people are more less more unhappy? So the number of people in the world is probably increasing and increasing. We can achieve a human birth, a human rebirth, simply through the observation of ethics. Even one ethic can lead to a human type of rebirth. But the human rebirth isn’t all that rare.
But a human rebirth with leisure unfortunately is extremely rare. It takes more than just that. So though many individuals have taken rebirth, it doesn’t mean that they carry on skillful action. And therefore, not carrying on skillful action, then out of this comes a deterioration of the environment. People are more human having created ethics in the past, observing ethics in the past lives but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be great skill in the course of this life.
It’s not necessarily human life or leisure unfortunately and because leaving creating unskillful actions there’s a deterioration in the environment. So our taking of, you know, with that our taking of rebirth and the type of rebirth that we have taken in this life is dependent upon the actions that we’ve created in previous lives. We have gone through innumerable previous lives, one life before that, the life before that, and the dependence upon observing ethics in a previous life. So if we look at in terms of this life, then there are amongst humans most do not observe ethics and not observing ethics then upon death they will not be able to achieve a happy migration in the future. But if they do observe ethics, immediately upon death, they will be able to take a good rebirth.
So this would be just like in the case of the recognition of an incoming tulku — having died, they are recognized again, and they are identified. [unclear passage] They they lost, they lost it. So what we’ve described here was the skillful action of ethics in abandoning the non skillful actions. This was a specific area of creating skillful actions, ethical skillful action. But we can create skillful actions in many ways.
We can do prostrations, we can recite our prayers and teachings. We can do meditation on emptiness. We can generate compassion. These are all skillful actions. Carpentry work is not.
So it’s possible that you could kill insects, for example, during carpentry work, but you don’t have the intention to kill them. It’s not negative. Okay. So they’re cutting down all the trees in the world destroying the habitat of all these. Is that bad or good?
Cutting down the tooth. So so it depends mainly dependent upon one’s motivation. When cut down the trees or work with the wood, thinking I’m cutting down these trees and working with this wood in order to harm something being, then this would be negative action. But if, though it’s there are sentient beings being harmed indirectly, that’s quite possible. But one does not have the motivation to harm them, therefore it’s not unskillful action if one does not have that motivation.
For example, this table. You got got got some good table over there. Uh-huh. Table. Sometimes sometimes a carpenter makes bird houses and and dog houses and things like that, but they make they make homes.
Okay. Alright. The earth, the trees, all of these, as I mentioned, are environmental results. And the quality of that result is dependent upon the skillful and unskillful actions that brought it about. Whether, you know, our environment where this house, whether it’s beautiful or unpleasant, is dependent upon our our our scope or non scope actions that we’ve created.
For example, example, the table arose from the actions of people who constructed it. [unclear] So the place arises out of karma, and everything within that place, whether the earth and the trees, etcetera. Yes. So the person could cut down trees from a due to a variety of motivations. It could be out of attachment.
They really they want the wood, or it could be out of a aversion. They want to get rid of the wood for for some reason, and or it could be just simply out of confusion. But the reason the reason that our the environment is deteriorating is because of the deterioration of the of the actions of sentient beings. That their actions of body, speech, mind are becoming more and more negative and this brings about the environmental effect of deterioration of the environment. [Question about a child and a dog.]
Yeah. [Question about protecting the child.] So what the mother is thinking is she doesn’t want it to bite. So I explained it in terms of a mother and child with the dog.
And the the mother, essentially, she wants that dog to not to bite her child. And she didn’t want the dog to bite. So she beat the dog. Out of her caring for her child — if that dog would bite the child it would harm the child. So the mother has been acting out of compassion for her child, but then in the interval, there arises anger towards the dog. And that is what is the reason for the action of hitting the dog.
There’s an interval between her compassion for the child and the anger towards the dog. So probably the the mother the mother’s compassion is not a pure compassion. It’s a type of compassion which is mixed with attachment and this is not real compassion. Real compassion is it has a factor of non attachment. But even if it were pure compassion, whether it outweighed the anger or not it would be dependent on which force was more powerful — whether the anger was more powerful or the compassion.
So you right. You you just interfere, and you hurt one of the other people here. But you just you just come between them. Stop the fight.