Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Lolo Houbein reflects on applying Buddhist principles to working life over twenty-five years, shifting the focus from Buddhism in work generally to her own practical experience. She frames the session as a discussion rather than a monologue, given the engaged audience. She explores right livelihood and the five precepts as foundational, then walks through the ten Buddhist qualities and a personal method of concentrating on one cardinal virtue per weekday to manage the complexity of ethical practice amid workplace demands. She discusses the particular challenge of the Bodhisattva Vow when it requires compassion toward difficult colleagues and bosses, the importance of starting each day fresh and without perfectionism, her experience running an incense business with integrity, and her ten years as a housewife—which she describes as the best alignment of Buddhist practice with working life. She also shares meditation practices from her commute and her method of emotional unloading at a home shrine, emphasizing that outward-facing meditations have been more transformative than introspective ones. Pitched at working Buddhists seeking practical integration of ethics and livelihood.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 B in W no date.mp3
UUID: 90125e3c-4d88-4182-a9b0-96a596eb8e34
Teacher: Lolo Houbein
Collection: Buddha in One's Work (Lolo Houbein)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~6,636
Myself and talk about the topic of the I’ll pass it straight over to Thank you. First of all, I’m going to change the title because it said where is it? Buddhism in one’s work. I I’m not a professional social worker or anything like that. I couldn’t talk about Buddhism in one’s work.
I can only talk about Buddhism in my work. So that’s the little change I want to make. But I was also warned that very few people turn up for these talks. And that turns out not to be true either, at least not tonight. So, what I can feel is that the topic is terribly important for people to discuss.
So I will limit myself quite a bit more about my own work and my experiences with Buddhism in my work than I had planned to do if there had been two or three people. And really try to leave space for discussion because we have now so many people here who all have had experience of work and how to apply Buddhism in their work or how to behave according to Buddhist principles in their work, that obviously an exchange of thoughts is going to be very interesting and very fruitful and that’s what it is all about. So I will tell you what approach I was going to take, And this is the approach that I have taken in my working life, which goes back as combined with Buddhism about, oh, more than twenty five years. And I can tell you it was pretty lonely in Adelaide in those days being a Buddhist and going to work. You just don’t talk about was very, very queer indeed to be a Buddhist twenty five years ago.
So it was a lonely road, that was probably a good thing because it made me try to work out my own salvation, which is exactly what the Buddha advised that you should be doing. And I, over the years, applied the simple rules of Buddhism to my work, and I started with the Eightfold Noble Path, and of course the most important one there, as applied to work, is right livelihood. And I have thought a lot about that because I have seen so many people who have become interested in Buddhism found that they were in the wrong job and had to get out of it because they felt it didn’t stroke with the Buddhist morality that they had come to understand. I have been so fortunate in my life that I’ve never, never had that problem, and I must first of all state that it seems to me very fortunate. I can see that in that sense I haven’t had the experience that other people have had who have immediately felt the moment they entered Buddhism that they had to change their job or profession even.
So that is one point that I have been fortunate in. And of course, livelihood just simply means that whatever you are doing must not be harmful to other beings and must be conducive to the well-being of other beings. That’s the way I have always seen it. I think there are books written about the subject, but that’s the simple way I would put it. The other points of the Eightfold Noble Path come into it, but I’ll come to those later.
I want to go on just briefly to the five precepts, because part of my career you can’t really call it a career but part of my working life in offices I found that the five precepts were abused more than anything else during working hours. And of course I’m talking about other people who were not Buddhists, but you could see these precepts that we take as Buddhists from time to time, not to take what is not given, no false speech. When I’m looking at twenty five phases, I suddenly forget the order of them. Let me see, I’ve got them here. Right speech, No, that’s the Eightfold Noble Path.
Help me out. Not to take what is not offered, what is not given. To abstain from taking life that’s the first one actually to abstain from taking life, to abstain from taking what is not given, to abstain from false speech, to abstain from sensuous misconduct, and to abstain from intoxicants which tend to cloud the mind. Right, we’ve got them. Those five.
Now, if you look at ordinary life in the workplace, whether it’s a factory or an office or what it might be, you find that those are the things in ordinary conduct that are constantly abused by people. And I’m not talking about people who are Buddhists, but about people in general. Because think people often see work and the hours of work as time that has to be killed. Because of economic reasons we have to be in jobs and at the end of the fortnight you get so much pay, but your mind and your heart isn’t really there, and you get this time killing going on. I had a strange proof of this at some stage when I was sent out to work in a typing pool for a fortnight.
And in this typing pool, yes, it’s not the nicest job, in this typing pool they kept a record of how many sheets you typed per day. And I wasn’t used to working in that way, but I stodgily worked away, and I must say I typed with about three fingers. I’ve never been very professional, but I earned my living with it. And they sort of all looked at me and thought, Oh, what have they sent this time? And there were all these professional typists flying away.
And there was one who had an electric typewriter. At the end of the fortnight, they looked at the record of how many sheets had been done by everybody, and I came out as number two with my three fingers. And I was totally flabbergasted by this. But when I looked back, I realized why this happened, that these flying typists would stop at a certain moment feeling that they’d done wonderful works, and then the time wasting would start. And if they had been Buddhist, they would have been violating the five precepts all over the place.
There would be boy and girl talk, and there would be everything under the sun except the heart in the work. So these five precepts are ones that I think are very good to keep in mind when you are at work. The one that is interesting from a social point of view in this society I think is the one of not to take what is not given, what is not offered. I find that in most workplaces where I have worked it is skillful taking that is the first precept. And anything that is not nailed to the wall and that isn’t recorded in a book is free for the taking to whoever works in that place because it’s part of the job, and some grant pays for it, or some government pays for it, or some big boss who’s got millions pays for it, and so on.
And this is a tendency in our society, and therefore one can look very finicky if one starts to object to people doing that, especially when it’s in your area where you are supposed to keep control of things. And you can run into trouble with that too. I did at some stage. I was then given the job to keep a key to a great big cupboard and so I became a sort of prison warden and that was not very good for relationships either. So you can really run into trouble with it.
The ten qualities which I’m working from this lovely book which has sustained me for decades, the Buddhist scriptures in the Penguin Classics. This came out in the days that you couldn’t get out of Buddhist books and there was no Buddha house and so on. It’s always been a great support. The ten Buddhist qualities, as they are listed here, are steadfastness, sincerity, self respect, vigilance, seclusion from the world, contentment with little, simplicity of tastes, non attachment, aversion to worldly activity and patience. A lifetime of work to acquire those, and not too easy in the workplace, whatever your workplace may be.
Especially seclusion from the world is very hard to keep except in a spiritual sense, and I remember how strenuously I had to try to do that in many work situations, to keep a certain detachment from that worldly aspect of the job that might become very, very grating on my conscience, on my Buddhist principles. And the other way in which I tried to be somewhat secluded from the world was to always have the Eightfold Noble Path very sturdily in my mind and not to participate in anything that would go against that during work or during procedures that had to do with the job. If it had to be stated, I would simply say, ‘I cannot do that because I happen to be a Buddhist’ and it scares people terribly, which is not what one means to do, but it scares them, which is just as well as an introduction. Then after that you have to strenuously behave as normally as you can for many months to come to prove that there’s nothing strange about you, you just happen to be Buddhist, and there are certain things in which you will not participate. Some of these things become difficult also at Christmas time, not because of Christmas but because of the party season, and that is part of working life here.
Contentment with little, I found probably the most challenging in a country where the work environment is so often dominated by the union movement, and if you happen to be in a line of work where you have to be a member of the union, I think you have particular problems because although on the one hand unions can do extremely good things for the work conditions under which people work, and I have worked in a factory not as a factory worker but as a teacher because I used to be in Mary Anne’s line of work. And I’ve seen the conditions in factories and it was a good factory, but I can understand that there are many reasons to have unions and to do something about the working conditions, to do something about regular improvements in salary and spaces where people can eat and where they can have a break from their work and so on. All these are perfectly normal things that should be done by unions, but we all know that a certain element in the union philosophy tends to cater to the greed in the human nature, and that’s where one may have problems as a Buddhist if it comes to union action.
And I’ve never had experience with that except once when I was a teacher at a high school in Darwin. I said, no, of course I cannot go on strike. Just been the particular reason why the strike was on was so vague that even the people who were very keen to go on strike couldn’t quite explain why, as so often happens. And the damage that would be done to the students in that particular school would have been huge because it was an area with great social problems and if you just close-up school for the day, the whole of society is disrupted. So as it turned out, I couldn’t even put up a fight because it turned out that most teachers weren’t interested in going on strike at all, so it didn’t happen.
So that’s been my only experience with that. The five cardinal virtues Lost him. Here we are. Faith, vigour, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom. At some stage I decided that it would be a good idea, seeing that I was not very enlightened and not very skilful, to just try one of those every weekday.
There are five cardinal virtues, so on Monday I would concentrate on faith, on Tuesday I would concentrate on vigour, On Wednesday, I would concentrate on mindfulness. On Thursday, on concentration. And on Friday, on wisdom. Now you think I may be playing a game, but it really works. What you’re doing is that you’re cutting it down in small chunks for yourself because it is too much to handle in one big chunk.
There’s the Eightfold Noble Path, the ten qualities, five precepts. It’s too much for an ordinary person who also has got a boss who keeps flinging things at her and so on. So I would take one thing and say, Today is the day that I concentrate on that in all aspects of my work. And it helps. It really does.
And if you get very good after a while, you can add things to it. Like I started to add two of the ten qualities to it. So on Monday it would be faith and two of the ten qualities which was steadfastness and sincerity. And so I could cope with that. I could cope with three through a day on the whole.
And I think it prevented many skirmishes and little blow ups that you get in in very demanding jobs, where people constantly grate on each other and there are always conflicts. When I say that I was always fortunate in not having to change jobs because the jobs that I did were conducive to the welfare of people, I must also say that because most of them were in education, they were also most draining. They were certainly for the welfare of other beings, but they are draining types of jobs and the people that work in these jobs sometimes lose their tempers and get very tired. So a lot of the effort of being a Buddhist went into the relationships with colleagues and bosses and what have you, rather than with the actual objects of your work through the students. I wasn’t always a teacher, I was quite often an office worker in the background who mopped up tears, sick children, delinquents who were temporarily parked in the office until the police came or somebody else to pick them up and take.
And connected with that would be the telephone which was constantly in my care with frantic parents complaining members of the public about bad behavior on buses by boys who had been wandering around in our uniform and so on and so on. Just to give you a bit of an idea of the sort of work that I did from my early years, working years, in Australia. I worked at the university first as a secretary, and from there I went to agricultural high school in Urrbrae for some years as a secretary, and then I went or in between that I had a short job at the mentally retarded workshop in Brompton, which would have been the type of work that I would have liked to stay with because of the great, great need that there was. But because that great need wasn’t recognized very much in society, the salaries were so low that I found myself starving after three months. I literally had to break away for that reason.
And after that oh, before that, I also worked with overseas aid, community aid abroad, Australian volunteers abroad for a year as a girl Friday, everything. After Urrbrae, the agricultural high school, I quit working life for a while and went to the university myself to get some study done. I regarded it as my working life as well. That was very interesting from many points of view. It gave me much more scope to be a Buddhist without too many pressures and too many drains because nobody was making any demands on my services, which was a change.
I was supposed to do certain duties, but if I didn’t do them I would just get a fail. So there was no responsibility put on me for a number of years. And that was probably similar to a person who decides to go into the Sangha in order to withdraw from the world and study and meditate. And you get a spirit of development in your Buddhist philosophy because of that falling away of worldly activities and worldly concerns and the things that other people put on you in society. So for me that was the years of study, where there was this being able to disassociate myself from all sorts of things with this one excuse I have to study.
And it was usually not just an excuse, I mean one does study very hard to get degrees. But also the services that one did to people, those services that one decided to do to people at a certain moment, they weren’t put upon you. And so you learnt the difference between the voluntary service and the service that you had to perform with more or less grace. Both are good learning sources because if you are in a job and you have to serve other people as part of that job, then you learn to have a Buddhist grace about it. Not that you will show it every day, all day, every hour.
I mean, we are very human after all, and we all break down from time to time under pressure. But you apply a certain Buddhist grace to a task that is chosen for you, that is given to you. You don’t choose it yourself, it’s part of your economic situation. Whereas when you’re in the freedom of being a student or a similar situation like that, whatever service you perform for somebody else is one that you have chosen to do. That becomes interesting because you also have to look at your motivations for that then.
As you all know, in Asia, in Asian countries, there’s a great tendency to gain merit, doing services to other people is part of gaining merit, to gain a better rebirth, to build up your Buddhist image. And this is something that I think in Western Buddhist groups we tend to frown a little bit on because it is too public, too much striving in public, and so on. So when you are in a position where you are free to serve people as you choose, that’s also the time to start looking at your motivations for doing it. And I won’t go into that because that’s a whole different topic again. There’s also something about the four right efforts.
Have you heard of the four right efforts? If I can find them. I think they’ve slipped away. I might come across them later on. And then at some stage, if you if you, in your Buddhism, have come to Mahāyāna Buddhism and you have made some sort of decision that you are a Mahāyāna Buddhist, then it’s unavoidable that you come across the Bodhisattva vow at some stage, and that you realize either vaguely or more pertinently that by entering the Mahāyāna path you are what I call an intending bodhisattva, who at some stage later on will start treading that bodhisattva path, or actually you start treading it from the moment you realize it, but there comes a time that you will take that Bodhisattva Vow whenever that will be, whether it’s in this life or in another life.
But that becomes very important in your working life because the sentient beings that are named in the Bodhisattva Vow, which eventually when you get to it, you will turn around to rescue those sentient beings are all around you at work. That becomes a hard thing to chew for a while because you look at certain overseers, bosses, people in power who are doing things to the little people underneath, which includes you, and you think, eventually, when I get to that bodhisattva stage and I take that vow, I have to turn around and rescue so and so and so and so and so and so. And that is the reality of Mahāyāna Buddhism. That is one of the hardest things I find in a working life, because we have to put up with whomever we are stationed with, and we have to realise that those people are the sentient beings that the vow is talking about. It’s not just the little kittens that we rescue along the roadside, and and it isn’t the neighbour who is in need that we may be able to help out, or a relative that we love.
It’s those people who can be very obnoxious to us and maybe we are very obnoxious to them. I remember having been perceived as being extremely obnoxious by other people at work because of the type of person I am. Not because I was a Buddhist, but just because of the type of person I am. We know all about non self and non soul and so on, but you can’t explain that to other people and say, Look, what you are seeing is not me, so don’t get cross at me. I don’t exist.
Just doesn’t. It doesn’t work, and I won’t buy it. So you are stuck with something that spells out personality to other people. And there you are, it’s raying out every day, eight hours a day, and people put up with it or they don’t, and some will not. Just as you will find it very difficult to put up with some other entities, non souls that are raying out something that looks like personality.
So we have these problems as Buddhists. But the awareness of it, I think, just puts you one step ahead of your coworkers. But that also means that you are going to have the greater patience, that you are going to have the greater tolerance, and that you will have to put up with more because of that. And looking back, would say that’s the story of my working life, but I don’t regret it one bit. I think it’s made the whole of life better.
And as you probably have gathered from the various things that I’ve said, I have always been in the need to work for economical reasons, for the sheer need of money to maintain myself and children until some eight or nine years ago, when I could start to relax on that score and start looking around and say, Now what would I like to do for work? By that time I was pretty old and by that time I had become a teacher and for some years I was teaching refugees like Mary Anne’s still doing. We were just talking about it. We used to be colleagues. And that was one of the most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had.
But the same problems occur just the same, just because you’ve chosen something and you absolutely love doing it. Is still the same problem of the society which is the matrix for the job and the people that you work with who come from everywhere and the fact that you still have a personality, that you are still not blending into the wallpaper, you still are too pronounced for other people to not get irritated by things that they can’t appreciate and so on. So that doesn’t change it. Let me see what my notes say. There was one man who had a terrific influence on my attitude to work.
I think I was brought up with the principle that if you had to do your work, whatever it was, you might as well do it well. So I had that advantage that I wasn’t trying to sneak out of my tasks because I was brought up with that principle that was good. I also come from a country where work is I was born in Holland where work is something of a religion to people. I tend to give the impression here in Australia that I’m a workaholic, and that probably is so. But I would put it this way: I love work.
I think that work is one of the most fulfilling things that can happen to you in your life. I have been able to invest whatever job I have had with pleasure. It isn’t always there in the beginning. The beginning is always very hard. If you take your job, responsibility seriously, then to do a job well takes quite a while to get into it, to learn everything that has to do with it, and not to think after a few days, oh, this is a breeze, know, this is going to be easy, because there’s always more to it than you think at first glance, and then a lot of people in the job would even think.
And that comes down to attitude, of course. When you start to develop that sort of attitude, then any job can be invested with importance and with pleasure and with significance. It doesn’t matter what it is. There’s a good story that I remember. One of the honors students at the university disappeared for a while.
She’d done her exams and I wondered why she wasn’t coming in the whole day to look for reading lists for next year like most of them did and so on. She turned up after three months and we said, Penny, where have you been? We’ve missed you. And she said, I worked in a mop factory. She told us the most marvellous story, how she needed money, so she went to find this job during the holiday and she worked in this mop factory which had been in existence for a long time.
The people who worked there had been working there for a long time, and they all worked very well together, and they had a nice boss, and they were only about seven or eight. It was a small factory and they made lots of mops. Probably all the mops that are used in Adelaide were made in that little factory. And the oldest there was a woman of seventy, and she didn’t want to retire. She loved making mops.
And Penny was taught how to make mops in three months, with great love by those people, and especially by the seventy year old woman. And she said, This has changed my life. She said, I’m coming back to write my thesis in literature. She said, But the Mop Factory and what I’ve learned from them, I will never forget. And she couldn’t say anything more about it, but we all understood.
The thing that she had learned there, she couldn’t have learned in the English department writing her thesis. She learned it in the mop factory. And the person that I learned from was Swami Vivekananda. I didn’t meet him in the flesh because he died before I was born, I think, or perhaps a year after. But Swami Vivekananda was an Indian Vedanta philosopher, I think.
I’m not even quite sure about school, is that right? And he didn’t really write books. He went around and talked to people. He gave talks and he talked about the karma, the yoga of karma and the yoga of he talked about the other yogas as well, the yoga of karma was his main topic. He used to talk about work and the works that one does and how one’s karma is made up out of that.
And the way he talked about attitudes to work were just such a revelation to me that I was never able to forget the attitudes that he was presenting. His works are available, or his talks rather, are available, I think, in the Cosmic Peacock bookshop because after he died they just found these stacks and stacks of papers and they started to order them made them into a book and called it The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. And it was a big fat book. And they thought that was it and then they found more papers. And so there was The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda volume two and volume three And I think it went up to volume twelve.
They kept on finding boxes with papers of talks that he’d given. And I haven’t got all the volumes, I’ve got two or three volumes, but those alone changed my life. He is recommended. You probably have noticed that I have talked about the attitude to work as a Buddhist because I have never seen it as my task to convert other people to Buddhism in the workplace. In Buddhism generally we don’t go around evangelizing or proselytizing, I think is the word.
We just live a Buddhist life and if other people happen to notice it or ask what we are, then we can speak about it. And I have done that when it was asked, but I’ve never made an effort to convert anybody. Well, if you’ve worked in a university you would know that that’s useless anyway they’re all converted to something! But the main thing, I think, is to be a Buddhist in your attitudes, in your relationships with people, and so on. And a couple of things that are important to remember because every day in your working life you tend to have calamities which go right against all the principles that you went in with in the morning at nine o’clock.
And you’ve got to remember that each day is a new beginning, so whatever happened today, don’t drag it on into next day. The next day is a new day. It’s a blank day. Anything good can happen in that day if you want to, if you work on it. Also remember that you are not perfect, nobody else is perfect either, but certainly you don’t have to expect from yourself that you are perfect because you happen to be a Buddhist.
Now it is a difficulty because in this society, if you are not of the mainstream but you choose to be deviant, then you are expected to be perfect at it. And so if you happen to have confessed that you are a Buddhist, they immediately want you to be an absolutely perfect Buddhist. So it may sometimes help to point out and say, Look, I am a Buddhist because I want to become enlightened, not because I am enlightened already. This will take time. I am not perfect.
You know, there’s no shame in admitting that. The other thing to remember is that nothing is permanent. That’s a good Buddhist principle, and when you’re in that really terrible pickle where the whole situation is falling down around your ears, then please remember it’s not permanent, and there’s going to be a new day. Always start that new day with a whole clean sheet and with all your Buddhist principles polished up and charging again. That’s the way I have gotten through my working life, because it was very difficult at times and it was very hard at times.
I had other interesting experiences which were in trade. I at some stage started a small business. I was the second importer of incense in South Australia after Mary Martin’s bookshop, which had one brand of a very smoky kind that you couldn’t keep alight. I decided to improve on this, and I became the first real importer of incense in South Australia in the 1960s, before the hippies were even heard of. And I used to market it as a room deodorizer, but secretly I was hoping to change people’s dispositions because it did so much good for me, you see.
I used to be able to just change my mood by lighting an incense stick and sitting still for a little while, and I was a better person for it, and I thought I could change the world by importing incense. So the interesting thing then was to find that I had landed in the world of trade, and soon industrial spies were upon me, and trying to find out where I got my product, and how much markup I was putting on it, and where I was marketing it. I used to walk with a basket like this and run them all in lunchtime and go to David Jones and Myers to try to sell the stuff. And they would call it all sorts of horrible names. They didn’t know what it was in the shops.
But anyway, the industrial spies were upon me, and soon enough there was competition, and then it was on. And I found out that in business there are special principles, and the special principles are principles that people keep from nine to five, and then when they go home they’re very nice people, but from nine to five there’s something else. And there comes a time that you have to take a stand against it as a Buddhist, And then they say to you, Yes, but this is business. And I would say, Well, then I am going to play it differently. And you run into great, interesting situations that way.
Well, the upshot of that was that I did business my way, and I did it by myself. It never grew big enough to take on other people, but the competition grew. I kept applying my ideas and my principles so my prices were lower than anybody else’s and I was accused of that sometimes because my prices were too low and I said, No, they are reasonable. Eventually I ended up having hundreds of friends all over the country and selling out to the competition when I’d had enough. I’d made my friends.
I didn’t make my money, but made friends, and I sold out to the competition, and they’d become friends too, actually. And that was fine. They’re still going. They’re doing well. They import a lot more than just incense now.
They import just about all the handcrafts for Asia, and it’s good. It’s good for Asia, it’s good for the craftspeople over there. But I’m just warning you, if you are in business, if you have been in business, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And the best the best job from the point of view of my Buddhist principles was being a housewife. I was a housewife full time for ten years, and that was the time that I could totally devote myself to the service of other beings because that’s what it’s all about.
Husbands, three children, and the neighbors, whatever else comes into the housewifery realm. There there were other things that are straight from the Buddhist rules. I’ll read them out to you because I jotted them down. The working for the well-being of others, the seclusion from the world, it’s very real when you’re a housewife, The contentment with little definitely comes into it. The simplicity of taste, well this is forced upon you by economics usually unless you’re a very rich housewife, but we’re talking about ordinary housewives, so simplicity of taste is forced upon you.
The non attachment in the doing of repugnant tasks and patience. All these things come into it, and as a bonus there was usually enough time, about an hour in the middle of the day, to do some study and some practice, to do a bit of yoga, bit of reading, a bit of meditation. And I found that that time was a time of enormous growth, and when I started to go into professional life in one way or another, there was not time for that growth. I grew in other ways because I had to practice I had to put into practice what I had learned. But those ten years as a housewife, which is also the time when I read Swami Vivekananda, and I read Gandhi, and I read whatever Buddhist books I could lay my hands on, was extremely fruitful.
Probably for a layperson as good a job as you can get to practice your Buddhism. I’ll see if there’s anything else I want to say before I and nobody’s interrupted me. Oh yes, I want to tell you about the meditation I did on the bus. For many, many years I didn’t have a car. I went to work on a bus and I can’t read on the bus because I get carsick.
And because I’m a workaholic, I have to find something to make my time useful. And that twenty minutes on the bus was converted into a meditation to the ten directions. And I would concentrate. I think the East was always at the back of me when I went to work, so I would start with the East and go to the eight directions and then go to the Nadir and the Zenith and just send peace to all those directions. But at the same time, when I was going east, I would think from Adelaide going east is Melbourne and Sydney, and I would think of particular people that I happened to know in those places so and so Melbourne, so and so in Sydney, so and so in the Pacific Ocean who had troubles or that I corresponded with or whatever and I would sort of think of certain people in the Eastern direction.
I would do that with every direction. And by the time I got off the bus, I had meditated on quite a lot of people around the world. And I found that probably one of the most marvelous things as far as meditation is concerned, much better than the meditations I’ve tried to do to improve myself. I don’t seem to make any advances with that very much. It seems that meditations that go outwards have been much better for me.
meditations that go out to other people, go out to situations in the world, to countries which were at war, to places where there were famines or floods or whatever, you know. And you can do that by simple meditations in the ten directions. So that was part of my working life because it brought on a certain attitude by the time you got off the bus and walked into the office or the school. And the other practice I always had was in the evening to unload in front of my little shrine at home and to play the memory tape, as I call it, and to unload and to charge up. And I never missed doing that in the evening.
And apart from that, I just like to say a few things about the nature of other work because, as Bruce put in the notice, I’m a writer as well. And when you are a writer, you think that you have more chance to put your Buddhist attitudes into practice because you can actually say things and if they are going to be published then everybody’s going to read them. But that also puts tremendous responsibility on one, again, to make every word a true word, not a word to fill in space, but a word that carries a meaning, that carries a significance for the whole thought that you are going to to express. I I was how’s the time going? Oh, we’re alright.
I’ll I’ll I’ll read you a little one, a little piece. That was the very first time I decided that I would let on that I was a Buddhist and actually have it.