Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Lama Lhundup teaches the progressive development of the mind of enlightenment through two interconnected meditations, both central to the Tibetan Buddhist path. In this 47-minute talk, he walks through equanimity meditation first — the systematic expansion of balanced, non-preferential regard from parents and friends to enemies to all sentient beings equally — and explains how genuine transformation of attitude toward people we dislike is possible through habituation and practice. He then teaches recognition of all sentient beings as our mother, using logical reasoning to establish that the continuum of our mind extends infinitely backward through countless rebirths, meaning each being has mothered us numberless times. He addresses the specific difficulty of recognizing an enemy as one’s mother by reframing anger: we blame the person, but the person is enslaved by their own hatred, which itself arises from causes and conditions in which our own past karma played a part. The teaching emphasizes remembering a mother’s kindness — her suffering during pregnancy and birth, her tireless daily care, her gladness to serve — as the bridge to generating genuine love and compassion for all beings. For practitioners engaged in Lamrim study or meditation on the causal path to enlightenment.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 14 TK and I.mp3
UUID: eb5e5ba3-98b4-4dc2-b648-18f16117631b
Teacher: Lama Lhundup
Collection: Towards kindness and insights (Lama Lhundup)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 47.5 minutes
Words: ~2,849
Cultivating the mind of enlightenment, we’re not 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. But in years, if we keep meditating, it’s definitely going to develop. So we should keep meditating until we gain the experience. So in our own experiences, we have had people who we couldn’t stand to see.
Just hearing their names. In the beginning it was such an enemy that seeing them, we couldn’t stand to see them. Hearing their name disturbed our mind. Just 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 through this through habituation, cultivation, there’s no reason why we can’t change our attitude towards the enemies and beloved and people who 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, our enemies. We take people in our country, 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 toward 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 they all have a complete feeling of equanimity that they’re all equal and they’re all exactly the same. So after we 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 believe that. But 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. Take the present mind, this thinking mind, this present mind that we have now.
There was a mind previous to this mind. There was a 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 now that mind, it 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 his previous life.
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 we remember that suffering that we experienced. So we can present a reasoning.
We can present 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? Because it is mind. For example, the present mind.
So 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. Those things might look fake. Not like that.
We should think about the reasoning establishing the fact that previous lives exist. If we cannot establish a previous life by reasoning and if we refute it by reasoning then previous lives don’t exist. Previous lives didn’t exist this would be the best because then we could 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 the previous life, then we can have confidence that previous life exists.
So, you know, so our previous life exists. And before that previous life, another previous life exists and before that another previous life. There’s no beginning to this process. You know, if 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 womb 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. The many which are born by spontaneous birth.
Many insects which are born by heat and born by spontaneous birth. For example, 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 we’ve been born from all sentient beings that have been our mother.
Beings are infinite. The number of births that we have taken are infinite. We have taken more 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 have been our mother uncountable times. Not only that but also our enemies. This enemy has been my mother uncountable times. Any sentient being that we meet, that sentient being has been our mother uncountable times in the past. So when we meet, whoever we meet, any sentient being that we see, if the thought 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 all 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 equanimity we began taking people as our objects in meditation. First we take the mother of this life and not only was 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 a mother countless times in the past and we take again more and more and more people and more and more people.
So up to the point where we can actually take this our enemy who we dislike and see him as actually being our mother. Even now we don’t know whether this enemy who we dislike whether or not he was our mother in a past life. Not only do we have to examine whether this person was our mother in this life, in a past life, whether this enemy was our mother in a 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 who this person we hold as our enemy and we dislike, in dependence upon developing this mind of holding them as our enemy we are collecting, creating negative karma and when this ripens and this will eventually ripen therefore beneficial to try to recognize this enemy as our own mother.
So you know if someone hurts us a great deal it’s extremely difficult for example to meditate on love and compassion for that person or to meditate, we are trying 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 beats 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 caused 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 it wasn’t, we get angry at the person because the person, the stick had no intention to bring us 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 the intention to hurt you and therefore I should get angry at the person but this person is also not in control.
He’s in his mind some sort of hatred arose in his mind and then he was completely, 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 hatred? Now why did his hatred arise? It’s because his hatred arose in dependence upon causes and conditions. Now what are some of the conditions where 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 him 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. That in thinking in this way we can cease all anger towards another person. So then we should try to think that all sentient beings, whatever all the various types of sentient beings have been, are just like the mother, my mother of this life. So we developed 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 is the most difficult of all these causes to develop. So we should keep meditating until we gain experience some experience of 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 realizations. So we have to develop the thought which thinks all sentient beings have been my mother. So if we have meditated well then this recognition of mother will come much easier.
Having developed the thought that all sentient beings have been a 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, all the difficulties and suffering 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 began to remember their kindness then. So even after our birth we are just 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.
At the moment that we actually come into this world she forgets all the suffering that she was experiencing and all the pain she went through and develops a tremendous love for us. If our mother didn’t take care of us, you know, hundreds of times a day, she’s taking care of us. Hundreds of times a day, we couldn’t live if she wasn’t taking care of us. All the benefits that we now possess that we are able to enjoy, we have a healthy body, we have education and all our possessions we are able to practice and study the Dharma. These all are dependent upon the kindness of our mother.
So now we’ve grown up, 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 shows toward this child and begin to remember the great kindness that she has shown us in the past. So, you know, seeing how a mother treats a child, the kindness that she shows, and one can think, oh, my mother treated me in exactly that same way, which is just as kind to me as this mother is toward her child. So it’s difficult for Westerners to remember how great the kindness their mothers were to them. So we only are concerned with our, we are completely caught up with our own desires.
We don’t remember the great kindness that our mother has shown to us. So 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, the food that she fed us, that she clothed us, 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, 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 thought from the depths of our heart that remembering the great kindness that our mother has shown us. We can look at when a child laughs, the mother makes the mother very happy just to see her child laugh or when her child is worried, her mother is also worried. The child is suffering, then sick.
If the child is sick, 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. When the thought arises, sincere thought, great kindness, remembering the kindness that my mother of this life has been to me and shown me. So this great kindness that she showed us is just 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 of mothers. For example, a cat with a kitten. If her kittens are in any way liable to be harmed. For example, a dog comes. She’s willing to sacrifice her own life in order to protect her young.
Example of a bird and her young, she’s constantly going out catching, for example going out and catching insects, bringing them back to feed to the young and going out again catching insects. Because of her trying to care for her young she is 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 great deal of fear, they will pretend that they have a broken wing and they will try to draw enemy away from their young. So there’s no mother who doesn’t hold her young dear. Of the fact that not only has my mother been of this tremendous kindness to me in this life, but in numerous lives, she has shown me this kindness again and again.