Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 25-minute teaching, Khensur Rinpoche shows how thought transformation (lojong) works through taking and giving—imaginatively offering your happiness to others and accepting their suffering. He explains how this mental training genuinely develops compassion: as other-centeredness grows, self-centeredness diminishes like cold giving way to heat. He connects this to the six perfections and wisdom realizing emptiness, which alone can uproot self-grasping. The second half uses the Wheel of Sharp Weapons and karma to explain difficult circumstances: when others don’t follow your instructions, it reveals your own past actions toward teachers who instructed you. A Q&A explores whether someone without self-grasping can still be self-centered, and whether self and other are ultimately distinct. For practitioners with background in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1992-10-27 – Side 2 – Wheel of Sharp Weapons – KR.MP3
UUID: 87105921-c61e-4812-b7c0-cf5371387c22
Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche
Collection: Mind Training
Date: 1992-10-27
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~1,117
Because whoever creates the karma, whoever engages in the action, that result will ripen upon that individual. So we, in fact, can only experience the results of our actions that we create just as others can only experience the results of their actions that they’ve created. Within this practice, the universal vehicle of thought transformation, we are seeking to train the mind in developing a very forceful and stable attitude of compassion and love. Therefore, we engage in this imaginative process of training, where we imaginatively give away our happiness to others and imaginatively take upon the sufferings of others. In fact, we are not giving away our happiness.
We’re taking upon their suffering. It is a way of training the mind imaginatively. If this is simply a mental process, then why engage in it, this process of taking and giving? It is because through this mental training, we are able to develop extremely powerful love and compassion. But not only that, through the attitudes that arise within the mind during the process of the practice, we are creating a tremendous amount of, accumulating a tremendous amount of creative potential, positive potential, and also skillful actions.
And we’re also pacifying the causes of suffering within our own mind. So there’s a tremendous benefit to be derived from such a practice. What is it that we want? We want to bring ourselves happiness. We want to cut from its very root our suffering.
So this is the function of thought transformation, of this mental training process. We are trying to cut away those types of mentalities which bring suffering to ourselves, and trying to cultivate those mentalities, those attitudes, which are conducive to bringing ourselves happiness. That is to say, we’re training our mind in the shifts of attitude into predominantly those mentalities and attitudes which bring about happiness and the decrease in finally cutting away of those attitudes which bring ourselves suffering. So through the development of love and compassion, our self centeredness is being harmed. It is being diminished by the power of love and compassion.
As that diminishes, our other centeredness grows and grows until finally we develop an attitude of other centeredness and our self centeredness has completely ceased. So these two, self centeredness and other centeredness, are mutually incompatible, as by way of analogy, hot and cold. As the hot increases, the cold decreases. And the same is true with self centeredness and other centeredness. So through the cultivation of love and compassion and then through the development of the various practices such as generosity, ethics, tolerance, etcetera, we finally, on the basis of those, develop the wisdom realizing emptiness.
By means of those practices and the wisdom realizing emptiness, we are able to end the two causes of all our problems, our self centeredness and our self grasping. They have ceased altogether. Without the wisdom realizing emptiness, there’s no way to rid ourselves of self grasping. There’s no other factor which can remove self grasping from the mind. Only this, the wisdom realizing emptiness.
Therefore, in order to develop that wisdom of realizing emptiness, we engage in these various other practices such as generosity, ethics, tolerance, joyous effort, and meditative stabilization. So in order to remove the root of all our sufferings, that is to say self grasping and self centeredness, we engage in the various practices of the six perfections. By means of the six perfections, we eliminate all our various faults, bring to consummation all our acts and qualities, and we are there empowered by means of that to bring about both the ultimate welfare of self and others. So in general, have just discussed the thought transformation of the universal vehicle in terms of the way of practice and the need for such a practice. So In terms of spiritual practice, one of the main contexts in which it needs to be carried out is in terms of karma, the law of cause and effect.
And here, these verses are relating instances of the law of cause and effect, actions as their causes and their results. That if those who are working for you do not work well and do not follow your instructions well, then this is the, as it says in the text, this is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons returning full circle upon you for the wrongs that you have done in the past. That is to say, we cannot think only in terms of this life itself, but we have to think in terms also of previous lives in looking at our various experiences, that where others do not obey your instructions and not follow your instructions well, is a result of you yourself in a previous life having acted in the same way toward those who were giving you instructions, that you did not follow their instructions well, that it did not work for their interests. We’re going to stop there today. Do you have some questions?
Yeah. If we get time. No, tinnyang chi isn’t it? So I was asking Rinpoche whether if someone has abandoned self grasping, whether they could have self centeredness. And he said that someone who has abandoned self grasping Someone who has been self grasping does not develop the self centeredness which is induced by self grasping since self grasping has been eliminated.
But they can have self centeredness. That is to say a sense of wishing for themselves alone the qualities of happiness and the elimination of suffering. Let’s see. Due to the force of ignorance, there is a grasping at self and others, or independently existing self and independently existing other? Okay.
What? Conventionally. Conventionally existing self. Those aren’t induced by ignorance. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Oh my. Now you have a good question.
You have a good question. What do you mean by non dual? Do yourself and others, are they ultimately different? Yeah. Something like So I asked the question, in general, self and other exist.
Do self and others ultimately, no, self, in general, self and others are different, are individual distinct. Are they ultimately distinct or different? That was my question. And Rinpoche said that there’s two meanings to the word ultimate. One is if we think of it in terms of truly existent, that because nothing truly exists, they aren’t truly existent, they’re not different.
But that’s not to say neither are they truly existent, they’re one, because nothing is truly existent. But if it’s meant to mean ultimately in the context of non truly existent, then they ultimately are different or distinct. They are not the same. In reality, in the context of non true existence, they ultimately are distinct.