Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Lama Lhundup introduces the Graduated Path by establishing why subduing the mind matters: genuine peace and happiness depend on it, yet the world grows more troubled because minds become increasingly uncontrolled, driven by attachment, anger, and self-interest. He then presents compassion as the essential practice for transforming the mind, using real-world suffering—starvation, drought, fear—as material for cultivating genuine care. The bulk of the talk explores generosity, the first of the six perfections, distinguishing true generosity as a mind of giving free from expectation of return. Lama Lhundup walks through three types of generosity, the graduated levels of motivation that deepen it, and practical meditations: imaginatively giving away one’s body, possessions, and merit in whatever forms sentient beings need—food, medicine, rain, teachers—to weaken self-cherishing and miserliness. For practitioners beginning serious dharma study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 GP.mp3
UUID: f7f5a8dc-b0dc-44da-a372-fb94b7b053a7
Teacher: Lama Lhundup
Collection: The Graduated Path (Lama Lhundup)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~2,558
So doing our mind, we we become happier. Whoever, whether oneself or others, to degree that we sort of subdue our mind, to that degree, we have that much more happiness. Decide whether our mind is subdued or not? We have to look at our mind and see are we attached only to the happiness of this life? Are we attached to all the Do we have great attachment to all the marvels, the wonders of cyclic existence?
Attachment to strong attachment to pleasure? Do we have many occasions where we are angry that we’re fighting? If you have these states of mind, then your mind isn’t subdued. So, similarly, if we see these states manifesting in our mind, then our mind is not we don’t have a subdued mind. So we have to begin by seeing the disadvantages of such states of mind and by seeing the disadvantages of them then we will begin to lessen them and cease them and we will give rise to a subdued mind.
So we can see for ourselves in the world that peace peace is becoming less and less. We’ve lost peace. We’ve lost happiness and that the problems of the world are increasing, becoming greater and greater. And this is simply because of the fact that people’s minds are becoming more and more un subdued. We can see this first amongst amongst sentient beings, amongst the humans, you know, the the love for one another is is is becoming less and less.
The basis, the root of our peace and happiness is compassion and love. And since these are becoming less and less that people only speak about love in in these words from the mouth. There’s no real love in their heart and therefore the world is becoming more and more problems or creating less happiness. So there’s no mutual there’s no mutual love because people are completely out for their own gain. They’re completely out for their own happiness and that their all their effort is made in this direction.
And it’s for this reason that we have all the unhappiness and fighting going on. So we’re talking about this is the general situation in the world. Now the fact that you have come, what is the essential necessity for having the purpose for coming to the Dharma talk is to practice the Dharma. And the essence of practice of Dharma is to subdue one’s own mind. And amongst the the the the methods for sub subduing the mind, the essential method is the development of compassion.
Why is that? It’s because in the world situation, it’s easy to develop compassion. Wherever we go in the world, country that we visit, will see problems, difficulties. And these are all opportunity to cultivate compassion. You know when we see problems, when we see difficulties, there’s no reason to become unhappy since the dependence upon these we can use them to develop our own compassion.
And if we can bring our compassion to the degree that we develop But it’s not merely, it’s not sufficient merely to cultivate compassion. In addition to compassion, we have to put into practice the six perfections such as generosity, ethics, patience, etcetera. So in cultivating compassion when we see sentient beings undergoing suffering, whatever type of suffering, for example they don’t have enough food to eat, they’re experiencing fear, all the various types of suffering that they go through, then we must when we develop this, when we cultivate this compassion, develop compassion, we have to actually act, make effort in order to eliminate the problems or the difficulties. So many of us, we we can see for ourselves in the world that there are countries where people are starving. They don’t have any food.
So when we see this condition, do we what is what is it? Why? What is the cause of this situation? The reason they are undergoing hunger is because in the past they have not practiced generosity. They have taken others possessions, and they have been miserly.
So as a fruit, as an effect of these past actions, they were born even though they were born as humans, were born in a poor country without food. So these starving people are just like us. human beings are just like us and therefore they should serve as an object for our development of compassion, the fact that they don’t have any food in considering the suffering that they are experiencing and that we must make effort to eliminate their suffering. So there are three types of generosity, the practice of generosity. There’s generosity of giving material things, the generosity of giving the Dharma, and the generosity of giving fearlessness, protection from fear.
You know, generosity just doesn’t mean giving any old thing. So the the definition of generosity is the mind of mind which wishes to give. So if we don’t have this this mind of giving even though we may give whatever much, whatever materials that we may give thousands of dollars to someone, This is not an act of generosity. So for example amongst the various nations they often give types of relief. They give thousands and thousands, millions of dollars to one another, but it’s not for generosity.
So when this mind of giving with actual generosity should be such that we have no hope for any any ripening effect. We are not thinking of any type of return for our self. We’re not thinking well if I give them they’re going to help me later. They’re going to do some kind of work for me. These are not we must our generosity of the mind of giving us is free of all these thoughts.
Okay. So the generosity of the mind is simply the mind of giving. So from the depths of your mind. So this this this mind of giving, this is extra generosity from from the depths of your mind. So this is this mind of giving is a is an intention which is free of any thought of return, of any sort of ripening effect and it simply which is to benefit the recipient.
So the the transcendent generosity. True. Transcendent generosity is the peerless or unequal type of generosity or giving where one in the depths of one’s heart seeks to benefit by giving others ultimate happiness. So the various degrees of generosity are dependent upon the power of the motivation. So as the power of our motivation increase the type of generosity, the force of the generosity increases.
If give, if our giving is motivated by simply trying to help them for this life, future life, then this is one type of level of giving. If we seek to generosity, which is motivated by helping them to completely be liberated from cyclic existence, then this is a higher level of generosity. But the transcendent So and then the highest type of giving that is transcendent generosity is where with the motivation that for the benefit of all sentient beings I must attain Buddhahood and therefore in order to bring that about I’m going to this I’m practicing this act of generosity and not only that but I’m seeking in this generosity to give an unequal type of happiness to this person with this type of generosity is to be immeasurable. An an an an equal ultimate happiness to this person. So all these various types of generosity are dependent upon the different levels of motivation.
In the basic generosity, whatever the person needs, if it’s money or material things, possessions, then if you if you have these things and So we have to give you know whatever we can from the point of view of our miserliness. The reason that we don’t have a big, we don’t have much wealth now due to having miserliness in the past. So we are trying to transform our miserliness through the practice of generosity. So the necessity of practicing generosity here is to eliminate our miserliness. So in order to eliminate miserliness, practice generosity.
So in general we can talk about the objects of generosity, not the objects, the articles given in the act of generosity are categories of the body, one’s own body, possessions, and our roots of virtue. So at present, we can’t actually give our body. For example, if we came upon a hungry tiger, we couldn’t give him our body. What? Why is that because we we cherish our body and therefore we can’t give it away?
If we didn’t cherish our body then we could give it away. So but for the Bodhisattva who has no who does not cherish his own body, he’s able to give even his body away. He’s giving his body away. This is like us giving food. There’s no difference with him.
So though we can’t actually give our body at present, we can imagine in our mind giving away our body. So we can imagine our mind that we can emanate our body in whatever types of forms that would be beneficial. Example, people need blood we give them all our blood. Emanate the blood if some being needs meat, we give them our body in the form of meat, and we just emanate all these parts of our body in our imagination. So if we do this practice by many different ways, many different giving our body and our imagination and all these various types to all sentient beings and we do this again and again then our attachment to our own body become less and less.
So we can meditate in this way and we can in our meditation we can imagine our body is being emanated out and we transform our body into whatever the sentient beings need. Whatever they want we give them that our body is transformed into that object. If they want a house our body transforms into a house. They give them a house. If they want to practice Dharma then we give them a teacher, a spiritual guide.
We transform our body into a spiritual teacher. Anything that they want or need, we transform our body into it. So so it’s extremely of extremely great benefit to engage to cultivate this practice, you know, transforming your body to whatever you need. For example, we can think of people in Africa where there are great famines in there. So there’s many different countries experiencing droughts but no rain during this time.
When you think of these various countries where they need rain and we send our body out and it transforms into rain and gives them rain or if they don’t, if they’re starving we give them, transform our body into food. There’s a great deal of benefit to be gained in this practice. Likewise if they need medicine we can So you know if we do this practice for example though we don’t, we aren’t actually giving for example these people medicine but we have the motivation of the giving mind and therefore from the point of view of our mind it’s just that much benefit as having actually given these people medicine or food or whatever we have the intention that we give because the motivation is there within our mind. So if we if we we if we cultivate this practice, we meditate this way, then our ability to to give to this mind of giving and generosity as we practice and our ability in this practice becomes greater and greater and greater. It will reach a point where we actually through the power of our mind to be able to actually give rain and give food medicine.
Actually, really. So merely merely thinking in this way that from depths of the heart wanting to benefit sentient beings is a great benefit. So what what the root of all our difficulties, all our problems is self-cherishing. And by thinking about it in this way, we we actually harming or hurting our own self-cherishing. Yeah.
Refuting. Don’t want I don’t want to. Maybe even. Likewise, can practice, we can train in generosity through our using our imagination by giving away our possessions. They give away, you know, whatever things that we have, whatever our money, etcetera.
We can transform these in our imagination to whatever the thing that we need. But if we train in this way, in our imagination then miserliness will decrease. So some people who have great miserliness who can’t practice generosity then they do the following type of practice. Some people they pretend like this example this hand, this is the beggar. This is the beggar and they have some money over here and giving all their money to the beggar like this.
And then they take a little bit of this. So this before they couldn’t give away even a little something. I want to take it. I want to. So so through this practice of giving this to their, you know, in their imagination just to their other hand a beggar, then this actually will decrease the the grasping, this miserliness.
If they give just a little of this to others After that. After that, then it’s a it’s a I’m a hundred percent. Then the miserliness as they had before will decrease. So the the effect of miserliness, the effect of miserliness is that in the future life we will not even see food and drink. This the effect of miserliness.
So, you know, if if we can give, you know, we we should give it. If we can’t, then we then this practice is really the giving by way of mind, and we are more We we give through dedication. So we make generosity of our body, possessions. We also make generosity of our roots of virtue. You know whatever types of virtue we may have collected whether it’s through meditating or any type of virtue that we’ve collected just as we imagine transforming our body into whatever something being needed likewise we dedicate roots of virtue that we have and transform these into whatever So we can imagine that that we send forth all our roots of virtue and it takes the form of light and in the nature of bliss.
And this this light this virtue in the form of light and nature bliss goes out to all sentient beings and touches all sentient beings and brings them happiness. So likewise we can imagine in our mind that we are sending the roots of our virtue to animals but here the virtue takes the form of light, and because animals suffer from stupidity. The because they suffer suffer from stupidity, this light is now in the nature of wisdom, and it touches all these animals and grants them wisdom and all the stupidity is eliminated. So we can also make a So we can also in the same way that we made offerings, we made generosity performed generosity through using our body possession body possessions and our virtue. Likewise, we we perform generosity to ordinary things.
We can also transform our virtue into the forms of various types of offerings and make offerings to holy beings.