Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this brief 8-minute talk, Lama Lhundup explores ethical boundaries within the Buddhist practice of generosity. He begins with a central principle: when giving is known to cause harm, it becomes an exception to the generosity ideal — refusing a knife to someone planning violence, or body parts to those who request them — showing that authentic compassion requires wisdom about consequences. He then shifts to the psychological and merit-generating value of analytical meditation on giving: imagining your body as white light that transforms into whatever beings need, or visualizing your body itself transforming into houses, food, and warmth for all sentient beings. Lama Lhundup emphasizes that even when direct benefit is impossible — such as helping hell beings through visualization — the merit accumulated through sincere mental training plants the seeds for future rebirth and power to help. Suitable for practitioners familiar with Lamrim teachings on the path of accumulation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 C o P.mp3
UUID: ad7b6bc0-6861-484f-9673-91e2abfc6c08
Teacher: Lama Lhundup
Collection: Changing our perspectives (Lama Lhundup)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 8.2 minutes
Words: ~533
Or he’s going to make use of what we give him, whatever generosity we make, if we know it’s going to bring him harm eventually, then this is a special occasion and we should not give him whatever is going to hurt him. So, for us now, for example, if someone wants a part of your body, your eye, or something like that, because we don’t have the ability to do it now, it would be wrong for us to try to make such generosity. Or if somebody were to ask you for a knife or a gun and you had reason to believe that they were going to use it to harm someone else, it would be wrong for you to give it to him. Clear? I just wanted you to repeat that last bit before you answered the question.
So the attainment — the extinguishment of self-cherishing — and the attainment of Buddhahood occur at the same time? So, the cause is training, as we have been explaining, training and giving away one’s body, one’s wealth, and one’s root of virtue again and again without without any interruption is the cause for extinguishing one’s own self-cherishing. So as far as giving flesh, because we can’t do that, we we imagine that we’re doing that? Can imagine. Bring it in place.
Because you’d like to get rid of it. Yeah. So, at the moment we don’t have the ability to directly benefit these beings, for example, hell beings. But by doing this practice, we develop the ability whereby eventually we will be able to purposely take rebirth in hell to benefit hell beings. There are many accounts of people having developed the ability to do this.
Though doing this, for example, visualization, thinking in this way does not directly benefit those sentient beings, we ourselves are developing great merit through this training process. But, though we don’t directly benefit them in this training, are not directly benefiting, for example, our mother and father and all these various people who are trying to imagine we are taking away their suffering and giving away our happiness to them, though they aren’t directly affected by what we are doing. There is great profit or there is great benefit to be derived because of the great merit that we are accumulating. We can see one as being the same as the other. So, first we imagine we’re going to send out, we’re going to give away our body, and we imagine that our body transforms into this white light at our heart. We imagine white light at our heart, and this white light is our body, our wealth, and all our virtues, and the fruits of all our merit.
It’s in the form of white light. And then, we send out this white light which transforms into whatever the sentient beings need: houses, food, warmth, whatever they need. Also, there’s the visualization where we actually imagine sending our body. This body, we imagine this body transforming into all these various objects. Okay?
Thank you. Yes. Yeah? You have some question? Okay?
Okay. I think this is good enough. Yes. A short meditation..