Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 47-minute teaching, Lama Lhundup guides practitioners through the foundational meditations of the Lamrim path: developing equanimity toward all beings regardless of attachment or aversion, recognizing all sentient beings as one’s mother across countless rebirths using logical reasoning about the continuum of mind, and remembering the boundless kindness those beings have shown. He anchors the practice in everyday experience: examining why we blame a person rather than the stick they use, how our own past karma contributes to another’s anger, and observing mothers in nature to awaken recognition of our own mother’s sacrifices. The teaching emphasizes that these realizations cannot be rushed but require sustained meditation and courage to work through genuine difficulty, particularly when extending compassion to former enemies.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 TK and I.mp3
UUID: b37b7ae2-dca6-401b-b5a1-e2a380418997
Teacher: Lama Lhundup
Collection: Towards kindness and insights (Lama Lhundup)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 47.1 minutes
Words: ~2,817
Cultivate the mind of enlightenment, we are going to develop it. But we shouldn’t think that we’re going to cultivate the mind of enlightenment in one day or maybe one month. In a year, if we keep meditating it’s definitely going to develop. So we should keep meditating however many years it takes we should keep meditating until we gain the experience. In our own experiences, we have had people who we couldn’t stand to see.
We just hearing their names and in the beginning it was such an enemy that seeing them, we couldn’t stand to see them. Hearing their names disturbed our minds because hearing them talk causes unhappiness just to hear them talk, hear them speak. This very same person later on can become your best friend where you couldn’t stand to be without them. So this through habituation, cultivation, there’s no reason why we can’t change our attitude towards the enemies and beloved and people who we hold dear. So there are many types of equanimity.
This specific equanimity we are talking about here is immeasurable equanimity. So we keep increasing the scope of our meditation more and more and more. We meditate on many different types of people. We meditate as we explained before. We take our parents, our friends, enemies, we take people in our country, different countries, all the various types of people that we have different feelings for, different attitudes and we take them into meditation and try to develop an equanimity towards them.
Finally we try to enlarge it to the place where we include all sentient beings in our meditation and we develop a feeling that I have no attachment toward any, no aversion, no hatred toward any, that I have developed a complete feeling of complete equanimity that they’re all equal and they’re all exactly the same. So after we have developed equanimity, then we meditate on all sentient beings have been our mother. So trying to develop this when we think about all sentient beings and we think all sentient beings have been our mother we really don’t believe that. But we know the mother of this life. If we only had one life, then we would only have this one mother, but we haven’t had only one life.
So we begin to use reasoning in order to establish that all sentient beings have been our mother. We take the present mind, this thinking mind, this present mind that we have now. There was a mind previous to this mind. This mind is arising, coming in continuum with yesterday’s mind and this mind is in continuum with the mind before that and before that and going all the way back to the mind which is in our mother’s womb. And that mind didn’t arise from no cause.
This mind in the mother’s womb had a cause. Now what is the substantial cause of that mind in the mother’s womb is the mind of a being of its previous life. Then that being was your mother. So but we may say well you know if I had a mother previously, in previous life I don’t remember her. And to answer this why don’t you remember it, there’s no certainty that we’re able to remember things.
For example, we know we were in our mother’s womb and during that period we experienced suffering but we don’t remember that suffering that we experienced. So we can present a reasoning. The mind which exists at the moment of conception. There exists a previous mind to that. The mind which exists at the moment of conception as the subject.
There exists a previous similar type of mind to that because it is mind. For example, the day of the present mind. This is a correct reason. So just because our Gurus or teachers have said that previous lives existed, they say it in the scriptures, those Gurus say.
Not like that. We should think about the reasoning establishing the fact that previous lives do exist. If we cannot establish previous lives by reasoning and if we refute it by reasoning then previous lives don’t exist. If previous lives didn’t exist this would be the best because then we can just go to sleep. So we can come to understand that previous life exists in dependence upon correct reasoning.
If the correct reasoning establishes the existence of previous life then we can have confidence that previous life exists. So our previous life exists and before that previous life another previous life exists and before that another previous life existed. There’s no beginning to this process. You know, someone is born a hundred times as a human, then he must have a hundred mothers. So in general there are four types of birth.
There is birth from womb, birth from egg, birth from moisture, and spontaneous birth. Four types of ways of being born. So previous to this world, the beings were born by spontaneous birth. There are many insects which are born by spontaneous birth. Many insects which are born by heat and born by spontaneous birth.
For example, the lice. You probably don’t have any, but Tibetans have a lot of lice. The gods are born by spontaneous birth. As there are countless sentient beings the number of births that we have taken are also countless. So we might think well it’s not necessary that all sentient beings have been our mother.
Births that we’ve taken are infinite. We’ve taken more rebirths, infinitely number more rebirths than there are sentient beings. Even the mother of this life has been our mother uncountable times. So not only has our mother been our mother countless times, innumerable times, but our father has been our mother in previous lives uncountable times, our brother, all our relatives, our friends, each of them has been our mother uncountable times. Not only that but also our enemy, this enemy has been my mother uncountable times.
And any sentient being that we meet, that sentient being has been our mother uncountable times in the past. When we meet, whoever we meet, any sentient being that we see, if the thoughts arise that person has been my mother, then this is the realization of recognition of all sentient beings as our mother. It’s necessary to meditate on recognizing sentient beings as our mother because during the course of taking rebirth again and again we are not able to remember the beings who have actually been our mother. All sentient beings have in fact been our mother but we have forgotten this fact due to having taken rebirth again and again and therefore in order to we must again establish this recognition that these beings who are actually our mother are in fact we must recognize them as having been our mother.
So as we did when we meditated on equanimity we began taking various people as objects in meditation. First we take the mother of this life and not only this person my mother of this life but this person has been my mother countless times in the past and we take our father and try to recognize that this person has been our mother countless times in the past and we take again more and more and more people and more and more people. Up to the point where we can actually take our enemy who we dislike and see him as actually being our mother. We don’t even know whether this person, this enemy who we dislike, whether or not he was our mother in the past life.
And not only do we have to examine whether this enemy was our mother in the past life and not only that, when we begin to examine this enemy has been our mother countless times in the past. So this enemy, this person we hold as our enemy and we dislike, in dependence upon developing this mind of seeing him as our enemy we are collecting and creating negative karma and this will eventually ripen. Therefore it is extremely beneficial. It’s extremely difficult if someone for example, one person were to beat us. So someone hurts us a great deal, it’s extremely difficult for us, for example, to meditate love and compassion for that person or to try to recognize him as our mother.
So we think, you know, I don’t like this person at all, you know, because he beat me. So someone beat us with a stick and I don’t like this person at all. Why? Because I’ve experienced pain. He caused me pain.
But if we’re going to dislike something we should dislike the stick because it’s the stick which actually causes the pain. So we should get angry at the stick not at the person. But we don’t get angry at the stick, we get angry at the person. Why? Because the stick had no intention to bring pain.
It was the person who had intention to hurt us. Therefore, because the person had the intention to hurt us, we get angry at the person. So if we think in such a way that you get angry at the person because you realize the person has intention to hurt you and therefore I should get angry at the person but this person is also not in control. He is in his mind some sort of hatred arose in his mind and he became completely under the control of that hatred and due to the hatred that took possession of him, that’s the reason he beat you. So therefore, you know, if we’re going to get angry at something why don’t we get angry at his hatred?
And why did his hatred arise? It’s because his hatred arose in dependence upon causes and conditions. Now what are some of the conditions? I am part of that condition causing his hatred to arise and that part of that condition is my own previously committed karma that I created for myself to act as a condition for him to become angry at me, hate me. So there’s no reason at all for us to get angry at this person.
In thinking this way we can cease all anger towards another person. So then we should try to think that all sentient beings, all the various types of sentient beings have been just like my mother of this life. So we develop the regard that all sentient beings of all various types have been just like my mother of this life. So this is extremely difficult. It’s the most difficult of all these causes to develop.
So we should keep meditating until we gain this feeling. So we have to take courage in practice. Just because we find it difficult to meditate and if we can’t bear any difficulties then we’re not going to gain any realization. So we have to develop the thought which thinks all sentient beings have been my mother. So if we have developed this thought that they’ve been our mother, then we remember the kindness of mother sentient beings by remembering the kindness of our mother this life.
So we begin to remember the great kindness that our mother has shown us even from the moment of our conception and all the difficulties that she had to go through even while we were within her womb. The care that she took in eating and drinking, the care that she took in moving around and all the hardships and pain that she had to go through during her pregnancy. We begin to remember their kindness then. So even after our birth we are like a worm. We can’t take care of ourselves.
We are completely dependent upon our mother to take care of us but she takes care of us gladly. She doesn’t mind cleaning up our filth. She doesn’t mind taking care of any of our necessities and without her we couldn’t live. During our actual birth the mother experiences great pain during our birth. But at the moment that we actually come into this world she forgets all the suffering that she just experienced and all the pain she went through and develops a tremendous love for us.
If our mother didn’t take care of us hundreds of times a day, we couldn’t live. She’s taking care of us hundreds of times a day. All the benefits that we now possess that we are able to enjoy, have a healthy body, we have education and all our possessions that we are able to practice and study the Dharma. These all are dependent upon the kindness of our mother. So now we’ve grown older and we have forgotten how very kind our mother has been to us.
But just to remind ourselves we can look at a mother and how she acts with her child, the kindness that she shows towards this child and begin to remember the great kindness that she has shown us in the past. So seeing how a mother treats her child and the kindness that she shows and one can think, oh, my mother treated me in exactly that same way with just as kind to me as this mother is toward her child. It’s difficult for Westerners to remember how great a kindness their mothers were to them. So we only remember, we are completely caught up with our own desires.
We don’t remember the great kindness that our mother has shown to us. So, you know, but in fact our mother has been extremely kind to us and we have to try to begin to remember the kindness that our mother has shown to us and all the food, the milk that she gave to us from her own body and the food that she fed us, she gave us, provided education for us, all the very minor and great hardships that she was constantly going through to provide us whatever we needed or whatever was going to make us happy constantly throughout her whole life she was constantly looking after our needs and we have to begin to recognize this and develop the thoughts from the depths of our heart remembering the great kindness that our mother has shown.
We can look at when a child laughs, it makes the mother very happy just to see her child laugh or when her child is worried, her mother is also worried. And if the child is suffering, then it hurts the mother more than if she was sick herself. So we have to use many different methods of thinking trying to develop this thought, this feeling and develop this when there arises the sincere thought of remembering the kindness that my mother of this life has been to me and shown me. So this great kindness that she has shown in this life we can think about but in fact she has been kind to us the same way in an immeasurable number of lives.
Other examples of the kindness in mothers, example a cat with her kittens. If her kittens are in any way liable to be harmed, for example a dog comes, she is willing to sacrifice her own life in order to protect her young. Example of a bird and her young, you know she’s constantly going out catching, for example, out and catching insects, bringing them back to her young and going out again catching insects. And because of her trying to care for her young she’s collecting a great deal of negative karma.
Also there are cases where when there is some harm or threat to her young, certain types of birds will even though they are very afraid, have a mortal fear of the enemy, they will pretend that they have a broken wing and they’ll try to draw the enemy away from their young. So there’s no mother who doesn’t hold her young dear. So we should try to become mindful of the fact that not only has my mother been of this tremendous kindness to me in this life, but innumerable lives she has shown me this kindness again and again.