Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Kyabje Rinpoche opens this Medicine Buddha empowerment session with extended foundational teaching, deliberately preparing the mind before the actual tantric initiation. In 53 minutes, he works systematically through the Lamrim: understanding the causes of happiness and suffering; recognizing human birth as rare and precious; contemplating impermanence and death; developing renunciation through awareness of the lower realms; and cultivating compassion and bodhicitta—the aspiration to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. Bodhicitta is his focus: he explains how it distinguishes the Mahāyāna path, and how it combines with wisdom understanding emptiness to form the cause for generating oneself as a deity in tantric practice. For those with prior tantric training.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2005-07-03 – 1A – Empowerment – KR.mp3
UUID: d04fe221-574d-4cd1-a7ff-cde182719b1a
Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche
Collection: Medicine Buddha
Date: 2005-07-03
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~2,559
Okay. So before we begin the initiation, when we do an initiation or do a a tantric empowerment, then there’s a lot of obstacles that can be created. So in order for us to remove the obstacles, we do a prayer to Mahākāla. And at the same time as doing a prayer to Mahākāla, we offer Mahākāla a torma or a an offering, and we say, please take away the students’ obstacles, please take away the obstacles from here so we can do the empowerment. The Dharma is supposed to be our offering to Mahākāla to take the take the obstacles away from here and make the place calm and peaceful.
Okay. Right. Sorry. I don’t know how much is going to Okay. No.
Sorry. We’re not offering the torma to Mahākāla. We’re offering the tormas to the beings that would harm us and stop us from being able to do this empowerment. So we offer them the torma as a way of appeasing them so they won’t do us any harm while we’re doing the empowerment. Oh, I see.
So now do the. Oh, Okay. So today, we’re we’ve come here to take an empowerment, and more specifically, we’ve come to take a a subsequent empowerment, a subsequent permission, to do the to do this practice. So, before we do this practice, then we have to train our mind in a specific way in order to be able to take the empowerment properly. So in the the the Lamrim text, it says that there’s three different types of motivation that we can have.
We can have a small motivation, a middling motivation, or a large motivation. So if we don’t have one of these motivations, if we don’t train our minds in one of these three ways, then what we’re doing isn’t, in fact, mind training at all. So, in the Lamrim text it talks about these three different types of motivations we can have, but in fact before we develop those, we have to develop an understanding of what is the cause for happiness and what is the cause for suffering. At the moment we have these things confused. At the moment we think that the cause for suffering is actually the cause for happiness.
We think by doing something, then we will become happy when in fact it will make it will only bring suffering. And, likewise, what is actually the cause for happiness, we think is the cause for suffering. So we don’t do this because we think that it will cause suffering when in fact it will cause happiness. So we have these two things confused in our heads. And in order for us to be able to reverse this, then we need to be able to understand what is truly the cause for happiness and what is truly the cause for suffering.
In order for us to understand this, we need to rely on a teacher. We need to have teachings from a teacher. If we don’t if we don’t have these teachings, if we don’t have this explanation, and we don’t have this reliance, then we can’t understand this. So in order for us to be able to do this, we need three things. We need the blessings of the teacher, we need the intelligence and the right intelligence to understand it, and we need the right birth in order to do this.
So if we have these three things, if we have the blessings of the teacher, if we have the ability to understand what the teacher is teaching us, then we have a rebirth in which we have the surroundings and the opportunity to be able to practice the Dharma, then we have the ability to work towards a good rebirth as a human or a god, and then we have the ability to practice so we can achieve liberation, and we have the ability to practice so we can attain Buddhahood. So we have if we have these bases, then we can work towards those results. So once we understand that our being born as a human is incredibly difficult and is incredibly important, and that from being born as a human, then we can we can work towards understanding what will truly bring us happiness and what will truly bring us suffering, then that in turn works to make us understand that being born as a human, having this rebirth is incredibly important. So from this position, then we can start working towards what will truly make us happy. So the other thing is that this body that we have, this experience we have, not permanent.
It doesn’t stay still for even five minutes. And because we have accumulated karma, this means that at a certain stage, we are going to have to die. Now, when we die, the only thing that will be of benefit to us is the Dharma practice that we’ve done. Nothing else that we’ve done will be of benefit to us at that stage. So while we still have the opportunity, we should do as much Dharma practice as we can.
Once we die, because we have accumulated a lot of negativities in the past, if we have to experience the results of those negativities, that means that we will go to the lower realms, and the sufferings of the lower realms are extreme. They’re more than we understand. So that means that we need to do Dharma practice practice while while we we still still have have the the opportunity. Opportunity? So at the time of death, if we don’t have any experience of it, if we don’t have any practice, then it will be difficult for us to achieve a good rebirth.
But up until we die, if we do our practice, if we take refuge, and we think that by taking refuge, that also means abandoning what needs to be abandoned and practicing what needs to be practiced, then that means that we will have this as a habit and at the time of death it will be easier for us to take refuge and that will be the best way for us to take a good rebirth. Or the best So this motivation, the idea that we don’t want to go to the lower realms is what is called the smallest person’s motivation. But if we look also in this life in what’s called the realms of happiness in these realms we also have suffering, we have birth, we have illness, we have old age and we have death. We also have a lot of suffering that we have to experience even in this existence that we’ve experienced now. So then when we understand this we understand that actually even being born into the into the pleasant realms is also also saṃsāra is also a place where we will experience these different kinds of sufferings, and we will continue being reborn in into saṃsāra and experience these sufferings.
And we understand then we’ll start to develop a mind or an understanding that the only way to truly end suffering is to achieve liberation and or to yeah, to achieve liberation. So we will try and start working towards that. So we will have this, we have to develop this understanding that we need to get out of saṃsāra and work towards liberation. Now to understand what’s, keeping us in saṃsāra we have to look at Four Noble Truths. The second of the Four Noble Truths is the truth of the origin of suffering.
If we want to understand how to stop suffering, then we have to stop the cause for suffering. So if we look at the cause for suffering, then we’ll see that the cause for suffering is what’s called karma and deluded thoughts or emotions. So we need to be able to stop those. If we don’t stop those, then we will continue to collect karma. Now, if it’s positive karma and it becomes a cause for us to be reborn in the pleasant realms, then this isn’t still good enough because it’s contaminated positive karma.
So what this means is that even though we may have the cause to be born in a pleasant realm, at some stage we will have to go back down to the realms of suffering again and then we will go up and down and around in saṃsāra. Will get a pleasant rebirth, then a negative rebirth, pleasant rebirth, then a negative rebirth. This is the way it will happen. So in order for us to stop this, to stop the cycles of rebirth, we need to, understand the cause for saṃsāra. Now the cause for saṃsāra is ignorance.
And when we say ignorance, what we’re referring to is grasping at self. Grasping at self, the ignorance of grasping at self is the main cause for us to cycle in saṃsāra. So, this is what we have to look at if we want to achieve the mind that wants to get out of saṃsāra. So in order for us to get rid of our grasping at self, in order for us to get rid of this thing that is the cause for us to cycle in saṃsāra, then we have to develop a wisdom, understanding, selflessness. Because even though we talk about the ignorance of grasping at self being the root cause because from it we have such things as desires and anger and other negative ways of thinking.
And it’s not as if we can get rid of, say, anger and still, and just anger and still have desire and and ignorance. We have to get rid of the root cause, which is the ignorance which is grasping at self. So in order to do that, we need to develop this understanding or or the wisdom that understands the selflessness of of person, that understands selflessness. In order to develop this understanding of selflessness, we need to develop meditative stabilization or meditative concentration. In order to develop meditative concentration, in turn, we need to work on our ethics, We need to develop good ethics.
Good ethics entails the abandonment of the 10 non virtues and the cultivation of the 10 virtues. Ethics and meditation are part of what’s called the three higher trainings. So we need to develop the three higher trainings. But this just by itself isn’t good enough either because if we’re dealing with these trainings, we’re only dealing with our own benefit. We’re only working towards our own liberation.
And all other sentient beings are like ourselves in that they are suffering and don’t want to be suffering. They want to experience happiness. So in order to, do the best thing for them and ourselves, then we should try and develop a sense of compassion for all sentient beings, develop great compassion for all sentient beings, develop love and kindness towards all sentient beings. And then after we’ve developed these, we should try and develop the mind that is working towards enlightenment for sentient beings, that is working to gather all positive things in order to be of benefit to sentient beings. And this mind is called bodhicitta.
Okay, so once we have developed bodhicitta in our mind stream, then any action that we do, any positive action that we do becomes a cause for us to achieve enlightenment, becomes a cause that has no equal, that is incomparable. Even if we give a little piece of food to someone, then this little piece of food or bread that we give to someone, giving that to them becomes a cause for us to achieve enlightenment. It becomes this, this incredibly powerful, incomparably important positive action. bodhicitta, the development of bodhicitta, whether we have it in our mind stream or not, determines whether what we are practicing is a Mahāyāna path or whether it is a Hīnayāna path. And because we are trying to practice the Mahāyāna path then we need to develop bodhicitta in our mind stream.
If we don’t have bodhicitta then we can’t call what we are doing practicing the Mahāyāna path. We can’t say what we are doing will lead us towards enlightenment. If we don’t have bodhicitta, then what we are doing is following the smallest path and then developing, changing over to the greater path can be incredibly difficult. So in order for us to be practicing the Mahāyāna path, we need to have developed a sense of this mind of bodhicitta in our mind stream. Now, this mind is working towards complete enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings.
But in order for us to actually achieve enlightenment, we need more than just bodhicitta. We can’t have just bodhicitta and achieve enlightenment. We also need to understand emptiness properly. We need to have the wisdom understanding emptiness properly. Now, if we have these two things in our mind stream, these two things work together and take us towards enlightenment.
The bodhicitta and the mind understanding emptiness work together. Now, the unique path or the tantra path is the combination of these two minds. When we have these two minds in combination, then we call that the unique or the tantra path. So in order for us to do any of these things, have to develop renunciation. If we don’t have renunciation, then we can’t have compassion or great compassion.
If we don’t have great compassion, we don’t develop bodhicitta. In order for us as well to achieve enlightenment, we have to have this understanding of emptiness. So if we want to practice Mahāyāna Dharma, whether it is Tantra practice or what, then we need to have these three things developed in our mind stream. So if we’re going to talk clearly, what we’re doing when we’re practicing tantra is to see ourselves or to become a deity. This is what the practice entails.
It entails meditation on the deity and in fact for us to become the deity. Now, we would when we’re talking about this thing, we have to understand what the cause for becoming a deity is, what the cause for for becoming this Buddha that we are meditating on is. Now if we compare it to what the cause for becoming a human in our next life is, then we could say that we could become a human in our next life by practicing ethics. By practicing ethics, we attain a human rebirth. So practicing ethics is the cause for us to attain a human rebirth.
The cause for us to attain or to become the deity is we need emptiness and wisdom understanding emptiness and bodhicitta. We need the method and the wisdom. If we don’t have the method and wisdom together, then we cannot generate as a deity because those are the causes for the deity. So we need to have these things in order to generate the deity. If we don’t have the bodhicitta, if we don’t have the method, then we don’t have the reason to generate as a deity.
And if we don’t understand emptiness, then we can’t become the deity. We can’t see ourselves as the deity. So we need these two things that act as the cause for us to generate to be able to generate as the deity and to meditate on the deity.