Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 41-minute session, Lama Lhundup teaches the four immeasurables—love, compassion, equanimity, and joy—as the foundation for transforming how we relate to suffering and happiness. He begins by establishing that material benefit alone is insufficient; we must work to bring ultimate, unchanging happiness to all beings without distinction. He emphasizes that genuine love and compassion depend entirely on cultivating equanimity first, otherwise our care remains attached and selective. The heart of the talk is two paired meditation practices: radiating white light from your heart to give all beings lasting happiness, and the practice of giving and taking, where you visualize black smoke of others’ suffering dissolving into your self-cherishing at the heart, destroying it. Lama Lhundup explains that merit from these meditations is boundless, and that while such altruistic thoughts don’t arise spontaneously, repeated cultivation and contemplation will eventually transform them into natural responses. He closes by urging students to practice these methods continuously in daily life, not only during formal sessions, and describes the path to purifying the mind and realizing its true nature.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 C o P.mp3
UUID: 89cfef57-ec8f-451b-be4f-cef19628e95f
Teacher: Lama Lhundup
Collection: Changing our perspectives (Lama Lhundup)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 41.3 minutes
Words: ~2,445
So the immeasurable love. In immeasurable love we’re trying to develop the thought that I am a human being and that as a human being, my main effort my energy, my main work should be directed toward bringing happiness to others, trying to benefit others. So in trying to bring happiness to others, trying to benefit them, now we can give material things, things to fulfill their temporal needs such as food, clothing, give them money. Merely this is not enough. It’s not if we really want to benefit them, we can’t settle for just merely bringing them temporal happiness.
We have to bring them some kind of ultimate happiness, some type of un changing happiness. So the the thought, you know, I must bring ultimate happiness to all sentient beings, to each and every sentient being without exception, holding no difference whatsoever amongst the various types of beings, that I must bring them ultimate happiness. Such a thought is immeasurable love. If we meditate, if we cultivate well, immeasurable equanimity, then immeasurable love will come easily. But if we haven’t cultivated equanimity well, of course we’re going to want to bring happiness to those whom we love, but we aren’t going to seek to bring happiness to those we hate.
And If we if we can’t if we cannot wish to bring happiness to even those people who we we hold as enemies, there’s no way that we’re going to develop great love. The type of happiness, emotion that seeks to bring happiness to those to our loved ones is not actual love. It’s love mixed with attachment. So we have to understand that the love we’re talking about is a love which is devoid of any attachment. In developing and cultivating great immeasurable compassion We imagine all sentient beings.
We remember their great kindness and how they benefited us. All sentient beings, they want happiness. They don’t want to suffer. That that that but in fact, do not have the happiness that they want and they’re tortured by suffering. So, you know, most people in the world don’t actually understand what are the causes of happiness and what are the causes of suffering.
There are very few people who actually understand the nature these two feelings. You know, most people in the pursuit of happiness go through a great deal of difficulty. They spend all their time and put forth all their effort into acquiring wealth, things, possessions, houses, etc. And we have to question whether this actually brings them happiness that they are seeking. There are people in business.
Spend their whole lives trying to acquire wealth. However much money gather together, however many millions of dollars they may gather together, they are never satisfied. So they’re never finding the happiness they want to redouble their efforts. But in fact, what often happens is that some disaster arises and they may lose all their money and because of this attachment that they had, they experience tremendous suffering. There is nothing All the marvels in the world cannot bring us happiness.
So whoever we talk to, the various people we talk to, initially we speak very pleasant words. How are you today? I’m fine. Everything is going well. But if we go in a if we go a little deeper in our conversation, then they begin to slowly reveal all the various difficulties and problems that they’re facing constantly.
So we know from our own experience that of all the people, our relatives, etcetera, who we know very well, how from our own experience and the relatives that we know very well, how much how many problems and difficulties that we all have. So we want to develop the thought, may all sentient beings finding no difference amongst all the various sentient beings, seeing that they equally desire happiness but in fact are tortured by suffering, may I separate them from their suffering. Such a thought is immeasurable compassion. Likewise, with respect to immeasurable compassion, if we haven’t cultivated immeasurable equanimity well there is wholly no difference amongst all the sentient beings. If we still hold some as close and others distant, then there’s no way that we’re going to be able to develop, cultivate, immeasurable compassion because we’re not going to wish all sentient beings to be free from suffering with the same with the same intensity.
So now we cultivate immeasurable joy. And this is when we see sentient beings, you know, and they’re and they we see them as being happy. And we develop the thought, may they never be may they always have this happiness, may they never be separated from this happiness. These are the four immeasurables. These are the way of cultivating developing the four immeasurables and their actual nature.
So so now we’re going to we’re going to have a meditation on these on the immeasurable compassion and immeasurable love. So we must in meditating on immeasurable love and compassion, we must have a feeling of impartiality. We must have it develop equanimity, sameness amongst all sentient beings and we must develop the feelings of wanting to separate them from their suffering and give them happiness. So we’ll begin with the imagining before us that all sentient beings are in front of us, all enemies, friends, every sentient being, and they’re all in the form of a human being. So our friends or enemies are in front in the form of and then surrounding them are all sentient beings, all in the form of human beings.
From from so try to from your heart, try to get to develop the feeling. May they all be happy. And when we develop a a feeling that, you know, that maybe they may they have happiness and we do have this very strong feeling. We’ve built this feeling very strongly. Then we begin.
We radiate out a light. We should think that this happiness that we want them to have is a great happiness, unchanging happiness or ultimate happiness. And that through this light that they that they have this that they that they have this happiness that we radiate out. So we radiate out this white light. Imagine that this white light is going out.
The white light goes out from from your heart through your right nostril? And it it touches all the sentient beings and dissolves into their minds and body and now think that they that they have mental and physical happiness, that they have this unchanging and ultimate happiness. And from the depths of your heart thinking that now that now all sentient beings have attained have attained this happiness, you develop an immeasurable joy within yourself. When you develop this feeling of joy within your heart, place your mind single pointedly on that joy that you feel. So that is the way we we meditate on immeasurable love.
So now we’ll meditate on immeasurable compassion. Imagine at your heart there’s a round ball or egg shape. It’s black in color. Now this — this is your self-cherishing, and you should think that this this that this is your self-cherishing. It’s because you’re self-cherishing that you have all your problems, that you cannot that you have all your difficulties.
You know, this is what is to blame. This self-cherishing is what is to blame for all the difficulties that confront you. That because nothing and because of this, there’s have not been able to benefit yourself nor others. Imagine all these people before you as you did before, we begin to consider all their very sufferings that they’re tortured by whether it’s disease, starvation, all the mental afflictions that they go through. Number of sufferings are countless.
They are numberless. So we are imagining yourself cherishing as a ball at your heart. We now and imagining that the all these sentient beings in front of you are undergoing this suffering, we developed a thought to to separate them from this suffering. And so we take their suffering in the form of take on the suffering in the form of black smoke, and the suffering comes in the form of black smoke and comes in through our left nostril and dissolves into this black self-cherishing at our heart. Through this black smoke coming into the black egg it completely eliminates our self-cherishing in the form of this black egg.
It’s completely gone and now then we should feel that all their suffering, the cause of their suffering, all their afflicted emotions, we’ve completely separated all these sentient beings from from their suffering. And because of this, there will arise a joy in in our in hearts. So so all the all the sufferings of the sentient beings, all the causes of the suffering, their afflicted emotions, all you have all come in the form of black smoke and dissolved into this self-cherishing at your heart. So in this meditation on giving and taking, if we don’t have if we don’t actually have a sincere desire to benefit others this joy will not arise. We shouldn’t we shouldn’t think that this is beginners shouldn’t think that this is a lot of nonsense.
But since many foreigners have a sincere desire to benefit others, therefore it is meaningful to talk about it. So our self-cherishing one’s own self-cherishing has taken on the sufferings of all these sentient beings. And then we should think, what does you know, this does this does this self-cherishing, which has taken on this suffering, now exist within my mind. It it no longer exists. And, you know, it’s our self-cherishing, which seems very real to us actually does not inherently exist.
So at this point we should try to understand that this self-cherishing has no inherent existence and that we should meditate on emptiness of self-cherishing of our own self-cherishing. So, you know, this practice that we just meditated on called giving and taking, it’s a there’s a it’s a extremely great blessing to practice this such a meditation. It is such a such a thought to actually benefit all sentient beings, to give happiness to sentient beings. It’s such a thought to take on the suffering of all sentient beings. Since sentient beings, you know, are numberless, the amount of merit that we collect by trying to develop altruism, to try and develop the exceptional resolve to benefit all sentient beings, the merit we collect is countless also.
Likewise, if we were to compare it to someone who housed and sheltered and fed one hundred thousand people, we would create more merit in even one minute than such a person. Why is it up to now we haven’t attained Buddhahood? Why is it we haven’t realized the actual nature of the mind? Why isn’t it that we haven’t been able to cultivate the various paths? Because we don’t have positive potential, positive or merit.
So there are many conditions that we can make use of in order to create merit. For example, we can make prostrations, we can offer mandalas, symbolic universes, we can perform generosity, recite praises to the Buddhas, etc. These four immeasurables that we’ve been discussing. Even though we make a lot a great deal of effort, it’s it’s it’s difficult for such thoughts to arise automatically in our mind. So how do we how do we what can we do since it’s so difficult to these immeasurables do not arise spontaneously or automatically in our mind.
Once we’ve actually listened to the methods and we listen to teachings on the immeasurables, we should again and again, whenever we have some opportunity, turn our minds towards the four immeasurables and think about them again and again and try to cultivate them again and again. We should make effort in collecting various types of merit and create the conditions and circumstances whereby they can develop in our mind. And then it’s definite that we they will arise automatically within our mind. So someone who has never seen a movie, play? A great play?
A movie? Someone who’s never seen it before, he’s going to make it and when he hears about it, he’s going to make a great deal of effort to go see it. However much money, whatever the the price he’s going he’s going to pay it. But when this person finally who has made such a great deal of effort to get to this movie he’s never seen before and he actually sees it, not all that great. It’s no big it’s no big deal.
You know, he’s going to he’s actually he’s he’s going through a lot of physical problems. Now he’s he’s, you know, he’s causing difficulties to his eyes, but in the end, he’s he’s he’s caused himself a lot of trouble for nothing. But if but if we if we pursue what we’ve been doing here and make effort, then the joy and happiness in our mind will increase again and again over time. And not only that, we will purify many negative, a great deal of negative, karma. And and and and once this once our mind has been purified, whatever we see in the world will appear to us as beautiful.
And by purifying our mind, developing a pure mind, the actual nature or the reality of our mind which we have not been able to experience or see up to now will become apparent to And by by correctly realizing the nature of our mind, we will no longer collect karma. Because within the nature of the mind it is not obstructed. So if we take essence essentially very briefly, we should cultivate the thought now I have cultivated this human body. Have a human life now. If we want to make the ultimate use of having attained this human body then we should develop and make great effort in cultivating, meditating on the thought to bring others happiness and to separate them from their suffering.
As to what we’ve what we discussed here, that you make effort in trying to cultivate in whatever you do and wherever you go, try to bring it up again and again in your mind and consider it and and develop these in your own mind. It’s not necessary that you have to only reserve such thoughts for when you come to Buddha House, for example. You can also do it outside in your own homes or wherever you are. Yeah.