The three refuges which Buddhists take are the refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. And tonight, I’d like to talk about some aspects of the Dharma. The Dharma that we take refuge in has two aspects to it. The first is that the Dharma refers to the teaching of the Buddha. The Buddha has given very detailed instructions on how we should practice if we want to become enlightened.
That’s one aspect of the Dharma. The other aspect of the Dharma is that it refers to the truth of the way things are. It refers to the truth of things beyond the surface appearance of them. It refers to the way the mind works and what creates our experience. The truth of the way things are exists whether there’s a Buddha in the world or not.
The Buddha discovers the truth of the Dharma, the facts of life, and then explains to others how they can also become aware of these facts, understand things as they really are. He teaches the Dharma for us so that we can understand what he understood. But whether there’s a Buddha in the world or not, the facts of life are as they are. So the Buddha is called the one who brings light into the darkness, the one who points out the way to those who have eyes to see. But the Dharma exists.
And so the Buddha said there will be a time when the teachings will no longer be available, when the Dharma of the Buddha’s teachings will have disappeared from the world. But the facts of life, the truth of existence will still be here. And so I’d like to talk a little bit more about how the Buddha’s teaching points out these facts of life, particularly in relation to one of the qualities that the Buddha himself or one of the words that he used to describe the Dharma, he said that the Dharma is ehi passiko, which is the Pali word, which means inviting one to come and see, encouraging investigation. And in this simple phrase, we have both aspects of the Dharma, the Dharma as the Buddha’s teaching and the Dharma as the truth of things. The Dharma inviting one to come and see.
The Buddha has given us a way of approaching the truth. And because his instructions are perfect and complete, they encourage us to take a look, to be able to see for ourselves. Now, because the facts of existence, the truth of the way things are, is around all the time, whether there’s a Buddha here or not, we might ask, well, why do we need the Dharma? Why can’t we see for ourselves? Why can’t we discover it without the teaching to guide us, without the teacher to guide us?
And it’s very interesting when we think about coming to see something. It’s good to reflect on what that means, the difference between looking at something and actually seeing it. Very often, we look, but we don’t really see what’s there. And sometimes, that’s because we don’t want to see. We don’t like what we see.
In fact, we have aversion to the truth. So an example of that is that we all know that this is only a temporary existence, that we’re all visitors here, that each one of us one day is going to die. And that’s obvious. It’s apparent. No one anywhere has ever escaped this truth of life, and yet, we try to avoid facing that reality.
We pretend, we cover up, We try to close our eyes because we don’t want to really see that truth as it applies to us. How would we live our life if we really, deeply believed that we were going to die? We could just think, well, it’s hopeless, it’s useless. We could throw our life away. What difference does it make?
That’s one way of approaching this fact of life. So what the Buddha’s teaching does is it helps us, first of all, to address this reality instead of turning away from it, reminds us in many ways of this truth. And then the Dharma also helps us to live a life which is meaningful even given that it’s only a temporary existence. Another reason why we don’t see things as they really are is because we only see what we expect to see because of our conditioning, because of what what we’ve been taught from our parents, from our culture, from our education, we see what we are expecting to see in terms of how we’ve been told things should be or would be nice if they were this way. And so, again, we don’t see things as they really are.
So, for example, we are conditioned to think that people meet and live happily ever after. Most people in society have a go at it because that’s what they’ve been presented as the option and the fact everyone meets and then they live happily ever after. And when we look at the newspapers and see the wedding photos and hear about how the couples met and where they’re spending their honeymoon and all of those interesting things, we buy the whole story happily ever after. And yet, we know that many of those couples are going to end up hating each other and getting divorced and fighting in the courts about who gets the house and who looks after the kids. But because of our conditioning, we see what we expect to see.
We see what we’re told is there even when we know that that’s not really the truth. It might be part of the truth, but it’s not the whole truth. And so when we are growing up and getting to that age, then we just jump in expecting that we’ll be one of those who’s living happily ever after. Another reason for practicing the Buddha’s teaching because the Buddha’s teaching gives us guidance on how to build healthy relationships, how to engage in intimate relationships which are supportive and not damaging, which are beneficial. So the teaching is not only helping us to be more realistic, but also helping us to deal with the difficulties of human relationships.
Another reason why we don’t see things as they really are is because of the habit patterns of the mind. It’s the nature of the untrained mind to flip from one thing to the other, to be constantly moving from one experience to the other, one contact to the other, never staying long enough in one place to actually see that thing as it really is. As you were trying to watch the breath, perhaps as you were trying to feel the touch contact between the lips. You’ll have noticed how quickly the mind wanted to get on to the next thing, finish with that, or maybe not even come there because it was too busy with something else. So the untrained mind is constantly looking at things superficially, only seeing the surface.
And if it’s not something that we like, then we don’t stick with it for very long. The mind is like one of those balls in a pinball machine. If you are familiar with pinball machines, you know that the ball gets whacked by one little lever and gets flipped onto something else. And it just gets to that thing and then it gets flipped onto the next thing and then it just goes between a couple and then gets flipped onto the next one. And that’s what’s happening with the mind all through the day, from one thing to the next, never staying long enough to really know that thing as it is or even to know that thing even below the superficiality of it.
And so the dharma gives us the tools to be able to start to train the mind to be able to stay long enough with our experience of life to see it beyond the superficial level. Now an example of the way that we don’t like to see reality is, for example, all of the food that we ate for breakfast, where is it now? Some of it will be turning into blood, into hair, into eyeballs. Some of it will have already left the body being excreted through urine. And the remainder will be excreted as feces.
Now, this is a fact of life for all of us. It doesn’t matter whether we chose the food that we ate, whether we enjoyed the food we ate, whether it was organic and nutritious or rubbish. This is the way all our food has gone since it went there at breakfast time. Now, normally, we don’t like to think about that. It’s the truth, but we turn away from it.
It’s not polite to think about those things. We don’t like to talk about those things. And what we’re told is food is delicious. We should get just the right food. We should pay a lot of attention to the food we eat.
We should enjoy our food. What happens to it all? Ends up in the toilet bowl. And then we don’t like to acknowledge that. We like to pretend that none of us does that kind of thing.
And then we try to cover up what actually happens in that little room in the house with pretty toilet paper, scented toilet paper, scented scents on top of the scented toilet paper. And this is just because we don’t like to acknowledge this is a fact of life. Now, if we had a trained mind and if we were relating to our bodily functions in terms of the Dharma, in terms of the Buddha’s teaching, we would reflect, for example, on, yes, the body is following its own nature. It really doesn’t matter whether I enjoyed the food or not. That’s what’s going to happen to it.
Really, it doesn’t matter if I chose the food or not. That’s what’s going to happen to it. And whether I like it or not, this is the process that happens every day. And so maybe I can start to grasp the Buddha’s teaching on this body not really being mine because it’s doing its own thing no matter how much I try to fiddle with the details of the food. This is how it processes that food.
And not only that, this is happening, this particular process is happening. While that is happening, so many other things are happening, not just the food is getting digested and it’s being turned into blood cells. So many other things are happening in this body, not according to my wishes and desires, but because the body is following its own nature. Unless we have a mind that is trained to observe and to stay with those kinds of processes, that is so that we can actually feel some of those things happening and we pay attention long enough to observe it, we can turn a blind eye on this fact of life. Now, what does it matter if that’s what’s happening?
Why is it important to even know these things? Because we think that this body belongs to me, and I can do with it what I like, that it’s under my control, that it’s who I am. Now what happens if the body doesn’t what process the food well? What happens if it doesn’t keep turning it into blood? Or what happens if the urine doesn’t come out?
Who’s in control then? Where is me in that? What happened to my body? And as we reflect on the fact that the body is turning over, turning over, turning over every day, every moment doing this, we also can reflect that this is what it means for the body to grow up, to grow old, and move towards death. This process is happening every day, every breakfast since we were born, every moment of every day, these processes are happening.
Whether we like it or not. I’m about to celebrate my birthday. Some people think it’s my fiftieth, but it’s really only my forty ninth. So I don’t want to miss out on one extra year. But in the Buddhist way of looking at birthdays, we recognize that one more year means one year closer to death.
One more year of this life that’s gone. So it’s quite a different way of approaching birthdays to the usual way in which we celebrate the fact that, wow, I’ve made it to fifty. It’s pretty good to have gotten this far but also it means one year less on the total length of one’s life. And this is the difference between seeing things as they are and in terms of the dharma and trying to turn a blind eye because it’s not what we really want to see. One of the reasons why we can’t see and we don’t want to see is because we haven’t trained our mind.
So what the Dharma does, the teachings of the Buddha, is it gives us the subjects that we need to pay attention to if we really want to understand what life is about. So the Buddha encourages us to reflect on our death, on its certainty. Buddha encourages us to look at the nature of the body and to ask ourselves the questions about who owns it, who controls it, where am I in this body that’s constantly changing. And then the Buddha also gives us the tools with which to carry out this kind of investigation. Now, one of the obstacles to being able to change our orientation and to actually change the way that we relate is to do with the nature of the mind itself, the way that we process the experiences that we have.
And now I’d like to turn specifically to the way that our mind processes, experiences and turns them into views and opinions and expectations. Because all of those things I was talking about that were barriers to seeing things as they really are, aversion to the truth, seeing things the way we expect them to be rather than how they really are, and also having a mind which likes to jump from one thing to the other rather than settling down and observing things in detail, these are largely views and opinions about what makes life good or worthwhile or what makes life happy and pleasant. How do we form those views and opinions? Views and opinions, the Buddha said, are part of a cycle. Views and opinions go together, interact with our perceptions.
And our perceptions generate and interact with our thoughts. And our thoughts create our views and opinions. So what we’re looking at is the way that the mind interprets our experience and then distorts it to conform to how we think things should to be and why it becomes so difficult to actually see things as they really are. If we have a set of of ideas or beliefs about a thing, about a person, about a situation, when we come in contact with that person or that thing or that situation, we relate to it in terms of what we already know, what we already expect. We actually see what we expect to see.
And this is part of the Buddha’s wisdom was to point out to us that the way the mind operates, the past is always coloring the present experience. And the way that we are going to react to that thing in the future is colored by how we react to it in the present. And all of those reactions build up a biased or distorted opinion about that particular thing. So we’re never really looking beyond the surface. We’re never really looking at something with fresh eyes.
So, for example, recently at the nuns monastery, we were having a celebration and people were offering us all sorts of things that we needed or that they thought we needed. And one of the things that was offered was a very nice set of plastic chairs. Now this is a very good example of how our views and opinions about something color our perceptions of that object and then produce thoughts all around that situation. So people came and offered these green plastic chairs. Now I’m just using this as an example because it’s quite innocuous one.
Now, if I say to you green plastic chairs, everyone will have a different view and opinion about green plastic chairs. First of all, about plastic chairs. Some people will think, Oh, plastic chairs, they’re so versatile. They’re so easy to look after. They’re so good to have because you can move them around.
You can put them inside or outside. There’s no problem about cleaning them and maintaining them. I love green plastic chairs. And so when the green plastic chairs come to your house, are delivered, and you have that view and opinion, what you’ll see is a wonderful green plastic chair. The color green, isn’t it lovely in the bush?
Goes with all the other greens. It makes it so much part of the place and it’s got such a smooth feel to it and they’re so light to pick up, so easy to carry. They’re a lovely thing. And when I sit on the green plastic chair, which I think is so nice, oh, it feels so comfortable. Oh, it just fits my back perfectly.
It’s a really good thing to have. The people who brought those green plastic chairs, aren’t they nice people? Aren’t they wonderful? And next time we see those people, we’ll think, ah, here are the people who brought those green plastic chairs, those very generous and kind people. Come on in.
That’s if we like green plastic chairs. Now, we might have a completely different set of opinions about green plastic chairs. First of all, about plastic. I hate man made substances, lots of chemicals. They let off terrible gases when they stand in the sun for any length of time.
And I mean, this is the forest. Why don’t they bring wooden chairs so that it goes with the wood, goes with nature? This is a natural setting. And look at the green. It doesn’t really go with any of the greens of the trees.
It’s an artificial green. Can’t you tell? There’s nothing in nature that looks like that. And so when we go to examine the green plastic chairs, we think, Ugh, look at these. You have to keep wiping them.
They’re cold when you sit on them if you don’t have them out in the sun. And then when we sit on them, we’ll think, oh, look at the way they mold these. Whose back do they think fits this shape? It’s not even comfortable when you sit down for five minutes. And so everything about that green plastic chair will be negative.
And not only that, whoever brought these green plastic chairs, what kind of thoughts did they have? How could they have thought that these plastic things would fit into this kind of setting? And then when we see the person, we think, Oh. And next time we see them, we think, Oh, here they come again. What are they going to bring this time that’s not useful?
The green plastic chair is exactly the same green plastic chair for each one of us. But we all have different reactions. And not only that, we perceive it differently. The things that we see are all the good points or all the bad points. And then our attitudes to the person who brought the green plastic chair.
We know nothing else about them, but we have a view and opinion about them now because of those chairs. Now this kind of thing happens to us all the time. If you think about what’s happening in the political arena, if you like a particular politician, then you’re always willing to listen to what he has to say or what she has to say. But if you don’t like them, it doesn’t matter whether they speak very sensibly and they’re offering you lots of good things which would be really useful in your life, you’re not going to hear it. You immediately turn off because you don’t like them.
You don’t give them a chance to say what they’re saying even if you’re sitting there in front of the television, because you’ve already judged them according to your previous view and opinion about them. And then it just confirms what you already thought about them, no matter what they say or do. So one person whom you like is very clear headed and is very decisive. If you don’t like that person, they’re arrogant. They never listen to anyone else’s ideas.
Someone who’s very open and is willing to listen becomes indecisive, wishy washy, if it’s someone that you don’t like. And we’re doing this to each other. We’re doing this all the time because our views and opinions color how we perceive, how we receive the information that we’re receiving in the present moment. The Buddha didn’t only point this out to us. He pointed out the further aspect of the way the mind works, which makes it so difficult for us to change our views and opinions.
Not only are they interacting with each other and reinforcing each other, but even when we know better, we find that how we react to something that we’ve had previous experience with is conditioned by what we’ve had, how we’ve known it previously in terms of our initial nonverbal reaction, which in the Buddha’s explanation of the way the mind works is called Vedana, and also in terms of our perception. Our perception is what we the sense we make of things, the way we actually identify it as being a particular thing, as being a particular thing not like that one, but like this one. So our initial reaction, the Vedana, is if you like a step behind the change in our view and opinion. And even when we know better, because of the pressure of that old reaction and our old perception, we tend to act in terms of our own old view and opinion. So for example, you may have been frightened by a dog as a child and you may have had a nasty experience.
And so you built up the view and opinion that dogs are beasts. They’re frightening. Should avoid them if I can. Don’t go near them. And because of that experience, whenever you hear a dog bark or particularly if you come close to a dog or a dog comes close to you, there’s a trembling.
There’s a shaking. Fear. Before you even think about it, fear. And before you’ve even really worked out what this dog is like. That happened to you as a child.
And over the years, you’ve learned that not all dogs are vicious. And as you get older and bigger, they’re not so threatening. And you may even have had experience, closer experience with dogs. So you know that there’s nothing really wrong with every dog that there is. But because of your previous experience, when you first see a dog close-up to you or hear a dog barking as you walk by, the immediate reaction that you have, the nonverbal reaction is, and then the perception of dog, and then the memory, ah, dogs are okay.
I don’t have to be that worried anymore. But this process is happening very, very rapidly and it’s happening automatically and it’s happening outside our conscious awareness. And so very often, we will react spontaneously, automatically in terms of our old view and opinion, old view and opinion about dogs are threatening. And then if we’re practicing mindfulness, we might then realize, ah, wait, I know differently now. I don’t have to be so frightened.
We can do that with dogs, but the same process but reactions are catching us out in our relationships with people, in our relationships with situations. This process of the old conditioning, steamrolling, our more accurate understanding of the situation. This is happening constantly until we start to be able to understand the process and train the mind to be mindful and aware, to be on guard, to refrain from acting in the old ways, to be able to bear with the unpleasant reaction that comes based on our past experience, and not let that push us into speech and action in the present moment. So this is an example of how the Dharma is revealing itself in two ways. The way the mind works is the truth of things.
But how do we deal with that? How do we change that? We use the instructions, the tools that the Buddha has given us in his teaching the Dharma. Without mindfulness, we can’t do it. But we can’t develop mindfulness without the support of the Samatha practices, the practices which bring us peace of mind, strength of mind, clarity of mind.
There’s practices like watching the breath in meditation, trying to train the mind to let go of everything else and just be with one thing, to be with that one thing for extended periods of time so that the mind is able to gather strength. And as you will have noticed, that’s all you have to do is stay with the breath, stay with the breath, and automatically, a pleasant feeling arises. Automatically, the mind is refreshed. Automatically, the mind becomes much clearer. This is what supports the development of mindfulness so we can apply mindfulness in our daily life.
It’s not enough just knowing the process. We have to train the mind. We have to retrain the mind. We have to retrain the mind over and over and over again because the strength of our conditioning, the strength of our old reactions needs to be challenged many times before a change is going to take place. Now, someone was asking me before this talk about trust and developing trust and how we can develop trust.
And trust covers a lot of areas. It covers our personal relationships, our most intimate relationships, our relationship with ourself, trusting ourself, trusting our goodness, trusting our wisdom, trusting that we have the skills to do what’s required of us, trusting other people, trusting their honesty, trusting their virtue, trusting that the politicians will keep their word, trusting that the sun will rise tomorrow. All of these things are trust. Now how do we develop trust? Trust is a very good example of one of those qualities of mind which can be undermined by our experiences in life.
Maybe we haven’t been a trustworthy person in the past, not reliable, not keeping our word. Or maybe the people that we’ve been closest to haven’t been trustworthy. They’ve let us down. Or maybe we’ve had very difficult experiences because politicians didn’t keep their word. And so many of us have a lot of lack of trust in our experience.
How do we change that into being trusting? This is a very good example of how our old conditioning makes it difficult for us to act according to new views and opinions. Say, for example, that we have been let down in the past by someone, but now we’ve met another person who we can trust. We can trust them because on the basis of our relationship with them, they have always done what they said they would do. They’ve always been reliable.
And yet, we can’t overcome our distrust, our uneasiness at believing this person. And very often, what happens is we think it’s to do with that person. We’re waiting for that person to let us down. And we’re seeing in their behavior, in their speech, what we are expecting to see based on our view and opinion that people can’t be trusted. So someone’s look or the way they speak, we read into that what we’re expecting to see, thinking it’s coming from them without understanding that it’s coming from us based on our past experience.
And even if we have contact with this person over time and we start to develop confidence in them, unless we understand the process of conditioning and start to tune into the fact that there’s an inner feeling triggered in us around this whole issue of trust, even when we’ve started to believe them, that old feeling is there and it can easily be magnified when we read their speech and their behavior in terms of what we’ve experienced in the past. We have to understand that we’re generating that within our own mind. That is the Vedana of our past experience. What we experienced last time is what we’re experiencing now, not because of the person, but because of our conditioning. And so in that situation, we have to start to become skeptical about our reactions.
We have to be willing to not take them on face value. We have to start to observe and observe frequently and long enough. Is this coming from me or is this coming from the other person? Very often, we’ll see that we’re adding our old distrust to the present relationship, not wanting to, not deliberately, not even consciously, but because of our conditioning. And so we end up reacting to this person as someone we can’t trust.
And of course, that colors the whole relationship. They start to react to us along similar lines. And so this is why we need to understand and then we have to keep applying the teaching, keep using the tools which the Buddha has described, the tools of mindfulness particularly supported by the Samatha practices so that we can start to see clearly. And then we develop insight, insight into our own experience, not just into the theory that the Buddha gave, but into the truth of it in our own life. But in order to do this, we have to sometimes go outside our comfort zone, particularly if it’s an area like lack of trust.
Sometimes we have to really trust, trust the teaching to show us the way. Around an emotionally charged area like that, it can be very difficult. And so as well as the Samatha practices which we do in meditation, we need to also support our mind through living a good life, through cultivating wholesomeness, keeping the precepts, developing generosity, developing loving kindness, all of these things contribute to the buoyancy and confidence in the mind so that we’re willing to even challenge some of our strongly held views and opinions or expectations about situations. Challenge them by examining them in the light of Dharma. And this is what the Buddha was encouraging us to use the Dharma for, inviting us to come and see, encouraging investigation, not just in theory but in the practice of our own life.
I think I’ll stop there and like to offer this teaching, hoping that it will be of value for all of you, and may the merit of this teaching help us all to attain nibbana.