Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Plamo teaches the second paramita, patience, as the antidote to anger and the foundation of spiritual strength. Drawing on classical sources including Śāntideva’s parable of the earth covered in thorns, she explains that we cannot control the external world, so we must instead cultivate a spacious, unshakeable mind. She illustrates this through the story of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who transformed her dislike of a difficult nun by changing her own attitude, discovering that the other woman was not the problem—her reaction was. Plamo emphasizes that difficult people and adverse circumstances are spiritual teachers, not obstacles; she challenges the misconception that patience is passive, arguing instead that it is a sign of deep strength. She connects this to the human realm’s unique advantage: enough suffering to motivate growth, enough ease to avoid despair. The teaching concludes with practical application in family and workplace relationships, where real transformation happens. The talk then briefly introduces enthusiastic effort, noting that perseverance—not mere motivation—is what accomplishes anything worthwhile, spiritual or otherwise.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 The Six Perfections.mp3
UUID: ec15c69d-426a-48bc-b50c-eb330b62eb6e
Teacher: Plamo
Collection: The Six Perfections (Plamo)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,034
So good afternoon. This afternoon, we’re dealing with the next paramitas, the paramita of of patience or tolerance, and then hopefully also that of enthusiastic effort. In ancient India, as in many spiritual traditions, there is a current of austerity. That austerity in Sanskrit is tapasya. And in India, it was in the form of very severe fasting.
The Buddha himself, for example, fasted until he was eating only a single grain of rice a day, and if you pushed his stomach you could come out on the other side of his backbone. Or standing for years with one hand in the air or standing and not sitting down, standing on one foot, standing in the Indian summer in the midst of four fires with the sun above as the fifth fire. These things which people do even to today, these are called tapasya, austerities. And the Buddha said, forget about all those. The greatest tapasya is patience.
Now, idea of patience is basically two things, although they come together. It’s having patience and tolerance towards difficult people and towards adverse conditions and circumstances. It’s to have that kind of mind which is very open and very spacious. Consider, each one of us is just one. And then there’s so there’s one me.
And then in this world there are billions of non mes. How is it possible that all those non mes are going to do everything and say everything and act exactly how I want them to act? There’s so many of them and so only one of me. It’s not possible. So what are we going to do about that?
How are we going to spend our life going around trying to make everybody do and say exactly what we want them to do and say, act exactly how we think they should act in order that we should be peaceful. This is not possible. The example is given by the seventh century Indian philosopher Śāntideva in the Bodhicaryāvatāra where he says that the earth is full of stones and thorns, and as we walk around on this earth, we’re bound to be stubbing our toes all the time on sharp flints or on these thorns. So what are we going to do to protect our feet? Are we going to carpet the whole earth?
Are we going to put, you know, carpet like this over the whole earth so it will be smooth to our the soles of our feet? This is not possible. I mean, Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch combined couldn’t carpet the whole earth. But we don’t need to. We don’t need to go to such extremes.
All we need is a piece of leather beneath our soles in the form of sandals or shoes, and we can walk anywhere. So likewise, we cannot create a world in which all circumstances and all the beings are going to act in accordance with our wishes. That’s not possible and very exhausting to even think about it. But if we if we armor our own mind with patience and tolerance, then we can deal with any situation. We can deal with any people.
So this idea of patience is a very important quality of the mind, not to lose it every time something or someone troubles us, annoys us, doesn’t do what we want them to do, doesn’t say what we want them to say, and we get upset, we get angry, we get irritated. Anger is a very interesting emotion. Going around from east to west and north to south all over. In whatever country, as I said before, there are two questions, two main questions which come up everywhere. One is, how do I find a spiritual master?
Think partly people ask this out of guidance. They need a sense of wanting to have someone to guide them. But also some people ask it out of this fantasy if they could only meet the perfect spiritual master somehow or other, all their problems would be solved. They don’t understand that probably that’s when their problems really begin. And the second question which is asked again and again is how do I deal with anger?
Because anger is an unpleasant feeling. Anger, we don’t like being angry. It makes us feel uncomfortable and people don’t like us. They don’t admire us. So we don’t want to be angry.
We want to rid ourselves of anger. As I said before, in a way the much profounder emotion of attachment we enjoy, the idea of clinging and greed and these things we don’t want to be rid of, provided that our greed is sometimes fulfilled. You know, we like desiring things, providing that sometimes we get the objects of our desires. So that’s a much harder emotion to get rid of and to transform because we like it. We don’t really want to get rid of it.
But anger we don’t like. Anger on the whole is universally understood to be negative. And so in this way it’s much easier to get rid of. And the Buddha himself said that although karmically it was at least eight times more heavy than attachment, it was much easier to get rid of because we don’t like it. So we’re happy to be rid of it.
Now there are various levels on which we can approach this and we’re not going to deal with it in very great detail. The first thing is, I think, to understand that we can change. We can change our attitude. Seeing, for example, someone we don’t like as a problem, as a difficulty, as something which we want to get rid of, we could try to see that they are actually a great opportunity for us to learn. If you take this quality of patience, we need to have difficult circumstances and difficult people in our lives in order to cultivate it.
You do understand that. You can’t cultivate this quality if you don’t have anything challenging you. So if you are continually meeting with people who are very kind and loving and friendly and helpful, that’s absolutely wonderful. But you kind of get sort of spiritually flabby. You know what I mean?
I mean, personally, this is a problem for me because, you know, usually people are really very nice to me. They’re not usually not nice. And so one gets lulled into this false sense of one’s own niceness. Because it’s very easy to be nice to people who are nice. Right?
And then if I walk into an Indian bank and the bankers are obnoxious, then I go then I see it. Right. There it is. Not gonna weigh. And and then you can you can decide.
You know, you can be obnoxious back. Or you can think, wow, thank you. You know, this is my opportunity now to really transform the situation and not answer back in the obvious way, to really value the fact that one can use people who are being difficult and obstreperous and, you know, just plain ordinary as a real spiritual friend. There are spiritual helpers on the path because without them we could never learn to develop patience and tolerance and basically loving kindness because you know it’s easy to be loving towards someone who’s lovable but the challenge is to be loving towards someone who is absolutely horrible. You do understand.
Yes, I can see that. Okay. In France, at the end of the nineteenth century, in Normandy, there was this very devout Catholic family and husband and wife, they had five daughters who all became nuns. Now four of these girls joined the same small Carmelite nunnery and amongst this the youngest daughter was called Therese. Now Therese is quite an interesting lady.
She joined the Carmelites when she was fifteen and she died of tuberculosis when she was twenty four. She is now Saint Therese of Lisieux and the patron saint of France along with Joan of Arc. She lived in this small, Carmelite nunnery with about thirty nuns. Now imagine, you’re in a small enclosed order with these thirty women. You didn’t choose which women were going to go into that order.
You didn’t choose all your best friends and say, oh, let’s hang out together. You don’t know who’s going to be in there before you, but those are the only people you are ever going to see for the rest of your life. That’s it. So she was in this small enclosed nunnery in which her elder sister was the abbess. And there was one woman in this nunnery, one nun, who she absolutely couldn’t abide.
She didn’t like anything about this woman. I mean she didn’t like the way she looked, she didn’t like the way she talked, didn’t like the way she smelled, she didn’t like the way she walked, she didn’t like anything about her. Therese was a little bit oversensitive sometimes. And everything about this woman just grated on her nerves. What was worse, in the chapel where they regularly went for prayer and contemplation, was this kind of stone chapel which sort of echoed.
This woman was sitting in front of her, of Therese, and during the silent periods this woman would make sort of clicking noises. And she never exactly knew when she would click. So she would sit there bathed in a cold sweat waiting for the next click. And she had very sensitive hearing so she heard it very clearly. And I mean she just couldn’t abide this woman but she couldn’t escape her.
There they were locked together in this small convent for the rest of her life. And so she said, well, what to do? I mean, you can’t spend the rest of your life trying to escape down another corridor every time you see someone coming. And this woman wasn’t about to change. So Therese thought, well, obviously there’s something about this woman which is really good because God called her to be one of the brides of Christ, so she must have something going for her somewhere.
How about if I change my attitude to her. So instead of trying to avoid her in this small house, she went out of her way to befriend her. And she gave her, when they met, her very nicest smile, really from her heart, not just from her mouth, but really, really putting her whole self into this nice friendly smile. She started making her little gifts to give to her and doing everything she could to think how to make this woman happy. Until the other nun said, I really don’t know why you love me so much, said Therese.
And Therese thought, well, if only you knew. But the fact was that it worked and that suddenly this woman was no problem anymore. She she actually began to be quite fond of her. Now nothing had actually changed. I mean, I’m still sure she was still clicking away like anything.
But everything had changed. Everything changed because Therese changed. Do you see? It wasn’t like some big miracle, you know, anything miraculous happened or, you know, God intervened and changed a woman. Nothing.
Something very simple. But that’s the message. We think that things are how they are and they cannot ever change. But that is not true. If we change, if we change and we change our attitude, everything changes.
And what was once a big insurmountable problem suddenly opens up and is discovered as a wonderful new opportunity. Do you understand? And this is for everything. I’m not, of course, if people are suffering from a very heavily abusive relationship or something like that. I’m not suggesting that you just smile and allow yourself to be beaten to a pulp.
I’m not saying that. I mean, that that would be entirely inappropriate. It would also be uncompassionate. I mean, are times when kindness and compassion can take on a very wrathful form. It’s not always gentle.
It’s not always submissive. But here we’re dealing with this question of anger and in normal circumstances what to do. When I was in India, after I had left the cave and just before I went to Italy, I went down south to South India with some friends. And my friend wanted to consult an astrologer. So we went to see this astrologer, and I said to him, Look, I have two choices.
Either I can go back into retreat or I can start a nunnery. So which would which should I do? So he looked it up and then he said, well, if you go back into retreat, very quiet, very harmonious, very nice and pleasurable and peaceful. If you start a nunnery, lots of problems, lots of conflicts and difficulties. But those are good, so you decide for yourself.
So I thought, right, back into retreat. And then I mentioned this to a Catholic priest whom I knew, and he said, well, it’s obvious. You start in the nunnery. He said, We are like rough pieces of wood, and if we are always stroked with silk and velvet, we never get smooth. We need sandpaper.
It’s sandpaper that gets us smooth. And if we think of this, then the adverse circumstances of our life take on some meaning. They are our sandpaper by which we learn, by which we cultivate, by which we measure how things are really going on inside us. And when we begin to see that adverse circumstances and people who really annoy us and trouble us are actually our greatest helpers and friends, And let’s not be pious. You do understand that’s the reality of the situation.
These really help us. They are really our helpers because without that we cannot learn, we cannot develop, we stay stunted. It’s very easy to wander around in a cloud of love and joy and bliss when everything’s sort of okay. But what about when it isn’t okay? Then we have to get off our bliss cloud and we have to deal with the situation as it is right in front of us.
So it’s really very important what we’re talking about here. I mean, in recent years, many lamas have been released from twenty, twenty five, thirty years of imprisonment in Tibet, Their only crime being, of course, that they were lamas around the time of the communist takeover. And so many they had no crime. They just happened to you to be in the wrong position at the wrong time. And yet when you meet them, when and the majority there must be exceptions, but all the ones I have met, they sometimes are physically rather debilitated, but now they’re quite old.
But their eyes are shining, their eyes are glowing as if they had been in twenty or thirty years of retreat. And they say how grateful they are to the Chinese because without that, they never would have had the challenge to really learn how to develop universal compassion and love and patience and understanding of and genuine concern and care for one’s tormentors. And so they’re grateful. You see, you have a choice. You can go under.
You can be bitter. You can be revengeful. You can feel frustrated. You can say, these bastards took all my life and I hadn’t done anything, and God, I hope they really suffer in hells for the next, you know, how many eons? And you can have that anger and frustration and bitterness in your heart, And then you’ve blighted your life completely.
Or you can have understanding, compassion, genuine sense even of gratitude, which is what they feel gratitude for helping them on their path to really develop qualities which they had read about only in books and up until that point had never really had to fully develop. And then your life has meaning and joy. It’s up to you. No one can do it for you. We are not in this world just to have a good time.
That’s the ultimate message. In Buddhist cosmology, there are many levels of being, many realms of being, and in one way above the human realm are the twenty-six deva or celestial realms of increasing subtlety until eventually they no longer had form, the gods are androgynous and then they had no form at all. They’re just mind spaces. But what is common about all these twenty six levels of increasingly subtle pleasure is the pleasure. Whether it’s very gross, sensual type of pleasure with pink footed nymphs.
It’s a male heaven. Or whether it’s a realm of neither perception nor non perception and infinite consciousness. The point is there is no suffering. And so from a Buddhist point of view, this is not a good thing Because if you have no suffering, you have no chance to really advance on the spiritual path. Right?
I mean, it’s not that we have to go out looking for suffering. It will come. But when it comes, we have to be ready for it. We have to know that this is something which we should not always try to be avoiding, That maybe this is really a way for us to learn lessons here. This is the point of the human birth.
From a Buddhist point of view, the higher realms are too blissful and you don’t learn anything. You get lulled into security because these heavenly realms are not permanent. They last a long time but when the karma of the beings is exhausted for being in that realm, they come back down. And then they’re in trouble because they’ve been pampered for so long. On the other hand, in the lower realms, the suffering is often so extreme that you’re completely obsessed in your own pain and misfortune.
You have no time to think of others or even to develop inwardly. So the human realm is considered to be ideal because we supposedly have intelligence and we also have choice. We have that balance between pain and pleasure. Enough pain to keep us awake and enough pleasure that we don’t totally despair. And we have to appreciate that and not always be looking for everything to be just lovely.
Do you understand? So that when things do go wrong, when we do meet people who are difficult, instead of despairing or or trying to, you know, run away or drug ourselves into not acknowledging it, we we make use of that. We think, how can we learn from this circumstance of this person? And we make use of it. We use our intelligence.
So this question of patience isn’t something passive. It’s something very active. It’s something very intelligent. But it’s very important. And it’s also important, you know, towards circumstances to have that kind openness that when things go well, then we’re happy, but when things don’t go so well, we’re also it’s okay.
You know, we can deal with it. Not that we’re all up and down the whole time. To be like a mountain, very stable, so that whatever winds are blowing against the mountain, the mountain doesn’t shake. The first book I ever read on Buddhism was a book called The Mind Unshaken. And I started to read it just because I liked the title.
And that’s what we need. We need a mind which is unshaken. Unshaken by pleasure and unshaken by pain. Because whether pleasure or pain, we can use both on the spiritual path. And if we have a mind like that, then that is a very fearless mind because we live our whole lives trying to avoid pain and attract pleasure.
And so therefore we’re very afraid there will be more pain than there will be pleasure. And this creates a very insecure and fearful mind because we know we can never have it all one way without having the other. But if we are able to deal with this spacious, grounded mind, if we can deal both with that side and with that side, then where is the fear? There is no hope and fear in that kind of mind. Whatever comes, we can deal with it.
Whoever comes, we can deal with it. Do you understand? I mean, I I want to express this because I don’t want you to think that patience just means being very flabby and and passive and and not being able to, you know, answer back or something. It’s like but it’s not that. It’s something very strong.
Someone who is really patient and doesn’t hit back is much stronger than the person who hits. We have, you know, unfortunately, very macho culture in which if somebody annoys you, you just bash them up or blow them up or kick them in the face, and that’s the solution. But of course it’s not the solution to anything as we know very well. If something upsets and annoys us maybe we really look into our own mind. There’s that thing in I’m just thinking of movies, since in movies people get blown up.
But there was that Star Wars. There’s that one scene where what’s his name? Skywalker? Is facing the dark emperor and he’s getting very angry and he’s really, you know, verbally abusing the dark emperor and saying, you know, he will always be against him and all his evil ways and da da da da And the dark emperor is saying, yes, go for it. Get angry.
Hate me. Want to destroy me. Because as long as you are angry towards me, as long as you hate me, you are on our side. Now that was very profound. Of course, after that, they’re all fighting and blowing each other up again.
But actually that was very, very true. So patience is a great strength. It’s not a weakness. To really be able to use anger as an aid on the path is an incredible strength. Instead of becoming angry, instead of losing it, to really be able to transform it.
I mean, there are many ways. One way is this way, which we’re talking about in this perfection of patience, which is to understand that the person who makes us angry is our greatest spiritual benefactor. And therefore, far from being upset with them, we should be grateful to them. Beyond that is the quality of being able to make use of the anger itself, but that is quite difficult, so I’m not going to discuss it here. But even in ordinary life, you know, we miss out so much if we are unable to deal with discomfort, for example, because we’ve all become so soft.
I remember there was this group of Taiwanese. They were from Taiwan and they had gone to visit this very high lama who’s now passed away in Nepal. And he lived up on a hill behind Boudhanath stupa. And they arrived there one evening, and the next day they were going to get a week of teaching from this lama. He was a very special lama and especially skillful in pointing out the inherent nature of the mind.
So they were very lucky to be getting a week of teaching from this lama. And then the next day when the translator went there to help translate for them, the Lama said, Well, actually they’ve left. And he said, Well, why did they leave? Where have they gone? And he said, Well, they didn’t like the bathrooms.
And then the lama sighed and he said, Dharma good, toilets no good. And so they left. And they lost this unique opportunity to get this teaching because they didn’t have tolerance. Because I mean, I was there. I don’t even remember the toilet so it couldn’t have been that bad.
I mean, come on. You know, that that inability to put up with a little bit of discomfort, to put up with the difficulties of the other people around us. Now when we’re dealing with taking the Dharma into everyday life, where better to exercise this practice of patience than within the family and within one’s colleagues and with the people that one is dealing with every day. It is obviously much easier to be patient and understanding with strangers on the whole. But our real challenge comes from the people who are close to us.
Now some of you, I’m sure, get on beautifully with your families, and you never have any arguments, and everything is absolute complete bliss and joy. And it’s as if you were in a celestial realm. And that’s wonderful. But for the rest, One of the problems in families is that we do get locked into patterns, as I said before. And we get locked into very often unhealthy patterns.
And then we are unable from these. And so it’s really important to develop this quality of how to put it of in a way of standing back and looking at the situation, of seeing ourselves, of hearing ourselves. That’s why I said earlier about having a video camera because for some people that might be the only way that they could see and hear themselves. But to see and hear ourselves, the tone of voice, Oh, but I only said this and this and this, we report later. But it wasn’t what we said, it was how we said it.
That tone of voice, way we act, the body language, everything, you know, which sets off this, you know, I said to him, then he said to me, and then I said to him, and then he said know, in the middle of it, you know, the way we relate to the children and the way the children relate to themselves, it’s all interconnected. And this is our field of practice. You do see that, don’t you? I mean, is where we have to transform. This is our Carmelite nunnery.
It’s no good having loving kindness for the rest of the world if we cannot deal with those who are closest to us. We have to start where we are. For some reason there is some karmic relationships here, we’re interconnected, we are responsible for each other. We have to deal with that. It doesn’t mean necessarily that, for example, sometimes there are partners who really are very mismatched and it would obviously be better if they parted.
I don’t mean that you have to stay together forever and ever, Amen, just because. It’s a way of practicing patience. Nonetheless, while one is in any kind of relationship, even if one is going to separate or not separate, At the time of being together and with what we have at this moment, this is our opportunity to learn and to develop and to cultivate and to create something more positive out of something which possibly has become very negative. Not to ditch that whole thing and say let’s try again somewhere else. Or to just carry on with it because we’re too tired and worn down to think how to get out of it.
We all have the possibility for change. It doesn’t matter how long something has been going, how long we have been acting, how we have been acting and speaking how we have speaking. We can change. And so when something is not right, when something is negative, when something is out of balance, then this is our opportunity to really try to work out how to bring it back into balance again. After all, if you take relationships between people, originally they must have liked each other, otherwise why did they come together?
So then what’s wrong? Originally they must have interrelated in a fairly acceptable manner. Otherwise, why would they be together? So that is our area of practice. That is the area where we can really learn, really see what is going on inside ourselves.
Not putting the blame all on the other, not putting the blame on ourselves, but just trying to see the situation. See it clearly. And then deciding whether there is something which can be done or whether there is nothing which can be done. But what I’m trying to say is that this, the situations which we are in, in our workplace, in our families, in our relationships, this is our arena of practice. This is where we have to work.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not romantic. It’s not esoteric and exotic. But this is when we make some use of this lifetime. We are all where we are because of causes which we ourselves have created.
Now what are we going to do with it? How are we going to use this situation? That’s up to us. Okay. Now this question of enthusiastic energy, does it make you feel exhausted?
Makes me feel exhausted. You see, we never can accomplish anything if we don’t really try, if we don’t have some ongoing perseverance. On the spiritual path, the two qualities most needed are patience and perseverance. Patience in the ordinary sense that people, they sit down, they want to meditate and then after two or three sessions they say, Oh, I can’t meditate, Too many thoughts. And they give up.
No patience, no perseverance. But nothing worthwhile, nothing worthwhile was ever accomplished without diligence, without perseverance, without effort. I mean, no, no, Here in Australia, you’re going to be holding the Olympics. Now you think of those athletes. What each one of those athletes has gone through, even just to be selected.
You know that they they change their diets, they change their they give up, you know, I’m sure none of them smoke. None of them, probably none of them or hardly any of them ever drink alcohol. They have very rigid diets. They get up early. They go to bed early.
They train all day long, they’re completely one pointed. Everything is sacrificed. Everything is sacrificed. For what? To get a medal.
And here we are talking about enlightenment. And if you say to somebody, maybe you should