Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 25-minute Q&A, Kyabje Rinpoche directly engages a paradox central to Western Buddhists: the second verse of the 8 Verse Mind Training teaches viewing oneself as lowest, yet Western psychology insists the opposite—that healthy self-esteem is essential to happiness. He argues the West has it backwards. Happiness in Western countries has declined despite rising wealth, while the world’s poorest communities report contentment matching wealthy nations. He offers concrete evidence: research showing that charity work increases happiness; Tibetan monks thriving as stateless refugees with almost nothing; psychiatric studies finding that Tibetan torture victims recovered psychologically better than Western torture victims. The real cause of Western depression, Rinpoche argues, is not low self-esteem but impossibly high expectations. When people fall short, they blame themselves. The Buddhist approach—accepting nothing is owed to you—doesn’t create low self-esteem but dissolves the suffering caused by unmet demands. For those encountering these teachings for the first time.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 8 Verse Q&A Day 1 111001 002 – KR.mp3
UUID: a337834f-9364-42f2-8cbe-956f5299c0cd
Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche
Collection: Mind Training
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~3,144
Anila, thank you very much. I’m delighted you. It was something I was going to address directly with you. You have asked the question and provided some of the answers in asking the question. The second verse is very problematical.
May I view myself as the lowest among all, is something which is completely alien to a Western understanding personal development. Then, I think the best way we can spend this half hour, if you agree, is talking about it. The first thing I would propose to you is that we put Western concepts of personal development aside. If there’s one thing which Western history has demonstrated is that we are a technologically gifted civilization, we are also remarkably ungifted civilization in terms of personal happiness. If you look at the sociological statistics, the statistics for development in Western countries are exceptional in terms of living standard, health, and so forth, but there is no clear correlation between our living standard and our happiness.
We are remarkably unhappy societies. So it is very clear that our understanding of happiness and what causes happiness is wrong. I showed to some of you during a seminar a very striking chart which plots, I put on the chart a plot of perceived happiness in Australia over the last sixty years versus the changes in GDP in Australia. You find that happiness dropped steadily from 1945 to 2000. GDP, broadly speaking, increases.
It’s all over the place. So it’s clear people are becoming more and more unhappy as, broadly speaking, wealth is increasing. And there’s a second chart, which I didn’t bring today, but it’s very striking, where perceived happiness in 150 societies in the world is plotted against a general indicator of material well-being. And what is striking is that you have societies to the left of the chart with extremely low general material well-being. Health, wealth, life expectancy are all low.
Many African societies, such as Malawi, is is a case in point, and yet the population’s ranking of its own happiness is as high or higher than that of almost all Western societies. So this is the paradox the West is faced with, and that is why I think we should listen to the Tibetans in this matter, because and this is not just things I I have read. One of my closest friends when I was young was Major Archibald Jack, who was British envoy to Tibet in the nineteen thirties. So he was in Tibet before the Chinese occupation. He met the then regent of Tibet.
He was actually a member of British Secret Intelligence Service. His official task was communication with the Tibetans. His official task was charting infrastructure in Tibet. And this gentleman, who was not a Buddhist, an officer in the British Army, a major, told me how struck he had been by the extraordinary level of happiness in Tibetan society among the wealthy and among the poor. So this seems to indicate that the Tibetans are onto something, and the Buddhist tradition in general is onto something with its concept of mental development.
Now it is revolutionary for Westerners to be told that the less self esteem you have, the happier you will be. Because all of pop psychology, which we imbibe by the liter, tells us exactly the opposite, doesn’t it? If you go on Yahoo, or any of these sites which cover pop psychology, you are told that you are unhappy because of low self esteem. Your relationships don’t work because you aren’t standing up for yourself. And generally speaking, the more self assertive, and basically by Asian and Buddhist standards, the more aggressive one is, the happier one will be.
I would put it to you, this is untested advice. And I remember when I was in The UK, I had many friends who were in the milieu of psychotherapy and psychiatry, or professional psychotherapists and psychiatrists. I used to be appalled at their own instability, and I remember thinking to myself, holy moly, it’s like giving to someone with a sledgehammer the task of fixing a watch. These people are themselves miserable. How can they help others?
Right? Then you can see when you meet Tibetan monks, let alone Tibetan masters in India, clearly there is something. Clearly, they are happy. They are happy with almost nothing. As refugees with no rights, they don’t even have an Indian passport, no money, no benefits, no health care, often as offerings.
Very often offerings of fodder and momo. Then this is the challenge that Tibetans are setting us. Why is it possible to be that happy with nothing? And why are we who have everything so unhappy? And the answer the Tibetans give, and it’s in that verse, is through viewing oneself as the lowest among all, through developing humility, through eliminating self-cherishing, through progressively placing others higher and higher, as a corollary of that, our own happiness increases.
Now, you might think think this is just pious preaching, and as someone put it very bluntly to me three years ago, after all, she said, you are paid to say this. Then my answer to her was I don’t get a penny, and if that’s that’s the way you feel, then we’ll be happy to refund you, you know. But that was the person had interiorized the Western capitalist message. It’s all about money and it’s all about me. That creates extraordinary levels of unhappiness.
If the Tibetans are right, as far as mental development are concerned, our society is completely wrong, and that’s a big challenge for us. Now, there’s a lot of evidence which points out that the Tibetans and the Buddhist tradition in general may be right. The first is research in cognitive psychology, and Anila is more competent than I in the field. But in the last decade or so, there has been a surprising amount of research showing that the more people are involved in work for others, in work for charities, which normally should make them more unhappy because they’re spending less time with themselves, the more they’re involved charity work, the happier they are. It’s only in the last decade this research has come out from cognitive psychologist who had no reason to subscribe to this view.
And when I was in Dharmasala, I was contacted by a Danish psychiatrist who was a specialist of the effects the psychiatric effects of torture. It’s a rather ghastly field to investigate, but he was working for several large NGOs, including Amnesty International. So he had studied the psychological and psychiatric damage, torture inflicted on people who were its victims in South America, in Uruguay, in Argentina, in Chile where torture was massively practiced. And he had been then assigned to Delek Hospital in Dharmasala to study the Tibetan victims of torture, at the hands of the Chinese. There were some horrible cases.
One nun especially was was tortured to the point she she took refuge in India eventually, but her sternum was jutting out of her chest. They were never able to repair that, and she would attend the teachings and there was a piece of bone just coming out of her chest. And he he contact me and he said he was professionally in a very difficult situation because what he saw at Delek Hospital was totally contradictory with everything he had seen in South America. He said in South America, the victims of torture were very badly damaged psychologically. They were unable to constitute human relationships.
They lived in fear and anguish. They had nightmares, everything you would expect, basically. He found that many of the Tibetan victims of torture at Delek Hospital were not only mentally sound, but remarkably happy by the standards of normal people. And he asked me point blank blank what this was. Then I said to him, didn’t feel, I I still don’t feel that one can understand the Tibetans without understanding Buddhism.
The Tibetans are one of these societies in the world where the Buddhist teachings have suffused the society societies the almost. And I proposed to him to come to Sera monastery, I was a monk at the period, and to get in touch with the Sera Je health care center, which handled health at the monastery, to see how Tibetans handled pain and suffering. So he came, you know, he spent a month with us. They took him to the tuberculosis center where many Tibetans were terminal with MDR TB, multidrug resistant TB, and in death remained happy. And he wrote it up actually.
So this is a clear sign that as far as mental development is concerned, these traditions of mental transformation do work. And then what I would suggest to you, and then we’ll make time for your questions, is the best way to test this is to leave our westernness aside. Just put it in a corner for a couple months, maybe a year or two. Try these techniques. Proof is in the pudding.
Try them on your own mind and see whether after a couple of weeks, a couple of months, you are happier or less happy. If you are happier, then there is something going on. If you’re less happy, then return to yahoo.com or whatever the pop psychology is. Then do you have any questions on this? Yes.
One of the signatures of depression in Westerners is expectations which cannot be satisfied. So the society sets the expectation level very high in terms of money, in terms of relationships, in terms of health, in terms of looks. Not everyone has a means for that level of money, that quality of relationship, those good looks, and that good health. Then when the person is unable to get what the society standard is broadcast at, this generates self hatred. It does not arise from low self esteem.
It does not arise from humility, as you point out so rightly. It arises from excessive excessive ego. An ego which is angry because what it feels, what society is telling it it should have, it does not have. So one of the easiest ways from a Buddhist standpoint of handling depression is to teach a person meditation techniques to bring the expectation level down. The key to mind training is to make the expectation levels crash.
Not only am I not getting getting what I feel I should have, but actually from the standpoint of mind training, nothing is owed to me. Not only am I not, as we are taught in the Western, innocent victim of a brutal outside world which does not understand my great qualities, but actually every single experience of suffering I have is a direct result of my own deeds. Then the moment this happens, our entire outlook changes. And I think causes of depression disappear, because it’s almost an epidemic in the West, and if you’ve lived, which was my case in an extraordinary poor country as India, Western depression is almost impossible to understand. There’s just there’s no there’s no explanation why people who have so much are so upset, angry, and dissatisfied.
I think it’s the expectations. So that’s where these techniques, whether we believe in past lives not, are very powerful to train the mind. You can practice Lojong without ever believing in past lives. It will still help your mind. Yes?
I think the basic The basic problem with this text, if there is a problem, is as Anila pointed out so rightly, it was part of the secret tradition in Tibet. It’s not a beginner’s text. Mind training was a secret practice, and this text starts at the level of the Mahāyāna. So it is much better when one is dealing with people who have no exposure to the teachings and who have a lot of mental sufferings to start below the practice of the being of small scope. So I I personally feel one of the very big problems we have now with the Lamrim is that the Lamrim was composed or designed by Atisha, by Je Tsongkhapa, their successors, for a Buddhist society.
So it starts up here. The premise of the Lamrim, which is never explained, is that everyone believes in past and future lives. They don’t really understand them, but they believe in them. Everyone believes in karma and causality. Everyone believes the existence of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Arhat, and so forth.
We are not there. So if there is a work Western Buddhists or those interested in Buddhism in the West have to do, it is to build up that section below the practice of the being of small scope. How do we explain to people why it is worthwhile to be religious? Then how do we explain to them there is something after this death and something before this life? How do we make a strong case for that?
It has to be strong. Then how do we explain to them something which is completely counterintuitive? That the more we try to achieve our own happiness, the more we destroy what we are trying to construct. The more we try to help others, the more we construct what we are not trying to build. It’s very striking.
And then these great texts, perhaps they have to be kept hidden, you know. Does that answer your question? Are there other No. That’s that’s not the understanding of the Buddha nature in Buddhist thought. Low self esteem is a Western problem.
It’s a Western problem which arises, as we said, from extreme expectations in a cult of the self. It’s something we have had for twenty five centuries. It arise at the fusion of Greek philosophy and Christian thought. Buddhist societies have a big advantage because basically, all Buddhist societies and I’ll put it in simpler terms, you’ll forgive me if I put it in these ways, all Asian societies are taught humility. We are not taught humility.
You look at how Asian children are raised. Asian children are raised to obey their parents. They are raised to be part of a community, the family community. They’re not raised to be creative. They are raised to conform with the values of their society.
Now, the truth of the matter is this works. What we have created in the West doesn’t work. Creativity cannot be taught. People have it or they don’t. Great geniuses, like Einstein or Newton, were not taught to be creative.
There was something special about them. In teaching children to be creative, what we have ended up doing is creating entire generations which are totally desocialized. They have put themselves around above everybody else, and we see the results now. I mean, our sociological statistics are catastrophic. Rates of divorce are skyrocketing.
Never have westerners preach so much to others relationships. Family life has never been so unsatisfying. Westerners preach to the world about how to raise children. Ours are societies in which people do not collaborate with with each other. We go and we hector societies in which people actually do collaborate with each other.
So I think we have to practice introspection. We have to look at what went wrong. I think really what went wrong is a cult of the self, and I think that is why so many of us are interested in Buddhism, because Buddhism offers another option. Maybe there is a way for us to develop spiritually within the context of non-self philosophy. Maybe, you know.
It’s a challenge for us. It’s a big challenge. Does that answer your question? Develop on it perhaps. Truth is in the pudding.
I think it is something we have to try. All of us have been taught all our lives that we are the most important persons in the world. It’s very difficult for us to understand the world will continue turning and nobody will care when we are no longer there. Then we encounter a tradition which teaches us exactly the opposite of what have we have been taught for thirty, forty, fifty years, which teaches us that we are completely unimportant. The less important we think we are, the happier and more successful we will be.
Now there are entire societies which function on this model, and these societies are becoming the dominant societies in the world. I mean, we are now in this country, in many respect has beens. The West is a has been. In the last ten years, there’s been a gigantic transfer of West to Asia. These are societies which have a different outlook on the person.
This outlook is rooted in Buddhist philosophy. They have moved away from this, but it is still rooted in Buddhist philosophy in the same way we are rooted, even though we have moved away from Christianity, in Christian philosophy. So their extraordinary success, their capacity to cooperate with each other, which we have lost, we have failed at that, that is a challenge for us. And you find the roots of that in these texts. I mean, someone who is Chinese, someone who is Japanese, you have seen how the Japanese handled the Fukushima crisis, Tsunami.
Somebody who is Japanese puts himself lowest of all, bows. Then in a crisis, such a person handles hardship better than we do. Such such a person cooperates with others. These societies are doing much better than our societies. I mean, they lend us money so that we can consume.
What does that say about us? So that’s a little bit the challenge of Buddhist thought. Then we have to stop here for today, so we have five minutes before the teachings. What I would like to encourage you to do is not just that this text remain a text which was written one thousand years ago in Tibet, totally unrelated to us nowadays, nowadays, but that you connect these teachings with our present situation and with what people call nowadays Asian values. Asian values are not something we in the West can dismiss casually.
They are the dominant values of the future, and they are rooted in Buddhist thought. There’s not the totality of Asian values by all means, but key elements. Then if we ourselves become Buddhist, we have to understand that we would have to take on board a large part of Asian values. This is closeness to our parents, closeness to our family, family, putting oneself not first, but last. Respect for all teachers, not just a spiritual teacher.
The person who teaches you to drive is a teacher who merits respect. And these are all the problems which cause problems for Westerners, because we become Buddhists here in the head, but we don’t become Buddhists here in the heart. Then thank you very much.