Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute talk, Kyabje Rinpoche opens with a striking scene: Śāriputra, watching a family dine, uses clairvoyance to recognize that the fish they eat is the father’s previous rebirth, and the dog beneath the table is the father’s mother reborn. This vision of constant karmic shifts becomes the foundation for the main teaching: developing loving-kindness by recognizing all sentient beings as our mothers, remembering their kindness across lifetimes, and cultivating gratitude and the determination to repay that debt. Rinpoche walks through three preliminaries using the seed metaphor—when causes and conditions align, results inevitably arise—and compares the Atisha-Candrakīrti approach with Śāntideva’s method. The session concludes with Q&A on working with difficult people through understanding karma and the continuity of consciousness across rebirths.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1989-08-22 – 6B – Sun's Radiance of – KR.mp3
UUID: f06ee767-b8a5-4eaa-94ee-8a22a150e98d
Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche
Collection: Sun Radiance – Thought Transformation
Date: 1989-08-22
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~3,023
This is a rather complicated story. So Śāriputra Śāriputra went out on his alms round, and he came to a home and he stood in the doorway. And what he saw made him laugh a great deal because he had a clairvoyance and he knew what was happening. The verse is such that it’s somewhat confusing for me to translate it, but something like the son eats the father, the mother gives birth to her enemy, the mother nurses her enemy, gives her father’s bones to the dog. So what this means this means is this is why it was so funny.
What it means is there’s there’s when Śāriputra, he saw a group of there was a husband, a wife, and a child eating their meal and there was also a dog beneath the table. And he was able to see that the fish that they’re eating came from a pond in the backyard, which was the fish was the rebirth of the husband’s father. So the husband was eating the rebirth of his father. And the dog was the person who had killed the father, and so he was giving his father bones to the dog. And the child, no, child was the child was oh, the dog was the mother.
So the dog was the father’s mother in the previous life, so the present father is giving the father’s the father the bones of the father to the mother. And the child which suckling, which was nursing at its mother’s breast, was the person who had killed the husband’s father. So the mother is nursing the enemy. And when Śāriputra saw all this, he saw that there was no essence to cyclic existence whatsoever and he just laughed his head off. So this is constant changing in relationships with others and the fact that the father took took rebirth as a fish in the pond, and then the then the son ate the father, you know, the fish, was which his father in the past lifetime, and there’s this constant shifting due to the force of karma in our relationships.
So recognizing all sentient beings as their mother and appreciating the kindness that they have shown to us again and again, not only in this life but in previous lives, remembering all their great kindness, their benefit that they have given to us, that we begin to develop a natural thought to repay their kindness, a sense of gratitude begins to develop. And those who would not repay kindness, let alone within the context of a spiritual practice, but even in the world, they would be thought of as rather despicable not to repay great kindnesses which we’re showing you. So if we meditate well on these three preliminaries to the development of loving-kindness and beginning to understand recognize that all sentient beings have in fact been our mother and begin to appreciate the great kindness, remembering their kind be mindful of the kindness that they have shown to us, developing a feeling of kind heartedness towards our mothers, and this would naturally evolve into a feeling of wishing to repay, a sense of gratitude that, you know, within the law of cause and effect that this would be very inappropriate, that even in the sense of the world it would be very despicable not to begin to have a sense of gratitude that one would not be fully human in this sense.
That if you cultivate these well, then loving-kindness will naturally arise. You won’t have to make any specific meditational practice to generate it. Just by simply developing these three preliminaries, it will rise a bit by itself. So if we, you know, create the various causes and conditions, then the results will definitely arise. That by developing this sense of this ability to recognize others as our mothers, remembering their kindness, developing a wish to repay their kindness, then naturally loving-kindness, and with that will definitely arise, that they arise as if by themselves.
We then go on to develop exceptional resolve and then finally the awakening heart. If we collect altogether all the necessary causes and conditions, then the result will arise. It’s just as in the case of if we have a fertile seed and we put it with earth and we put it with water, then we try to suppress it, but because all the conditions and causes are aggregated, the effect will definitely arise. And likewise, if we have created all the causes and conditions, bringing them together, then the awakening heart will definitely arise. It’s very necessary to create the cause and the conditions for a result to arise.
Whenever we listen to the Dharma, we end with a dedication. We recite the dedication prayer, May the precious actually the body mind, this is referring to the awakening heart. May the precious awakening heart not yet born arise and grow. May that born have no decline, but increase forevermore. And we say that again and again and again and again and nothing happens.
You know, why isn’t our prayer being answered? Maybe we can’t develop an awakening heart. Why is it we keep saying these words and nothing happens? It’s that we, in fact, we can create, we can generate an awakening heart. But in order that it develop, we have to create its causes and conditions.
Without creating those causes and conditions, then it’s not going to happen. So if we create the causes and conditions, then we can generate an awakening heart. If we don’t create those causes and conditions, then we won’t generate an awakening heart. We won’t become a Buddha. You know, that all of these various beings who have become Buddhas, who have become Bodhisattvas, they did it in dependence upon developing an awakening heart, which they did in dependence upon creating the necessary causes and conditions.
So we have to cultivate the causes. If we don’t cultivate the causes, then the result will never arise. As in the case of building a house, we have to prepare a proper foundation. There has to be a firm, stable foundation, and then we can based upon that, we can build any type of structure that we desire. We can make any design that we like.
But with no foundation, no matter how magnificent of a building we may build, in fact it’s not going to last for very long. It’s going to fall over. It’s going to fall down in a few months. It can’t last because it doesn’t have the proper foundation. So, you know, we need to build the foundation for Awakening Heart.
We have to create the causes and conditions, and then it can definitely be generated, can definitely develop. We can see this with our reasoning. We can understand this quite readily, it’s quite rational. This is the reality of our situation. So what has been said is just extremely rough, just a very brief, hasn’t been extensive in the least about talking about the welfare of our mothers.
So the humankind is quite different than all of the various all of the other types of beings. For example, as compared to an animal, that in general animals are quite dumb, that we’re quite superior to animals in the sense that we we have the ability to think. We have a rational ability, that we have a very powerful discriminating awareness. We have, Due to our abilities, we can do almost whatever that we want. But this also applies to both negative and positive, that we have the power to create great negativities, but also the power to create great positive results.
So we’re trying to differentiate between the quality of humankind and those of, for example, an animal. Even with respect to animals, the mother animal cares a great deal for her offspring, provides for it, benefits it. But there reaches a point in their relationship when the animal simply does not just turns its back and leaves. That there’s no thought as to the great kindness which has been showered upon it by its nurturing mother. There’s no reflection, there’s no mindfulness of the kindness and benefit.
At some point or other, the animal simply turns its back on its mother and leaves. We shouldn’t be like an animal in this respect. It’s tremendously beneficial to consider the kindness of your parents and to determine to repay their kindness. It’s a very special type of relationship because of the great kindness that they have shown to us, they’re a very special object. It’s very skillful to care for them.
This as in the case of making offerings to the Buddhas, due to the nature of the object, can derive unimaginable, positive, skillful type of action. But likewise, because of the great benefit that our mother has shown us, that it’s an extremely powerful type of action to seek to repay that kindness, for example, that it will help us to have a long life, that it will help to diminish any type of harm that we may incur, that we will be happy. All because of the power of this object, because of its great kindness, this relationship that we have. So that’s an extremely rough explanation of the system, this tradition set down by Atisha and Candrakīrti in developing loving-kindness through the precepts of recognizing all sentient beings as our mother, remembering their kindness, and developing the gratitude which seeks to repay their kindness. So later when we proceed with the explanation of the method of developing loving-kindness according to the tradition of Śāntideva, then you can begin to compare what has been roughly presented here in the method of developing equanimity and then going through the stages of recognizing mother, etcetera, in order to develop loving-kindness.
You can see for yourself, you know, which one is most that you have a liking for, which one you have an inclination for. You know, they’re both working toward the same goal. So you can determine for yourself which one you feel some affinity toward and make use of that. Since they’re both working toward the same goal, then you can use the one which you feel is most appropriate to you. So we’ll stop the teaching there and we’ll spend the remaining ten minutes or so answering questions.
I’m sure I’m saying that developing you know, the awakening heart doesn’t come about without the causes. So as you’re saying, just the causes are simply meditating again and again on these recognizing all sentient beings as our mother, remembering their kindness. Is there any other other other ways apart from sitting in meditation and going over and over those subjects? The So there are many causes and conditions for the generation of the awakening heart. What has been mentioned is the main causes, the sevenfold cause and effect instruction and the exchange of self for others.
But there also are causes such as one not being able to bear the degeneration of the great vehicle Dharma, seeing that the great vehicle Dharma, the Mahāyāna Dharma is degenerating and not being able to bear it. This is a cause for development of an awakening heart, not being able to bear the suffering of sentient beings. You know, seeing the unimaginable qualities of a Buddha and thinking, Wow, how could I ever get those qualities? And therefore determining that I want to become just like that. I want to become a Buddha.
And this would be a cause for developing the awakening heart. So there are these two main causes, but there are a vast variety of other conditions and causes. So what are the two main causes? Going over and over those subjects in meditation that establishes those you you still haven’t been in this zone, but that you check your behavior and speech and so on to them and sort of act towards them more kindly than what you feel in your heart. I mean, you actually consciously try to to adopt a different attitude towards it even if it doesn’t arise spontaneously.
Is this how you meant that? Mhmm. Action as well as stillness. What is the meditation, the actual So this is a very good way to act, to actually make effort to overcome your dislike toward this person and to develop some kind of beneficial altruistic intention toward them, that this is the way we can begin to decrease this power of disliking by trying to be nice to them, by trying to help them. Also trying to understand that the way you’re relating to them now is a is a result of karma that you’ve created, that you previously created.
And that, in fact, the actual situation is that they have been your mother, they’ve been your father, they’ve been your relative in the past, they have benefited you a great deal. And making effort to decrease this disliking by seeking to help them and remembering all these qualities that they have given, that they way that they have related to you, benefited you in the past will help to begin to decrease this dislike that you might naturally feel toward them, and it’s very good to make such a type of effort. So it’s not necessary to have no questions. The questions are just the answer to the questions is simply to eliminate any types of qualms, doubts that you might have, any types of conflicts. If you went away with qualms and doubts, that you might this would decrease might decrease your enthusiasm, aspiration, and it’s very useful to clear up doubts and qualms that you have, and therefore it becomes more powerful what has been said.
But it’s not necessary if the qualms aren’t there. Just as in the case when the self of this morning and our present self is not the same self but is the same continuum, and the self of today will continue on till tomorrow, it’s not the same the self of today and the self of tomorrow is not the same self, but the same continuum. Likewise, we could say that the mother of this life is in the same continuum as the mother of our previous life, but we can’t say that it’s the same because our mother of this life was when we were born as an animal was also our mother and she was an animal. We don’t have an animal mother. Our mother of this life isn’t an animal.
So it’s not the same mother, but it’s the same continuum. It’s not the same being. It’s this continuum of the same being. There’s a continuity, continuum of that same being. You know that we were we have been animals in the past and that we slipped off that body and then we took on a human body.
It’s the continuum of the same being, but different embodiment. Just as in the case as someone who, went to the gym do some kind of athletics, and they take off their street clothes and they put on their shorts and their T-shirt and their running shoes or whatever. And so they are they have a different appearance and they have a new dress. And then when they finish in the gym, they take off their shorts and they put back on their street clothes. That same person, same continuum, but it has taken on different appearances.
And so likewise, that we take on different put on different clothing and take off different take off the clothes and put on new clothing, but it’s the same being who’s enacting all these who’s going through all these changes. Changes of clothing. So Buddha described this process as if like the change of the seasons. And with respect to use the example of a tree, and the tree is in the spring begins, the buds begin to appear, and then flowers and leaves and flowers on the tree. And then as fall arises, the leaves begin to wither and the flowers die.
And then winter comes and the flower and the tree is completely bare. And then the season changes, keeps changing, and again the buds appear and the leaves begin to appear and the summer comes. So there’s constant changing of appearances with respect to the single tree. It’s always been the same, it’s always been this one tree, but the appearance of it are constantly changing with the seasons. In looking at all that our mother has done for us in this life from our very birth onward, the care and kindness that she has shown us, it all mounts up to the sense that the fact that she has benefited us so very much, that she has been greatly beneficial to ourselves.
And so it’s due to this great benefit which our mother has shown to us that if in return to this great benefit, if we were to harm her, then this would be extremely negative. In view of the great kindness that she has shown us, if we were to harm her, then this would be extremely negative. But additionally, on the other hand, if in view of the great kindness she has shown us, if we were to benefit her, then this would be extremely beneficial. It’s simply due to the great benefit that our mother has shown us that makes our actions toward her that much more powerful, the type of results which will arise, even to the point where there is one classification of what are called the five boundaryless actions, sometimes called the five heinous crimes, but the five boundaryless actions such as killing one’s mother, killing one’s father, killing an Arhat, and so forth, etcetera. These are the most negative types of actions that we can commit.
This is due to the great beneficial relationship that we have with our mother, and that anything within this relationship that we do is that much more powerful because of this factor of kindness and benefit.