Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 15-minute talk, Lama Ribur Rinpoche opens with a vivid anecdote about silk merchants in Varanasi to introduce a profound Buddhist teaching on inner versus outer beauty. Drawing on a passage from the Anguttara Nikāya, he compares a virtuous person to fine Kasi cloth: beautiful to behold, pleasant to be near, and enduring in value. He contrasts this with society’s emphasis on physical appearance — cosmetics, fashion, surgery — arguing that while outer beauty is genetically determined and culturally unstable (what is desirable in one era appears ridiculous in another), inner beauty is something we actively create through moral effort. He illustrates this point with historical examples: Rubens’s full-figured nudes now seen as grotesque; Louis XIV’s white-wigged, high-heeled masculinity laughable today; Chinese foot-binding once erotically prized, now recognisable as deformity. The underlying message: virtues like generosity, honesty, and kindness remain universally admired across cultures and centuries, making them far more worthy of our time and attention than the pursuit of fleeting physical attractiveness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01hTrack CSDhammika.mp3
UUID: b4a4fb66-8a9b-4b86-815c-dfe618af5bfe
Teacher: Lama Ribur Rinpoche
Collection: Dhammika (Lama Ribur Rinpoche)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 15.3 minutes
Words: ~2,066
The opportunity. Last year when I was there, I was traveling with last year when I was in Varanasi, I was traveling with somebody who hadn’t been there before. We stepped down onto the street. Straight away, half a dozen touts. Oh, come to my brocade museum.
A museum? Museum, my foot. And I said to my friend that they’re all selling all this stuff. It’s very expensive. And then I thought, well, even though it’s expensive, it is beautiful to see.
There’s a work of art. That’s the only work of art you can wear. And of course all the touts were saying, you don’t have to buy, just come and look. And I said, we’re not going to buy. Not necessary.
We just want you to have a look. So right. So I took him along, and they’ve got a particular trick. What they will do is they’ll unfold all of it. And you keep on saying, enough now.
No, no, no, and they’ll unfold it because they think that you’ll feel guilty that they took all their stock out and you didn’t buy anything. So this is one of the tricks to get you to buy, you see. So we sat down, these fellows came at us, and bit by bit from the shelf, he would take out this beautiful cloth, throw it up into the air, and let it settle on the ground, and then throw up another one and let it settle on the ground. And one by one, gold, the color of a peacock’s tail, most beautiful. It’s like being in a rainbow.
My friend was enthralled. And we were looking, and the man said, Do want a Coca Cola? I said, Two Coca Colas. We’re not gonna buy. Not necessarily to buy.
Just look. Good? And this went on and on and on. And when I said to him, Have you seen enough? He said, Yes, it’s beautiful.
I said, Do you wanna buy some? He said, No. How can I wear a sari? I said, okay, let’s go. Why, of course, the the touts and the shop owner were very upset, but I held them to their promise.
Not necessary to buy, just looked. We looked. Bye bye. And even at the time of the Buddha, this cloth was celebrated for its beauty. And in the Anguttara Nikāya, the Buddha says, there are some people who will like kasi cloth.
Kasi cloth is beautiful to look at. Kasi cloth is pleasing to touch. It’s beautiful to touch. And then he says, even when Kasi cloth is old and people can’t wear it anymore, they don’t throw it away. They store it up in a scented chest or they use it to wrap gemstones.
They never throw it away. And then he says, A virtuous person, a person who has what we would call inner beauty, kindness, generosity, honesty, straightforwardness, That person is like kasi cloth. They’re beautiful. Kasicloth is beautiful to touch. It’s pleasant to be in the company of a virtuous person, just as it is pleasant to touch cloth.
And even when kasi cloth gets old, people don’t throw it away, they store gems in it. Likewise, when a virtuous person speaks, people treasure up their words. And of course, this idea, the idea that virtue gives you what you might call an inner beauty or a spiritual beauty. This is not an idea that is unique to Buddhism, either. One of the great philosophers of the classical world, Plotinus, he says that you should try to make yourself beautiful the way a craftsman or a sculptor makes a statue beautiful.
And he says, withdraw into yourself the look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful as yet, do as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful. He cuts away here. He smoothes there. He makes this line lighter, that line more pure, until he has shown a beautiful face upon the statue.
So do you also. Cut away all that is excessive. Strengthen all that is crooked, bring light to all that is shadowed, labor to make all glow with beauty, and do not cease chiseling until your statue, until there shall shine out on you the splendor of virtue. So this idea that it’s inner beauty that is more important than physical beauty or eloquence of voice is certainly not a uniquely Buddhist idea. But it’s important to sometimes be reminded of this teaching because in our society, in our culture, so much emphasis is given to the material, okay, rather than the psychological or the spiritual.
Just think of how much money is spent to make people look beautiful. Okay? Facelifts and perfumes and what do you call these stuff you put on your face, makeup and all of this. If we spent, you know, people say to me, I don’t have time to meditate. But perhaps the half hour you spend doing your hair or putting on your makeup, making yourself appear to be physically beautiful.
Perhaps if that time was spent on helping to make yourself spiritually beautiful, spending time in meditation or self reflection, perhaps that might be more important. Now, what are the advantages of inner beauty as opposed to, say, physical beauty? We all want to be beautiful. You hear people wishing and desiring all sorts of things. But I can’t ever remember hearing of anybody saying, Oh, I wish I was ugly.
People don’t want to be ugly. They want to be beautiful, physically beautiful. They want to be surrounded by beauty. They want to spend their life with a beautiful person. In human relationships, one of the most important initial points of contact between one person and another is what you look like.
So if you’ve decided to go out on the town, to go out hunting for a husband or a wife or whatever, you’ll spend money on clothing. You’ll put all sorts of funny things under your arms and wherever else you put it so that you smell nice, or at least so that you don’t smell. You can buy these things to put in your mouth so that your breath smells nice. Until recently, if you were a woman, you would spend quite a lot of time doing up your face, and you’re here. Foundation, I know all about these things.
Foundation and then powder and mascara, okay? Shave this, shadow that, okay? But of course, until recently it was only women who did that. Now men do that too, And quite honestly, in some ways, I understand why. A few years ago I made some films for the Curriculum Development Institute, television films, and I went to the studio at the education department, and we rehearsed the script and we did a few other things.
And then the lady said, Come down here to the makeup room. It never occurred to me that the makeup room is the place where you put up makeup. I wasn’t quite sure what it was. Anyway, I sat in a chair and before I knew what had happened, they had powdered my face and I had just shaved my head. So they powdered the top of my head.
They powdered the top of my head. And if you’ve never worn makeup before, which I haven’t, it’s a really strange, you feel all dry and a stain and you get some up your nose and tastes funny. Anyway, later on when I when I saw the the film, my goodness me, I I had no idea I looked so good. All the pimples and speckles and shadows had gone. And later on I asked Melody, well you really did a wonderful job.
I understand why women wear makeup now. And she described to me what people do when they put up makeup. You can shade certain parts or lighten parts that would usually be shaded so that you can actually make your face look a slightly different shape than it is. It’s a real art. Anyway, I understood why some people at least wear makeup.
But of course the problem is that sooner or later the makeup has to come off. You can imagine marrying somebody who looks really marvelous and then she goes to the bathroom at night, takes it all off. You wake up in the morning and my God, there’s a monster next to you. She’s a completely different person. Okay?
And this should sort of make us consider that there are certain advantages in the inner beauty over the outer beauty or the beauty of form. One of them is that if you’re born beautiful, well you can hardly be given credit for that. It’s pretty much the luck of the draw, isn’t it? If you happen to have perhaps good looking parents, well, lo and behold, voila, you grow up and you have an attractive face, an attractively shaped body. It’s no credit on your part, okay?
Inner beauty is made, and it is made through an act of will according to Buddhism. We may already be born with certain virtues, certain characteristics, but that is because we have developed them in a form of life, okay? So we become our own creator. Physical beauty, that’s all to do with genetics and biology, okay? Inner beauty is something that we create and make for ourselves, as is inner ugliness.
We are responsible. Okay. And the other advantage of inner beauty over physical beauty, of course, is that the ideas of physical beauty are notoriously unstable. What is beautiful in this culture is considered ugly in another culture. What is considered beautiful today may have been considered ugly yesterday.
And you see this very much when you, well, if you travel or if you understand art. You take Peter Paul Rubens. Now, two fifty years ago, he painted women in England. Lovely, sensuous, erotic shapes of women. His paintings were considered erotic.
But if you look at the women that he painted today, they look absolutely disgusting. Because at that time, during the sort of later Baroque period, their idea of feminine beauty was of a woman about twenty who was pudgy, preferably with rolls of fat on her waist and her abdomen, okay, and as white as possible. Nowadays we consider it is very fairly important to have sort of a tight, muscular body, slim body, and to be brown, colored in some way. Or if you look at, I don’t know, if you want an idea of a masculine beauty, look at Louis XIV, only what, two hundred or three hundred years ago. Now, Louis XIV, at his time, if you were a good looking man, how did you look?
Well, first of all, you had a white wig of white curly hair, probably going down to about your waist. And your face was completely white, powdered white. And you generally have a black spot on the side of your cheek like that, and you’d have tight silk stockings and high heeled shoes with a buckle on it. Now if you walked down the street today looking like that, people would laugh at you, and they would certainly doubt your masculinity because our ideas of what is good looking for men has changed completely. Less than fifty years ago in China, there were still women who bound their feet.
And men used to go almost hysterical with erotic desire just to see one of those tiny feet. Now we look at them and you feel sick. It looks like a deformity. It is a deformity. So the ideas of what is beautiful from a physical point of view are notoriously erratic.
They’re changing all of the time. But what people consider inner beauty, that changes very, very little. And it’s almost universally appreciated. Certain qualities of it: Nobody likes selfishness. Nobody likes jealousy.
Nobody likes deceit. On the contrary, generosity, kindness, honesty, and things are universally accepted, held up as admirable qualities. Long before the Buddha, such qualities were considered to be an important part of the characteristics of somebody who is pleasant, somebody who is acceptable. And undoubtedly a thousand years from now, it will probably be pretty much the same. And another advantage of the inner beauty over physical beauty