Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 31-minute teaching on Guru Devotion, Lama Ribur Rinpoche illustrates why blessing depends not on the objective reality of what you receive but on your faith and perception. He opens with a classical story: a Tibetan mother asks her merchant son to bring her Buddha relics from India; the son forgets, picks up a dog’s tooth, wraps it in silk, and presents it as a relic. Through her unwavering faith, the mother sees light and rainbows emanate from the tooth. This demonstrates that blessing flows from sincere perception and devotion, not from whether the object is “really” enlightened. Rinpoche then gives concrete guidance for laypeople: wake with intention to keep virtuous discipline; during work, silently recite mantras to develop renunciation, compassion, and wisdom; eat mindfully, mentally offering food to all sentient beings within your body; and view all activities—earning, sleeping, walking—as dharma practice rather than obstacles to it. He concludes with a Q&A on dreams, explaining which dreams (those near sunrise) reflect reality versus those caused by imbalances in wind, bile, and phlegm. Practical for working practitioners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18 GD.mp3
UUID: 34327e87-bee3-42b6-99a4-80a22bf98736
Teacher: Lama Ribur Rinpoche
Collection: Guru Devotion (Lama Ribur Rinpoche)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 31.3 minutes
Words: ~2,124
So was used to give this example regarding how you can receive blessing even from somebody that is not Buddha or is not an enlightened one just because you perceive him as to be an enlightened one. So there is a story with a Tibetan old woman wanted so much relics of a saint or a Buddha would be the best, but otherwise, not that. So his son, his Tibetan son used to go to India because he was a businessman, so he used to go to India to buy and sell. And so because he was having this trade, and he was often going to India, so his mother once asked him, please, would you please bring me back from India? The best would be a relic from Buddha himself.
But if not, at least a bone from the Arhats, one of the Arhats or a very saintly being. So please just remember it very well and put it in your mind. So the son assured that and he went to India and obviously forgot. So then when he was just arriving back to his own house, he remembered. And so he picked up a tooth of a dead dog.
And so and he folded it in a very precious silk. And then when he met his mother, the mother said, so I ask you so much about these relics of a Buddha or an Arhat. What did you—did you remember? And so the son said, yes, sure. And he opened up the silken cloth and there was this tooth.
So the mother took this dog tooth as being the Buddha tooth himself. And so with a lot of reverence, she brought this dog tooth into the altar and then she started—because of her devotion, because of her single pointed faith, she started making prayer to this dog’s tooth and suddenly because of this power, because of the power of her prayer, because of the power of faith, unshakable faith, then light was springing from the—rainbow light was springing from the tooth of the dog just because of her very strong faith. This means that whether that was really relics or not, and in fact it was not, but due to the main power of the faith, due to the main power of perceiving that as Buddha relics made everything, I mean, that made the magic. So the blessing is depending on how you perceive your lama. So if you want to get the maximum advantages, it’s better to see your lama as Buddha.
So whether the lama is good or not, it’s not your business. Your business is to perceive him as a lama, as a Buddha. So what you should do is that you should wake up early in the morning and then you should make up your mind that this year, especially this month, especially that day, you’re going to check your mind to control your mind and to be particularly virtuous. So you should try—in that day you should make up your mind that in that day you should avoid as much as you can all the negative action of body, speech and mind and you should try to accumulate as much virtues as you can of body, speech and mind. And then you set your mind in this way and then you go to work. And when you go to work, obviously you have—I mean you go to work because you need salary. So but if you think—if you just think that salary you might utilize it for making offerings and buying books and so forth in order to improve your mind, your inner side.
So if you can think this and if you can generate this thought, this awareness, again and again while you’re working, that is going to help, because then even if the job is the same but having different type of motivation helps the result, makes different result. So again while you’re working, Rinpoche said, usually when you’re working usually your mouth either is shut or you’re not using it very well. So the best way to use your mouth when your hands are typing or whatever, so then you can in order to develop some renunciation, some compassion and some wisdom, you can recite mantras. Like Rinpoche said, so having the intention of improving your mind towards those goals like the generation of the three principal aspects of the path, you can utilize the mouth in that way while you’re working. When you come back from work then after dinner if you have little bit of spare time and if you have a small place where you can meditate you can meditate a little bit on those Lamrim topics like we have explained now. So on the eight benefits of having guru devotion and then on the precious human rebirth and so forth. And then you can do it either quickly or maybe a little bit more intensively depending on the time you have.
And then while you’re for example having lunch and dinner, while you’re having your food, instead of just throwing food in your mouth you can think that because your body, I mean yourself is not alone but inside your body there are all the sentient beings like virus and microbes and so forth. And so you might think that all those sentient beings they are going to survive due to your lunch or dinner and praying that they might take rebirth as a human being and may be able to generate a pure mind in meeting with the Dharma. If you can do this every day, it’s already a very good Dharma practice and is going to bring you really further away. And if you have received any of the tantric initiation or whichever class you have received, then you might think that when you’re eating, when you’re having lunch, at your heart there is the deity himself and you’re offering, you’re giving offerings, you’re doing offerings to the deity while you’re eating.
So that is a big accumulation of merit and wisdom. And when you go to work with the goal of receiving salary, so then when you receive the salary, you think that you’re going to use this also for offerings in order to accumulate merit. I think it’s just a matter of doing, you see, otherwise there is a lot to do. There is a lot of—there is the possibility of doing a lot of things, you know. It’s just a matter of doing that.
Otherwise, possibilities are like—there are a lot of them. Then as Milarepa was saying, whatever action you do, you can transform it in Dharma. Like when you walk or when you sleep, everything can be transformed in Dharma. Milarepa is saying when I walk and I’m going up, I think that I’m taking all the beings to the upper realms. And when I sleep, I sleep—I think that I’m sleeping in the clear light of bliss.
So if you’re not able to utilize—if you don’t make up your mind that you’re going to utilize whatever happened as Dharma, it’s difficult. And it’s difficult that you are able to practice Dharma if you try to find a spot of time and space to dedicate this into your practice of Dharma. It’s gonna be difficult. It’s better to utilize whatever happened in your life as the Dharma. You see, a day is made of twenty four hours and we sleep the majority of those hours and then we dedicate the remaining to going to work and for eating and washing and so forth. So basically if you try to find—if you think that you’re going to accomplish Dharma, utilizing maybe that half an hour or an hour of sitting in cross leg on your cushion, that is gonna be difficult.
I think the best thing to do is to utilize in a skillful way whatever comes in your life. So utilizing the time that you spend to work and when you eat and sleep and so forth. So if you can utilize all these you will have a great result. Otherwise if you wait to have a right free time, a right spot of place and then a right time like half an hour, an hour of free time in order to meditate, that I don’t think is gonna work very well. So better to utilize whatever comes in a skillful way, in a dharmic way or transforming it in a dharmic way.
And however, the thing that makes a difference in our life is if we know what is to—what has to be our mental attitude, our attitude. Our attitude toward life should be not harming other beings and trying to be as beneficial as we can. And this is from our side trying to control as more as possible the three mental delusions. So knowing that the mental delusion like attachment, hatred and ignorance are really harmful to us, knowing that we should try to apply all those antidotes. Like when we know that we are overwhelmed by attachment we should apply the meditation on the unpleasantness of the object and when we are overwhelmed by anger we should meditate on patience. So trying to, you see, avoiding harming other people, trying to be as much beneficial as we can and keeping in mind that we have to subdue our mind, that we have to control and we have to free our mind from the mental delusion, I think if you keep in your mind this while you are living your life that is going to have very good result.
Okay. There’s no any further questions. So—Do you understand the question? Yeah. The problem is that the dreams are—you can divide the dreams in four different categories.
And those four different categories are related to different time of the night. So you can have dreams in the first part of the night, in the second, third, and fourth. And the fourth part of the night is the one close to the sunrise, like let’s say four to six. And those are the one that usually are relating to reality. So the other three, the first, second and third, are made like you have dreams but those dreams are due to your—it’s not liver, it’s confusing organs, it’s like winds, bile and phlegm.
Phlegm? You say phlegm? Phlegm. Right. So winds, bile, and phlegm.
So these three organs inducing some dreams. So these three are not real. You have several dreams but they are completely unreal. So the fourth one, the one that comes during the sunrise are the real one. So I really don’t know in which part you have dreamed.
If you—I don’t know if it was the first, second, third, or fourth. And whatever dream may appear to you apart from the sunrise are fake. Again, there are different way of judging about the dreams regarding the way how you wake up. If you wake up straight after one dream, if you wake up in a really happy state of mind, that dream is auspicious and it might have a good result. Whereas if you wake up in a really sad and sort of afraid state of mind, then the dream is not really auspicious and it might have a bad result.