Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 25-minute panel discussion, Buddhist teachers address a central concern from lay practitioners: fitting meditation into a busy life of work and family. Their answer reframes meditation itself. You don’t need hours of retreat time; fifteen minutes daily suffices, and ordinary tasks become meditation when done with mindfulness and concentration—feeding a child, driving, social work. Examples include the lay saint Marpa and a teacher’s 57-year testimony of daily practice. One panelist offers a counterpoint, framing meditation as a vertical ascent toward detachment and wisdom, arguing you cannot have both worldly life and spiritual liberation. Practical and philosophical, for busy practitioners seeking permission to practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1997-09-14 – 2A – Exploring the World of Buddhism – KR.mp3
UUID: 227a9864-8f06-4012-9cc7-ad220cf10039
Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche
Collection: Public Talks
Date: 1997-09-14
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~1,994
# Exploring the World of Buddhism 2a 1997-09-14
**Collection:** Rinpoche Recordings — Public Talks and Events
**Duration:** 25.1 minutes
**Words:** 1,998
**Model:** Deepgram Nova-3
**Corrections applied:** 0
**Transcribed:** 2026-02-27 18:44
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Mean to be a better person. The question, I think we’re not too sure which member of the panel is going to reply to this one. I work and have a family and don’t have time for meditation. How can Buddhism help me to be a better person? This is really no problem.
We can still practice the Buddha Dharma extremely well. I mean, there have been many great past masters who were lay persons who had a family life, who carried on various activities. And one of the most illustrious is that of Marpa who was a great saint of Tibetan Buddhism. There have been those lay people who carried on business, who had families, who actually attained liberation and Buddhahood. So having a busy schedule is not really a problem.
But we have to mainly, as was explained previously, concern ourselves with the development of a kind heart. Try to look upon others with the eyes of love and compassion. Try to benefit others as much as you can. This should be anyone’s main practice whether whoever they are, however much time they may have. Whether you meditate or not, you should seek to relate with others in terms of a kind heart.
But also we all, anyone can begin to curtail the negativities that they enact through their body, speech, and mind. This is the basis of the practice, to not involve ourselves in negative actions, but try to act more skillfully. Then you’ll be happy. Maybe. As was mentioned, the great master Marpa, he said that if we don’t practice, it doesn’t make any difference how much we sit in meditation. We aren’t going to get anywhere.
Even if we would go to the top of a mountain, we won’t progress in our practice. But if, on the contrary, we practice in our everyday life, we will get very far. Yes. Same question. Thanks.
Master said that if you’re busy, you got kids and jobs to do, how can we meditate throughout the busy time? He said that if we have the target, the things that we want to get, so we must give out the will that we must get this. So he say, in our daily life, twenty-four hours, we eat, we sleep, we work, took a lot of time. So we must give out at least half an hour or one hour or even fifteen minutes to practice meditation in at least fifteen minutes. Try to organize the things in the social life or in the family life so that you can have fifteen minutes or half an hour to practice meditation.
One of the psychologist, I think Henry Thoreau, one of the great psychologist, he said that if we are, when you are standing here and somebody call you and you start to shake. Yeah. Shock or something like a shock. Then for that moment of a shock, you lose sixteen hours of living. Sixteen hours of living. And if you have been healthy, if you’re happy, calm, then you will gain sixteen hours of living. So depend how you choose between that, whether you lose sixteen hours of living or gain sixteen hours, it will depend. We must say, sometime you’re gonna get used with practice meditations during daily life. But once you started and keep this schedule for that, and then you wouldn’t turn it away.
You will say that one day, must have about fifteen minutes or half an hour to practice, and you will find the loving kindness and also the calm and the purity, purify the purity of the mind. The monastery life, I started at the year of eight. My teacher taught me how to meditate. But up until now, I’m sixty-five. I still keep in that method, and I find very, very benefit, a lot of benefit from doing meditations. So master also say that if you want him to fast for one day, he would do it. But if he not letting him meditate for one hour, he will find difficulty or he will find something that he will be a great loss to him. So master say, if you practice meditations, firstly, you will find a lot of difficulties. If you read in the books or watching the film, it’s very smooth going. But if you sit for half an hour meditating, you’ll find very, very difficulty because the foot is itchy. The head is thinking a lot of things. So but he say that don’t worry. Keep persevere, and you’ll reach the goal one day. Say but keep try to organize about fifteen to half an hour a day just for that and keep practice constantly.
Don’t one day practice and then two days stop, and then that would not help in calming of the mind. And if you keep doing that, you will find the life much more easier in your daily life. And the other thing is he say that doing meditation is not too exactly distinct from the social life, social activity. Meditation can you can put into the work that you have done. Like, for example, if you’re doing some social work, like social worker or driving a vehicle, then you must concentrate on the speech, the thought, and the actions.
And that’s what we call meditation as well. The same when you care for the child. Think about the child as a meditating object. It’s because it’s the child and think of other and care for him or her, feeding him or her in a concentrated way. Do this. When I feed the child, I know that I feed the child.
When I change the nappy of the child, I know that I’m changing the nappy of the child. Doing every step and following those step in the mindfulness, then that is called the essence of meditation. Thank you. If we look at the question of meditation in one’s daily life, then you got to remember we wish to meditate while we want to live a life in the world, and most of us want also the attainment of nirvana. The two have to be very carefully coupled together.
Therefore, in my own interpretation, in my own tradition, it is that meditation is first the acquisition, gaining of a mastery over one’s physical body and the mind. We insist on the conjoint operation that you can sit like this and relax and feel no constraint of your body. And with your eyes closed and automatically shutting out all the senses out there, your wide angle, the telephoto, everything is covered. Then within that period of meditation, looking at my own authentic text in our tradition, we say you also need to bring a certain amount of intellection. You’ve got to intellectually look at what we are doing.
That is the point at which we claim we need every one of us, you and me, to develop a dignified detachment, even temporarily though, from the humdrum of life. With the newly bought chicken in the back of your car and the ice cream in the seat, you can come and sit for meditation. That is melting away. The other one is running or whatever it be. Even temporarily, though, we have one word which we use, which temporarily cut off connections and then think the rest of the world doesn’t exist. And at that point, you teach yourself the worth of pursuing these various forms of stimulation that comes to you from the senses. I wouldn’t call them stimulation. I would say bombardments. So you got to get your bearings.
When the world keeps bombarding at you, you gotta immunize yourself and say, no. No. Thank you. I mean, contrast in the study of internal self-correction and self-adjustment. We make no comparisons.
Nevertheless, we are constrained to observe a difference between two people who died recently. If there’s anything called a meditative approach to life, certainly Mother Teresa reflected a great deal more than poor Diana. Diana was good, and she was good. But the degree of maturity, the total balance one gets in reacting to the stimuli of the world is what meditation means. And remember, it is not a horizontal running.
It’s not like a cognac, glass of cognac in the evening. It must be like a takeoff on a space shuttle. Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. And up and up you go till you jettison the big chunk of metal that was powering the engines, and then you get, you and I have to be in a process, little bit of capsules, which are going to get our solar energy in orbit and not down below. So that’s probably a radical position that I take, mainly based on my nearly seventy-six years of living in the world, but living detached, gradually withdrawing. Nine, eight, up to zero.
So at a certain age, I looked like that at one time. I look like this now. Maybe in five years, you’ll never see me in Adelaide, maybe in the slopes of somewhere else or in a jungle somewhere. This withdrawal, because you can’t eat the cake and have it. Not life in the world and nirvana together.
You’ll never feel the pain of giving it up. Like the poor astronauts, including Neil Armstrong, first man, never felt that he was going away from earth. Once he landed on the moon, he said, hello. Hello. This is Neil talking to Nixon.
I can see the earth from there. So that’s our approach to meditation. Exercise of the mind and the body, build an awareness. It is not emotional. It’s intellectual because our nirvana, as we said, starts with compassion, but the great wisdom is there.
The ultimate, the merchant landing for the Pathfinder and the soft landing there, and that is wisdom. Thank you, Bhante. Okay. I’m sorry. We don’t have time for any further questions.
We need to vacate the hall by six o’clock. It is now almost twenty to six. So sorry. No more questions. I’ll now call on Lyndy Abram, Director of Buddha House to thank our teachers. I’m very sorry to the two masters who were unable to answer that question. I’d like to thank the Venerable Masters who have given us insights into the various Buddhist traditions represented here today. I’m sure we all have much to reflect upon and integrate into our lives. I would also like to thank the many people who worked very hard to organise this event.
In particular, I would like to mention Jampa Gendun. This is the man who has put a great deal of effort into organising the event. Also to Perry Hamilton, our emcee. And the very many people who have worked so hard who are already starting to pull things down. There’s many people who’ve been involved. The props and the flowers, as you can see, it’s made a very beautiful place for us this afternoon. And at this point in the afternoon, offerings will be made to the masters by the various Buddhist groups. And I’d also just like to thank you for coming and for staying this afternoon.
It’s been very wonderful. Thank you.