Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A deceptively simple paradox anchors this 12-minute talk by Khensur Rinpoche: the path to becoming one’s own teacher runs entirely through the spiritual master. He explains how the lama’s blessings act like seeds in the mind, while daily situations serve as cooperative causes — together shifting the mind from unskillful to skillful action, from doubt to faith, from little to great effort. From there he draws out the implication: knowing what to adopt and reject depends on the teacher’s guidance, and so does the eventual capacity to guide oneself. He closes with the Buddha’s teaching that every person is simultaneously their own teacher and their own enemy, depending entirely on whether they cultivate compassion or turn toward negative action.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 PP 1989-05-20.mp3
UUID: 6e7d3818-99e0-4af3-ab64-6b9606d58bff
Teacher: Khensur Rinpoche
Collection: Preliminary Practices (Khensur Rinpoche)
Date: 1989-05-20
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 11.7 minutes
Words: ~425
To to increase your faith and, your your your faith in your spiritual teacher. Yeah. So receive blessings from the spiritual master increasing clarity and wisdom, And then various situations present themselves. Acting as opportunities to increase one’s wisdom. So the the blessings of the teacher then the the various the direction of our mind is is turned into a a more positive direction.
You know, before my mind was very much involved in unskillful action. Now it becomes directed toward more skillful. Before it was we developed more before it was had non faith and now it’s directed toward faith. Before it was involved with little effort, now it’s involved in great effort. So these are all these qualities of transforming the mind and the blessings of the spiritual master.
And you know, the master imprints these seeds in the mind and then the various conditions which we confront act as cooperative causes giving rise to all of these reverses of these qualities and increases in our positive qualities such as wisdom, etcetera. So the situations act as cooperative causes and the blessings of the Lama like the seed and increasing and reversing and redirecting our mind. Okay. So, it is in dependence upon the spiritual teacher that we know what is to be adopted and what is to be rejected. We know what is positive and what is negative.
And as, so, you know, our coming to know these is dependent upon the spiritual master. But as was said previously, our teaching the other day, that one is one’s own enemy and one is one’s own teacher. That one can be either of the two. And that we become our own teacher is dependent upon the spiritual master showing us how to become our own teacher. So eventually we come to know what we need, what is positive, what is negative, what we should be doing, what we should be engaged in, that we should be developing compassion, etcetera.
This too, that is to say we become our own teacher, this isn’t reliant upon the blessings of the spiritual master. So the Buddha said that one is one’s own teacher and one is one’s own lama, one’s own enemy. If we act in such a way that without love and without compassion, involving ourselves in negative actions, then we are our own enemy. But if on the other hand we begin to direct our mind in positive ways, we begin to develop the spiritual qualities, then in this way we become our own teacher.