Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this extended 4-hour-42-minute teaching, Tenzin Chogkyi guides students through the Four Noble Truths, the foundation of all Buddhist teaching. Beginning with the historical context of Buddha’s enlightenment, she explains the first noble truth—suffering, or dukkha—not as mere pain but as the underlying dissatisfaction pervading samsaric existence, illustrated by the metaphor of the broken shopping trolley. She presents three progressively subtle forms of suffering: the suffering of suffering (manifest pain), the suffering of change (pleasure’s inherent instability), and pervasive suffering (subjection to karma and delusion). The second truth explores the origins of suffering through ignorance about the nature of self and reality, disturbing emotions like attachment and aversion, and karmic actions. She provides practical teaching on the four components of complete karmic action, the four characteristics of how karma functions, and the ten non-virtues. The session concludes with a personal karma quiz helping practitioners identify where their habitual patterns create specific life experiences, and explores concrete strategies for karmic purification grounded in both traditional Buddhist practice and Western pragmatism.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2012 08 25 End of Suffering Sess. 1.mp3
UUID: b5d66916-2c2f-4950-b5c3-a03dafe0fc09
Teacher: Tenzin Chogkyi
Collection: End of Suffering (Tenzin Chogkyi)
Date: 2012-08-25
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~36,340
I have one friend in Adelaide and he has his three year old son and we were hanging out the other day and he informed me that I was a giant, you know. He looks at me with these big kind of three year old eyes and he just goes, you’re a giant. Like, I thought that was so cool. That was very cute. Yes.
No. No. No. Yeah. Right.
Right. The crane. Alright. Then be at whatever angle allows you to to watch me without neck strain. Yeah.
It is when I’m sitting down, I’m a normal sized person. It’s just when I stand up. Alright. So welcome to our class on the Four Noble Truths. And as we usually do before we begin, we’ll sit for a few minutes watching our breath just to settle our minds, and then we’ll set our motivation.
That’s something that we always do before any Buddhist teaching. So we’ll do that today, first sitting and just focusing on the sensation of breathing. We always do this before we begin meditation, teaching, kind of to get our minds in neutral so you can focus either at the sensations at the nostrils or deeper in the body, the chest rising and falling, the diaphragm expanding and contracting. And now let’s take a minute to set our motivation. So reflect on your reason for coming, your intention for being here.
It may be that you’re very new to Buddhism. Maybe you’ve heard that Buddhism has something to offer in terms of techniques for dealing with suffering and dissatisfaction? Perhaps you were drawn to Buddhism because you’re going through a difficult time in your life. We’re searching for some insight into how to approach the problems and difficulties. Perhaps you’ve been studying Buddhism for some time, but you feel that you’ve never really completely understood the presentation in terms of the four noble truths.
You’d like more insight into this basic structure of the Buddhist teachings. And in addition to our own purposes, in the Mahāyāna tradition, we always emphasize that our study, our meditation, emphasize that our study, our meditation, our practice is always done not only for our own benefit, but in order to increase our spiritual capacity so that we’ll be able to be of ultimate benefit to all living beings. And this wish is called Bodhicitta, so let’s try to generate at least some sort of compassionate wish that our study today might be of great benefit to all living beings. Okay. So the four noble truths, the first teaching that the Buddha gave after his enlightenment, and it can be used as a framework for understanding all of the teachings of Buddhism.
In Buddhism, I often say the four noble truths is like the outline, and whatever you learn, no matter what advanced practices and techniques, are always sort of filling in more detail in the outline of the Four Noble Truths. Know, it’s not like the Four Noble Truths is the first thing, and then there’s a whole another approach that’s sort of the intermediate approach, and then something else that’s more advanced. We can fit everything into the structure or framework of the Four Noble Truths. So especially for people who are relatively new to Buddhism, I think it’s really useful to get a good teaching on the four noble truths because then if you’re taking a more advanced class later on, you can say, oh, this is where it fits in. It’s this part of the truth of the path to the cessation of suffering or you’re studying something like karma and you understand, oh, this is exactly where it fits in in terms of the truth of the cause of suffering, and you’re not kind of going, well, where does this fit?
You know, it’s nice to have that framework. And then we just fill in the details. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, usually when he teaches, always begins by referring to the Four Noble Truths and explaining how whatever subject he’s teaching fits in to that framework. So if it’s good enough for His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, it’s definitely good enough for us. And I think it’s really important because this is also common to all Buddhist traditions.
It’s not a Tibetan thing. It’s not a Theravadin thing. Right? All Buddhist traditions of all countries, this is the basis. So it helps us, especially in the West, I think, we you know, one of the great advantages is that we’re exposed to so many different Buddhist traditions.
Traditions. You know, everybody’s kind of come to the western countries and set up a center. That wasn’t the way it was in Asia, so it’s easy to get confused. But this is the kind of foundation of all Buddhist traditions, and then the rest is just the details and the different techniques and different lineages of practice and things like that. But also with a good understanding of the four noble truths, you don’t get distracted by those differences that are sometimes cultural and sometimes, you know, seem quite different, you can look to that basic understanding that underlies all of them, okay?
So what I’d like to do first, which I always do and I know many of you already and some of you are new to me, it’s always nice to go around and have everybody just introduce themselves and say a little bit about their background, and it also helps me to understand where I can, you know, need to put more emphasis perhaps in explaining things. So, like I said, I know most of you already, some of you are new to me and I got your name completely wrong. I’m trying to learn everybody’s names, but I’m not always perfect, so sorry. Now I’ve got it, Jan. Alright.
So, and I know Kathy’s name too, so we will start with Kathy. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Good.
Great. Thank you. Yeah. We’ll get there. We’ll get there.
You’re jumping ahead to about the tenth flip chart page, but we’ll get there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But the answer is yes.
The answer is yes. Yeah. The short answer is yes. We’ll give we’ll fill in the details. Yeah.
Right. Yeah. Great. Good. Deanne.
Deanne. Deanne. Deanne. Okay. Got it.
Okay. Yeah. He’s my hero too. Yes. That’s true.
He’s a great hero to have, isn’t he? Yeah. Good. Great. Sandra, was it?
Okay. We’ve got two Sandra’s. The other one’s not here even though I thought she was, so that’s great. The other one. Right.
I was just one off. Good. Thank you for saving me. Great. Great.
Thank you. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That’s right.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? I found, you know, for myself, it’s not sort of like learning algebra. You just learn it and you know how to solve the equation and that’s it. Of course, with Buddhism, it’s all to do with practice and experience. And I find for myself, I can read a Dharma book and then I’ll read it a year later and it feels like it’s a completely different book because of course my understanding, my meditation has deepened, everything has changed.
So I think you’re absolutely right, Jen. It’s, you know, you can you can’t hear even the basic teachings enough times because every time you hear it, it is like something completely different. And I think we often have a very sort of Western academic approach to Buddhism, and we feel like, okay, I understand it. Now, on to the next thing. But of course, understanding and realizing is two completely different things, you know, and the realization really only happens through, you know, constant exposure, meditation, over and over and over again.
And, yeah, I find the same thing. You know, I’ve been studying for many years, and I’ll go to a quote unquote basic teaching and just have my mind blown just because I’m ripe and ready for some insight that I wasn’t ready for the first twenty five times I heard the exact same teaching. And, yeah, you’re right. You just hear something completely different. And I think, yeah, we misunderstand that a little bit just because of our Western approach to education.
Yes, Sandra. That’s right. Right. He’s great, isn’t he? So clear.
Right. Definitely, for sure. Right. Right. It’s always something new, and that’s the thing too.
The same author explaining things in a slightly different way in their next book, and you can get something else out of it too. So yeah. Well, my story, it’s on the website. You probably heard some of it. You know, quite similar.
Just grew up, started meditating as a hippie as a teenager. Transcendental meditation was the big thing. I think we were driving the other day and we passed it, transcendental meditation, when I was growing up in America in I remember it must have been the early seventies. There were posters in all the shopping centers, you know, learn how to meditate, get your mantra. So I did that.
I think I started meditating when I was, like, fourteen or fifteen. You needed permission from your parents if you were a certain age. And, you know, grew up I think the religion of my family was scientific materialism. You know, you can’t really believe anything unless you can kind of touch it, smell it, taste it, feel it. Never talked about God in my family growing up or religion or anything like that.
And then when I started reading my first Buddhist books, which way back then were these terrible translations, some of you may remember, you know, full of words like sin, like these really old translations of the Buddhist sutras and things. But even so, I was able to get that that was really the path for me. It just completely made sense. Of course, later thought, oh, you know, some past karmic imprints were ripening. And and it’s the Four Noble Truths that I always go back to because it’s such a foundation I find sometimes in the Tibetan tradition, I love the Tibetan tradition, and sometimes struggle a lot with rituals and some of the practices that seem, you know, I can’t quite make the connection.
And so I always try to use the Four Noble Truths and say, okay, what’s the essence of this practice that’s getting me back to this? So when I was invited to teach at Buddha House by the previous SPC, Lindy, she happened to request me to teach my three favorite things, the four noble truths, the bodhisattva vows, and the Heart Sūtra. And she asked me, and I was like, great. I’d love to come because those are my three favorite things to teach. So the origin of the four noble truths, many of you all of you probably, because nobody’s brand new, know the story of Lord Buddha’s life, that he was born as a prince in a kingdom in the what’s now the border area of Indian Nepal.
In fact, there’s two claims for his home village of Kapilavastu. There’s an Indian Kaplowvastu and a Nepalese Kaplowvastu. My vote I’ve been to both, and my vote is the Nepalese one. Just, you know so born into this kingdom. And when he was born, as was often the case back then and even now, they had astrologers come to, you know, look at the astrology and see what his destiny was gonna be.
And so when the astrologers came, they said, oh, remarkable, amazing being. He’s either gonna be, you know, a world renowned emperor, what they call a wheel turning king, you know, emperor of vast lands, or a great renunciate, a great yogi who’s gonna show the path to liberation from saṃsāra, uncontrolled rebirth and cyclic existence. Well, his father, the king, he was actually a tribal chieftain, but we usually call him a king. You can imagine which outcome he was invested in. Right?
And I always say, you can imagine George Bush senior, when George Bush junior was born saying, oh, he’s either gonna be Saint Francis of Assisi or the president of the United States. Right? Which one would he have wanted? So his father, King Suddhodana, kept him completely isolated. He was very smart.
He knew if he saw any suffering and dissatisfaction, it would sort of trigger this wish to figure out what’s the meaning of life, you know, what’s behind all of this. So he kept him sort of isolated in these pleasure palaces. Most of you know the story. At a certain point, he sort of snuck out of the palaces and saw sickness, old age, death, and then he also saw a renunciate yogi, and that triggered in him this desire. He’d seen these three aspects of suffering, sickness, old age, death, which he’d never seen before in his life, leading this incredibly sheltered life.
And it really woke up this realization of the first noble truth, the truth of suffering. And then he saw a renunciate walking through the marketplace, you know, and anybody some of you have been to India Nepal, you know, total chaos. Right? The marketplace, every shouting, screaming. So he sees this renunciate with a begging bowl walking through the marketplace, completely serene, you know, with his countenance, peaceful, and he says to his charioteer, Chana, who’s what’s with that guy?
Who’s that? And Chana says, oh, that’s a renunciate. He’s actually given up the householder’s life to look for the answer to these fundamental problems. So that triggered in Siddhartha. He wasn’t Lord Buddha yet.
Siddhartha this wish to do the same thing. So he left the palace, studied under two teachers originally, and his teachers taught him that these rarefied meditative absorptions, these states of concentration, which are still taught in certain yogic traditions in India as the result of the path. Because when you’re meditating, when you’re immersed in that state of concentration, they’re imbued with incredible qualities of physical and mental bliss, no manifest suffering at all when you’re in that meditative state. So they were taught as the goal of the path. They were taught as liberation.
You know, go develop this level of concentration, go into this blissful state, and that’s it. That’s the goal of the path. But, Siddhartha, the previous Lord Buddha, realized, no. You know, like any other high, I always come down eventually. So, it’s not real liberation.
So, he left those teachers, went off with five of his friends, five friends who’d been also students of the same teachers, but had so much faith in Siddhartha that they left with him. They went off and had six years of austerities. You know, and sometimes you’ll see these statues, like, there’s these famous statues of the the former Buddha when he was meditating and practicing these austerities, and they say he would eat, like, three grains of rice and two lentils a day. So there’s these statues where he just basically looks like a skeleton covered in skin. Have you seen some of these statues?
They say that, you know, if he would poke in his stomach, he could feel his backbone because that was taught in those traditions as a way to attain liberation too, completely overcome the needs of your body by subjugating your body to these incredible austerities. And that’s quite common in India now too. If you go places like Rishikesh, you’ll see these yogis that have, for example, held their arm up in the air for, like, years and it’s completely withered or, like, sleeping on the beds with nails or staring into the sun, all of these austerities because it was thought if you just completely overcome any of your bodily needs, that’s the path to liberation. But Siddhartha also found out, well, that doesn’t work either. You know, he he found out that his meditation was so unclear.
And you know what it’s like when you’ve skipped lunch and maybe skipped dinner and you sit down to meditate and you have that blood sugar fade thing that happens and you feel like your mind isn’t at all clear. Well, this was happening to him. He just felt like, well, wow, you know, if I abuse my body like this, my mind isn’t clear, I’m not able to meditate either. So at one point, he was offered food and it’s an interesting story. This young woman, Sujatha, had been praying to a local forest deity, you know, back in India and even now and in most countries of South and Southeast Asia, there’s this sort of animus tradition that the local places are, you know, they’re spirits, local spirits and local landlords of the places.
So she’d been praying to this forest spirit to give birth to a healthy child. And she’d had a son, so she was going into the forest to give a thanksgiving offering to this spirit that she’d been praying to because it worked. Right? So she had this bowl of this rice milk porridge that she was gonna make as an offering. She saw Siddhartha sitting under a tree, you know, this skeleton covered in skin, his hair matted, piled on top of his head, didn’t even look like a human.
She thought maybe he was the spirit she’d been praying to, so she offers him the food. Now, he hadn’t eaten proper food like that in years and he and he realized it was just at the point that he was realizing that this abuse of his body wasn’t working, so he ate the food. Well, his five companions saw him and they thought, he’s given up. He’s thrown in the towel. He’s given up.
Look at him. You know, he ate the food. He bathed in the river, and then they just thought, forget it. He’s given up. You know, here’s the one that we had so much faith in, but he doesn’t have enough stamina.
He’s given up. So they wandered off in disgust, just left him, walked off. Meanwhile, he regains his strength, feels this mental clarity coming back, and then it as is said in the story, one night sat down under the Bodhi tree, made a vow not to stand up until he’d broken through and attained liberation. And then during the first watch of the night, he got certain realizations, second watch of the night, so and so. It’s beautiful to read the story.
And then as dawn broke the next day, attained full enlightenment. Well, for forty nine days after his enlightenment, he didn’t he stayed under the Bodhi tree. He thought, nobody is gonna be able to understand what I’ve seen. It’s so profound and so deep. There’s nobody alive who’ll be able to understand it.
So I’ll just kind of live off in the forest for the rest of my life, you know, kind of immersed in this meditation on what I’ve seen. And if you go now to Bodh Gaya, some of you have seen, there are these seven sort of pillars with with writing on them saying, you know, for seven days my favorite one is for seven days, he stared at the Bodhi tree thinking of what he had experienced. And you can just imagine him, you know, for seven days without a break, staring at the Bodhi tree just going, wow. That was amazing. And then as the story goes, these gods, Brahma and Indra, not like God, not like the Christian God, but from the God realm, these beings came to him and requested him to teach and they said, please teach what you’ve seen.
They said they’re beings with just a little dust in their eyes. Right? They’ll be able to understand. So he agreed to teach and then he thought, well, who’ll be able to get it, this thing that I’ve seen? And he thought of his two previous masters, these ones who taught him these rarified meditative absorptions.
He thought, wow, they were close. You know, I bet if anybody’s gonna get it, they’re gonna be able to understand. And he checked around and found out that both of them had just passed away within weeks. Right? So he thought, oh, you know, they and then he thought of his five companions who left him and he said, wow, we had this incredible connection.
You know, we were together for six years practicing this austerities. They were close too. He found out that they were in a place that was frequented by meditators near Varanasi or Benares, this very holy place on the Ganges River. It’s been a holy site for, I think, like three thousand years or something. So just north of Benares, Varanasi is was a place called Isipatana, the park of the rishis or the park of the sages, also sometimes called deer deer park, because it was a wildlife sanctuary that the king had made a sanctuary for deer and other wildlife safe from being hunted, and these yogis would go into this wildlife sanctuary to meditate.
So he heard that they had gone there after they left him. He went there walking. I’ve done it on a bus, you know, and you’re on the bus doing these pilgrimages from place to place, and you’re like, wow. Lord would’ve walked. Man, you know, it’s an entire really long day sort of through hot, dusty Ganges River Valley.
But anyway, so he walked there, goes to is walking towards this park, and his friends saw him from a distance and recognized him. They say that Lord Buddha was really tall and had this noble bearing because he’d been a prince before. So they say that it was always easily recognizable even from a distance. So they saw him coming and they said, oh, here he comes, like the slacker, Siddhartha. Right?
The one who gave it up. We’ll ignore him. You know, we’ll just sort of disrespect him because we we don’t wanna be influenced by him. Right? He’s given up the path.
Well, as he’s walking towards them, and there’s actually a stupa that commemorates the spot where he met them, where he met his five friends. So as he’s walking towards them, they see he’s got this incredible glow, like he looks amazing. They’re it’s obvious that something’s happened. So without even discussing amongst themselves, they set up his seat for him, offer him water, wash his feet, which is sort of the honorary way that you greet somebody in ancient India. He sits down and they go, wow.
What happened to you? And he gives the first teaching, right, on the four noble truths. So this is his explanation of what happened to him in between the time that that they left him and the time that he goes to find them. So this is the essence of his insight that night under the Bodhi tree, which is why I say it’s the foundation of all Buddhist teaching and everything else is an elaboration of the four noble truths. Right?
So it’s really nice to go back to and we celebrate that day. We usually call it wheel turning day, and in the Tibetan tradition, there’s four kind of holy days that we celebrate. And this is one. It’s usually in July, and I think it was, when was it July this year, July twenty third or something like that. Anyway, it’s usually, it’s the lunar calendar is what we follow in Buddhism, but it usually falls somewhere in sort of late July that we follow this this teaching.
So the four noble truths. Are there any questions before we go into what these are about the story of Buddha’s life or any of the stages that he went through to clarify? I know from probably all of you, it’s a familiar story. Kathy, anything? Are you sure?
There’s something percolating over there. Can feel There’s a lot. Okay. Okay. Sandra, did you have some?
No. Alright. Yeah. Oh, and it’s full of deer now, and it’s so cool when you go there. I’ve I’m really into leading Buddhist pilgrimages.
It no. It’s full of deer because it’s it’s mostly deer, and they have all these different species of deer from kind of all over India, and you can go in there and feed the deer carrots, and there’s these little boys that run up with what did they have? Like what’s that? No. No.
It’s not sort of a a overall, it’s mostly for deer because that was sort of the tradition. And they say that that king of Varanasi, the story goes, he set up that wildlife refuge because he was hunting a deer one day and then was struck by the suffering that he caused the deer when he shot it with probably a bow and arrow or something, and then from that point on sort of renounced hunting and set up this wildlife park so specifically for deer. And that was, I think, hundreds of years before the time of Lord Buddha, so it’s been been a kind of wildlife refuge for that amount of time. Yeah. Alright.
So the four noble truths. Now the word noble, did I put it in oh, I did. I put it in quotation marks. Those of you who’ve been in my Bodhisattva vows class know that I have this thing about certain translations. You’ve experienced that already.
So noble is one of them. It doesn’t mean noble in the sense of, like, nobility or a king or anything like that. It’s a translation. And, again, we’re kind of stuck with this translation. There are certain words that would be better even to leave untranslated in a way.
It’s a translation of the Sanskrit word ārya. Now for those of you who’ve been studying for a while, what’s an ārya? What or who is an ārya? Does anybody not enlightened, not complete. They have a certain realization.
It’s not full enlightenment necessarily. Right? An ārya is being on the way towards full enlightenment, but what’s the realization that an aria has? Kathy. Guess.
Go ahead. It’s a huge sort of dividing line. When you become an Ārya, when you have a certain specific realization, it’s a huge milestone, like the biggest one actually before enlightenment, you could easily say, is this realization after which you get the title Ārya. Peter, do you know? Can you guess?
No, Deanne? Okay. An ārya is a being who’s seen directly the ultimate nature of reality, otherwise known as emptiness. Okay? So, we’ll talk a lot more about what that means.
Emptiness is the ultimate nature of all existing things, of all things. Now, it doesn’t mean that things don’t exist. It just means an emptiness or a voidness of a certain way of existing. Right? You can understand that intellectually.
Remember at the very beginning, I was saying, you know, one of the problems we have is that we focus so much on intellectual understanding and we sometimes don’t meditate enough to get a direct realization. And this is one of the things that eventually on the path, we need to have a direct realization of emptiness. Now, just to introduce the idea really briefly, and we will go into a lot more detail. There’s a big dichotomy for non aryas, for ordinary beings, they’re called. In Tibetan, the word is so so kyewa, which is usually translated as childish ones, but it doesn’t mean four year olds.
It just means anybody who hasn’t seen the ultimate nature of reality directly. We’re called we I mean, sorry. I’m making an assumption here. Called ordinary beings, childish ones. Right?
Because we haven’t seen for us and, again, sorry if you’re an Ārya and you’re in here, thank you for showing up, there’s a big dichotomy between the way things appear to us and the way that they exist. The way things exist are is a certain way, empty of a certain way of appearing. That appearance we have very, very strongly. So, on the path, one of the major kind of goals of the path is to, first of all, by intellect, by understanding intellectually, reduce that dichotomy down, down, down, until finally, you’re able to actually get a direct perception of how things really exist. That’s a big deal on the path, and we’ll talk more when we get to the truth of the path about the progression.
And in fact, we’ll talk about it a lot in the Heart Sūtra class. So this is an advertisement for emptiness. Heart Sūtra weekend is all about emptiness, the ultimate nature of reality, and how we get that realization. When you’ve had that from the first moment of the meditation where you have the first nanosecond of the first direct realization of emptiness, no longer intellectual understanding, you’re an ārya being. Completely different kind of being.
You’re no longer an ordinary being. Okay? So that’s a huge, huge milestone. Now, you’re not enlightened yet, but you’re speeding on the way. And in fact, you may have heard this phrase stream enterer, meaning you’ve jumped in the stream, you jumped on the conveyor belt to enlightenment, nothing is gonna derail you from that moment on.
Okay? So that’s huge. So, what this means is the four things that are seen directly as true by a being that’s had that realization. That’s what the Four Noble Truths really are. It’s not noble like, you know, in the sort of ordinary English meaning of the word noble.
It means the four things that are seen to be true by an ārya. The four things that are seen to be true by somebody who’s seen the ultimate nature of reality. Okay? So that’s a different kind of a feel to it. So some people refuse to use the word noble and just leave it untranslated, the four ārya truths, because that’s better in a way, if you know what an ārya is.
Because after that direct realization of emptiness, which happens in deep meditation So what you’re seeing in that meditation is that the way that you always thought that everything existed, not just in this life but since beginningless time, doesn’t exist like that at all. Just wipes out all of your perceptions that you’ve had since beginningless time. You realize you’ve been living under this delusion. So it’s this realization, totally mind blowing, that happens in deep meditation. And then after you come out of meditation, we say that you see what’s called the sixteen aspects of the Four Noble Truths.
There’s after that first meditation on direct realization of emptiness, there’s this twenty four hour period after you come out of meditation where it’s like popcorn, all of these realizations about how things exist are coming. And so you get an insight into the four noble truths. Okay? So they’re very profound, very, very profound. And that’s why the Buddha taught these as an answer to the question, what did you see?
What happened under the Bodhi tree? Right? That was the answer because that was what had just become clear to him for the very first time, the Four Noble Truths, which is all about our suffering and how to eliminate it. And that’s all that the Buddha was interested in teaching. Right?
There’s this kind of famous story that Lord Buddha had a disciple called Vacchagotta who would always ask him these sort of abstract philosophical questions like, what was the beginning of the universe? And, you know, after a Buddha passes away, then what? We had some questions the other night in the class we were having of like, where do you go after nirvana? You know, these kind of questions that are quite abstract. And at one point, Lord Buddha’s walking with the disciples through this forest of salt trees, these beautiful trees that grow in Northern India, and Vacchagotta starts pestering him again.
You know, what about this and what about that and the cosmos and yada yada yada. And Lord Buddha reaches down and he picks up a handful of leaves and he says to the gathered, you know, assembly, how many more leaves are there? Are there more leaves in my hand or more leaves on the trees? And they’re all like, duh, like on the trees, you know? And then the Buddha says, what I know is equal to the leaves on the trees, but what I teach is equal to the leaves in my hand.
I teach about the truth of suffering, the truth of the origin, the truth of the cessation, the truth of the path. That’s all you need to know. You don’t need to know how it all began. All you need to know is, this is my situation. How the heck do I get out of it?
Then he gave another analogy and he said, if you got shot by a poison arrow, before you let the doctor take it out, would you say, wait, wait, wait. I need to know the name of the guy who shot me. What did he do for a living? What’s his father’s name? What village did he live in?
He’s like, no. For God’s sake, let the doctor take the poison arrow out. Right? So in Buddhism, there’s a huge emphasis on our human situation and what do we do about it. You know, there isn’t it in fact in you know, sometimes people talk in Buddhism as if you have to believe in all of these things.
You know, there’s some big creed in Buddhism that you buy into first, and then that makes you a Buddhist, but it’s very practical. You know, one one book I was reading, they said instead of orthodoxy, it’s orthopraxy. You know, it’s very, very pragmatic. It’s just about how do I deal with the dissatisfaction that I experience in my life? So practical.
Okay. So that’s sort of a different slant because I think in Judeo Christian religions, there’s this, you know, in some churches, you have to recite the creed of all the things that you believe. And, of course, there are certain things in Buddhism that are posited like karma and rebirth and things that we don’t know for sure. We have to sort of take on analysis and a certain amount of trust of our teachers who teach us, but it’s really very practical. You know, it boils down to the four noble truths.
So the Buddha kept reeling people back in, you know, and if you read the original sutras, which is quite kind of cool because it’s mostly Lord Buddha just talking to somebody who’s asking him a question. And when they get too far out there, he’s like, okay, come back. You know, how does this relate to your life and what’s going on in your life? So really, really basic teachings and like I say, the framework of everything. So you do some complicated puja and you’re chanting in Tibetan for two and a half hours.
It fits in, you know, if you can see the purpose of that. For me, it gives me a lot more faith in my practices when I can relate them back to the four noble truths. I’m not just doing something because the Dalai Lama told me to. Right? Which is doesn’t really work for us.
We’re too well educated. We’re too intellectual. We don’t have that kind of faith. It sort of falls apart if you don’t really understand how it’s gonna help you. You know, there’s only so much that I’m doing because Lama Zopa told me to.
And he doesn’t even want you to do it because he told you to. He wants you to understand why you’re doing it. So this explains why. Okay? Yeah.
Yeah. That’s right. There’s no point. Yeah. And it’s really through meditation and like we’re talking before, even hearing the same teaching.
We say that there’s three ways of sort of approaching the teachings of Buddhism. There’s listening or hearing, and that’s like this. I’m up here going blah blah blah, and you’re hearing or reading the books or whatever. And then there’s contemplating, applying it to your life, thinking about, wow, how does this teaching apply to me? Is this true for me?
You’re checking through contemplation and discussing with each other is a fantastic way to contemplate. You don’t have to contemplate necessarily sitting cross legged. Talking about the Dharma with your friends and seeing how it applies to your life is an awesome way to contemplate. And then meditating, really internalizing, you know, so it’s not just up here that it’s as one of my friends who’s a translator, you know, this sort of, you know, very geeky like translator who just spends all day translating Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan. One day he was saying, You know, today I was translating this text, this great Sanskrit text, he goes, For once, something went below the neck.
And I thought that was awesome, like, because he was sort of, you know, realizing that his approach was so intellectual, but finally, like on this one page, and that’s it. And that’s what we’re looking for. Because Buddhism, even the ultimate nature of reality, even emptiness, isn’t that hard to understand intellectually. I mean, it’s challenging, but it’s not rocket science. It’s not that hard.
But is it gonna change your life? Is it gonna change the way you look at reality? Is it gonna change the way you behave? Or is it gonna be left up here and then you’re going around still creating the causes of suffering, still flailing around. I mean, that’s the real test, isn’t it?
And it’s only when it goes below the neck, you know, and that’s what a realization is. It’s sort of this life changing, perspective changing shift. And it’s cool. When you feel like that’s happened, like you react to things differently than the way you used to because of your Buddhist meditation, that’s when you know it’s sort of the proof is in the pudding kind of thing. You know, you know that you’ve internalized it.
Because it’s really easy to be a Buddhist scholar and to just be going around totally ridiculous, you know, and not changing anything about the way you live. So it’s more, you know, if there’s one tiny thing that really changes in you, that’s better than memorizing all these texts and not having any kind of shift go on in your own life. You know, really important. Yeah. Center.
Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And the lamas say that only really happens through meditation, which the Tibetan word for meditation, gom, comes from a root that means habituation. And that’s important to understand. So what we’re doing is habituating over and over and over and over and over again to a different way of looking at things, a different perspective. We’re meditating on compassion to try and grow that feeling in us, and it only happens through meditation. I have a friend who’s a Buddhist teacher, and he requires his students to meditate at least one hour for every hour they spend in class.
And I think that’s a great rule. I’ve been kind of hesitant to apply that myself, but I think that’s great because he says, if you don’t meditate at least the same amount of time that you’re studying or going to class, nothing’s going to change and it’s useless. In fact, they say sometimes your mind can get kind of hardened if you study too much without applying it at all. You’re like, Oh, no, not another Lam Rim class. God, why can’t they have something else?
I know all about the lam rim. Well, do you have one realization? No. Right? So it’s really, really super important, and I’m jumping ahead to the truth of the path, but that’s okay because it all relates to each other.
So it he let’s see. We’re gonna have a break in about ten minutes. Is that right? Fifteen minutes. Any questions so far?
I know I haven’t really gotten into the essence of the four noble truths. So what we’re gonna be doing this weekend, because we’re a bit short of time, the truth of suffering, that’s pretty easy to explain. It’s just a question of relating that to our own experience. Not a lot of details there. That’s something that the Buddha said, you just have to understand and relate that to your own experience.
We’re gonna be spending a lot of time on the truth of the origin suffering because the more that you understand that, the more you understand the path. So when we get to the path, it’ll all make sense because you’ll see how every practice that we do short circuits this chain reaction that leads to suffering. So the more we understand about the origin, that includes things like our misunderstanding about the nature of reality. Okay? Our disturbing emotions, mental afflictions sometimes we call them.
That also includes the topic of karma. We’re gonna spend a lot of time talking about karma as it’s so essential in terms of the origin of suffering. We’re even gonna have a karma quiz. Okay? Where you are going to see where your experience comes from karmically.
The negative experiences that you have in your life, we’re gonna analyze and see where did they come from? So we can come up with a karmic purification game plan, individually tailored to your suffering. Isn’t that cool? Okay. So we’re gonna do that just when we need a break.
Probably this afternoon, we’ll get to that, And then we’re going to talk about the truth of the cessation, again, quite briefly because that’s just about, hey, if something’s caused, remove the causes, no more result. But we’ll look at the goals of the path a little bit when we talk about the truth of the cessation. We talked a little bit for those of you who are in the class on Wednesday night about the difference between liberation and enlightenment, so we’ll talk a little bit about that and the goals of the path. Now the truth of the path, if you’re interested in Buddhism, that’s the rest of your life. But we will give you a framework for that.
I mean, huge detail, obviously, in that one. But, again, by understanding while the truth is the origin, the past will make sense. Okay? Sandra, you had a question. Yeah.
We can talk about it a bit. Yeah. We can definitely talk about it. One thing that I’d love to do, if we have time, and we’ll just kind of see how it goes, is I think we should do it. Yeah.
Never mind. We’ll do it. It’s so important. Is present a teaching called the twelve links of dependent origination, and that talks in great detail about how we keep creating the causes for our uncontrolled rebirth in saṃsāra. So that really relates to kind of past and future lives in terms of the whole dynamic of how why do we keep being reborn over and over and over again?
You know, compelled by the forces of karma and delusion. So, yeah, I think that’s important enough to do it. I didn’t make a flip chart page of that yet, but now that we you know, I think it’s important enough. It’s really essential. So, yeah, we’ll get into that.
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s very right. Right. Right.
Right. Right. So we’ll talk about that. Yeah. Yeah.
We will talk about the Buddhist view, which is different than the views, like you’ve mentioned, of some other traditions. It’s different from some somebody was mentioning the other night, there are these sort of new age views about things like rebirth and karma. And so the Buddhist views can be quite different from some of these more kind of popular views. Like, just as an example, there’s a view quite popular that you are you know, you kind of choose your rebirth to learn the lessons that you need to learn. And then when you’ve learned all your lessons, you’re liberated.
But that’s not a Buddhist view. You know, Buddhism says, until a very high level of realization, you have no control over your rebirth. It’s determined by your karma. So that’s a little bit different. Now it’s great to look at the problems in your life as opportunities for growth and understanding, you know, but that’s not what caused them.
It’s not like you, out of volition, caused that. So we’ll talk about that when we get more into the whole question of rebirth. Okay. What’s happening, Peter? You’ve got a question.
Are you sure? You have a little frowny. Alright. I’m always scanning. Yeah.
Alright. Who’s got a question? Sometimes people are shy, but you can really read they have a question on their face. Alright. We’re gonna have a break in just a few minutes, but what I wanna start talking about is the truth of suffering.
And I’ve put this word dukkha underneath in parentheses because that’s the Sanskrit word that’s usually translated as suffering. And this is another one of those vocabulary words that I have pet peeves about and struggle with. Because what does the word suffering connote to you? Yeah. Pain, anguish, physical pain.
So, this is this sort of bad translation is one of the reasons that Buddhists have a bad reputation as being really pessimistic, isn’t it? Because people have you ever heard this? People are like, oh, you guys, you’re always talking about suffering. Lord Buddha was really kind of a drag and pessimistic. Well, it’s it doesn’t mean only pain and anguish.
That’s included, but that’s not characteristic of our experience all the time. So sometimes we can also feel like, well, I can’t really relate to that. Lord Buddha was talking about people who are you know, have cancer and bitter divorces and car accidents and all of that. He wasn’t talking to me because I don’t feel like I’m really suffering. I mean, suffering, that’s kind of intense.
So what did lord what was lord Buddha talking about there? Let’s talk about that. That’s the first subject. So dukkha, interesting word. And when we look at what it means, it’s a combination of two Sanskrit words, du and aka.
And Sanskrit has all these compound words, but two roots, du and aka. Do means something like constricted, out of kilter, out of balance. Okay? And aka literally means space. So constricted, out of balance, out of kilter space.
What? What does that mean? Okay. Now, aka, the word space, is a word that’s used also for the hole in the middle of a wheel that the axle goes through. Now, if you have an out of kilter wheel, that’s a dukkha.
Okay. That’s a dukkha. Have you ever had one of those grocery trolleys that one of the wheels is stuck? Is there exactly. Is there another kind?
What are you doing? You’re in Coles in Burnside Village. It’s normal stuff. You know, you’re heading towards if you’re me, you’re heading towards the organic natural food section because you’re out of quinoa. Well, what happens?
You keep slamming into the Heinz baked beans, you know, which you can’t eat because your Tibetan doctor won’t let you, and you just can’t go where you need to go. You just you know, your goal is so clear. You know, you just can’t seem to steer and get in the right direction. That’s what the Buddha was talking about. Now, does that sound a little more familiar?
Right? It’s this thing of we just can’t seem to get towards our goals of happiness. You know, it seems so easy, isn’t it? It’s like, I know what I want. I just want this, You know?
And we set out and karma derails us. You know? It’s it throws us out of kilter over and over and over again. So some people prefer to translate this word suffering as dissatisfaction. And that I think is better.
It’s more it’s sort of like you can’t get what you want. If you do get it, it doesn’t last. You lose it. Right? It’s just this sort of experience that we always have.
I mean, when I was first getting into Tibetan Buddhism and Lama Zopa Rinpoche sent me to be the director of this retreat center in California. And so I went there, and I’ll never forget the first conversation I was having with somebody who’d lived there for a really long time, and she was we were talk we were laughing about how we should totally know better. We were just saying how we still even though we’ve studied this stuff and we should know better, we still have this thing of like, oh, it’s kind of intense right now, but pretty soon it’ll all mellow out. It’ll all be smooth sailing. It’s sort of like, oh, you know, the place to live is good.
The job’s good. The relationship needs some work. But once that mellows out, then, you know, or yeah. The job. Like, the relationship’s good, the house is good, the job.
So I’ll just, you know, change jobs. And then smooth sailing. Don’t we always feel that way? Like, whatever it is that’s not working, we just think it’s some temporary little glitch in the matrix and then once we sort of correct that but what happens? You correct that and then something else falls out of balance.
And then you correct that. And that’s what we call life. Isn’t it? Making these mid course corrections, putting all of our energy into correcting the glitches. And then you correct one, and then the other thing falls out of balance.
It’s ridiculous. And Lord Buddha said, give it up. It’s never gonna work. Right? It’s endless.
And when you really start meditating on this and think, oh my god, like, much energy have I put into band aids on saṃsāra? Right? It’s like, this is the nature of our unenlightened existence. That’s what Lord Buddha said. By nature, saṃsāra is a broken realm that’s not fixable.
There’s no way to fix it. And even if you manage to live in the perfect place and the roof doesn’t leak and you’re happily married to your high school sweetheart and you’re still in love fifty years later and the grandchildren are behaving and doing well and getting fellowships to study at Oxford, what happens? Somebody dies. That’s right. So even if you somehow what’s that?
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Or at least say, yeah. Or the global economic crisis and you lose all of your retirement funds.
Right? All of these things, we’re subject to this and that’s what the Buddha said. He said, as long as we are in cyclic existence, as long as we’re subject to karma and delusions, this dukkha is just characteristic of our life. You know? So I think explaining it in this way, because everybody can relate to that.
When we use the word suffering, you go, well, that happens from time to time, but not much. But that dissatisfaction of the out of kilter grocery trolley thing, you know, I think we could all relate to that. And that’s what the Buddha was saying is characteristic of our unenlightened state. Right? Now, there’s a cause to that.
And like I said, that’s what we’re gonna talk about a lot this weekend. And then there’s the the first two noble truths. And I have to apologize. We have to start at the beginning. I’m sorry.
It’s kind of a drag because we have to talk about suffering first. But they say the analogy is you need to understand that you’re sick before you’re gonna go to the doctor and get the medicine. The doctor and the medicine are the last two noble truths. You know, if the Buddha had just taught the first two, this spiritual path would not have survived twenty six hundred years. It would just be too depressing.
Oh, there’s suffering and there’s a cause. Wah wah. Oh, well. You know? But luckily, because there’s a cause, there’s a remedy, you know, to it and a path leading to that remedy, that cessation of suffering.
So that’s the good news. So whenever anybody complains about Buddhism being so pessimistic, remind them of the third and fourth noble truth. But it is important to relate to what the Buddha said about our suffering because otherwise, we’re not gonna embark on the path. Obviously, if we think it doesn’t really have anything to do with our experience, we’re not gonna be inspired to get into it. And I think everybody, probably everybody in this room and everybody who’s interested in Buddhism has some experience of dukkha, you know, and when you talk about the out of kilter grocery trolley thing, everybody can pretty much relate to that.
And I don’t think we’d be here if we couldn’t. You know, we’d be off out there somewhere trying to make saṃsāra work once again, as we have done, Buddha says, since beginningless time. But we’re not. We’re here. Right?
So there’s some instinct about what the Buddha talked about. Now, what we’re gonna do after the break, there’s several different sort of lists of dukkha that the Buddha explains. So we’re gonna look at two kind of classic lists to get a little bit more into what flavors does our dukkha take, you know, again, to get more of a deep understanding of that. But let’s have a tea break, and let’s come back. Why don’t we come back at eleven?
So it’s, like, seventeen minute tea break, and then we’ll come back and talk a little bit more about dukkha and see if there’s any more quest. Thought about during the break about what we’ve talked about so far? Couple of questions about karma already coming up. It’s always a hot topic. So we’ll get into that more this afternoon.
Okay. Let’s then talk a little bit more about dukkha, suffering, and we’ll present a little bit like I said, the Buddha talked about suffering from various contexts and various lists, and we’ll look at these two lists that the Buddha presented because this will really help us understand kind of the subtle levels of this dukkha or dissatisfaction. So one list is the three divisions of suffering. And those of you that have studied the Lam Rim, the stages of the path, will probably be familiar with this list. And the first of these divisions is called the suffering of suffering, dukkha dukkha.
And this is that one that we were talking about before. That is the one that usually comes up in our minds when we hear the word suffering, you know, pain and anguish, either mental or physical. So it can be mental suffering or some sort of physical suffering, the heart attacks, the bitter divorces, the car accidents, etcetera, etcetera. Know? Soliness the Dalai Lama often says that Western people are much more subject to mental suffering than physical suffering.
We’re usually not starving and suffering from malnutrition and living as a refugee in some camp or something, but we often have quite a lot of mental suffering. So this would be what we would call sort of abject manifest suffering. Okay? Yeah. Did you have a question?
Yeah. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Oh.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That’s right.
That’s right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah.
It’s true. And whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.
That’s right. Yeah. Of just accepting. Yeah. And it’s so often the case, isn’t it, like people who suffer from crippling low self esteem and then they tell you their view of themselves, you know, and it’s a friend of yours and you’re like, I don’t get it.
Like, how could you see yourself as so pathetic when you see the you see something completely different, you know? We’ll get into that too when we talk about emptiness and we’ll say how our reality is created by our concepts, you know, and that relates to everything, really, and how much our con conceptual sort of overlay like you, you know, fashions come and go. In the eighties, we were all getting perms. I remember it was long before I was a nun, and, you know, constantly going off and getting a perm because I had really straight hair. And then, you know, in the late sixties, we were ironing our hair to get it straight and it’s sort of like, go figure.
But, yeah, all of it, it’s all just concepts, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So mental and physical, this first one’s sort of abject manifest suffering. Now, second one is more subtle, a little bit harder to understand, but this is getting deeper into that underlying level of suffering, the suffering of change.
And what this means is, Lord Buddha said, what we usually call happiness is actually a relief from more extreme suffering. And if we indulge in whatever it is that we call happiness long enough, it’ll turn into suffering. So classic example, many of you will understand many of you sorry, Peter. You won’t understand. Some of you might be too young.
When you’re going through menopause. Right? So you go to bed and you put on the duvet and the blankets because you’re cold and you’re going to bed. And then what happens? You have a hot do you call them hot flash or hot flush?
Hot flush. Yeah. In New Zealand, they do. In America, we call them hot flush. So you have a hot flush, and then you wake up sweating and you fling off the covers.
Right? And then fifteen minutes later because you’re bathed in sweat, you pull them back on again and it’s just like this all night long, isn’t it? Like, here we go. So like I said, Peter, you’re exempt. Right?
So, that’s a classic example. You know, we’re cold, so the blankets feel like happiness until we’re too hot and then the blanket that had given us happiness before turns into suffering. Right? So, this means by nature, the blanket isn’t the source of happiness by its very nature. It’s just relieving us from a more extreme form of suffering.
Eating is another great example. Like, in about an hour and ten minutes, it’s gonna be lunch break. You’re probably gonna be ready by then. You know? So you’re gonna go to Burnside Village to the little eatery thing next to the tree that’s dying and you’re gonna get your food, you know.
And it’ll taste quite good. The first kind of plateful, if it were one of those all you can eat buffets though, what happens? You know, because it’s all you can eat and you’ve paid a set price. You always go back for seconds and then maybe even the seconds are okay. Thirds starting to feel pretty uncomfortable.
So it’s this seesaw effect, right, that happens. We’re always trying to relieve more serious suffering by some means, but by its very nature, it isn’t by nature happiness. Because if it were, the twelfth piece of chocolate cake would taste twelve times as good as the first, and you know even by chocolate cake piece number three what’s happening. Now, and this gets into something that Jan was talking about during the break. The Buddha didn’t say that everything is subjectively suffering.
And this is another misunderstanding. But he was just saying, by its very nature, even the things that we call happiness are not happiness by nature because then the more we had of them, the happier we’d be. And we can think of every example of what we call happiness and all of them are like that, you know. Right? The more of it you indulge in.
So it’s always this little sort of teeter tottery balance thing and that’s the suffering of change. We’re always trying to keep it just balanced right. And we get pretty good at it. But Lord Buddha was just saying the chocolate cake, the blanket, the new boyfriend, whatever it is, isn’t by nature happiness because if they were happiness by their very nature, it always worked to give us happiness and it doesn’t. Okay.
So that’s a little more subtle. So check again with your own experience, the suffering of suffering, really clear and obvious. This one, a little tricky. You know, as one of my friends who teaches Buddhism, he says, you have to cook it. You have to kind of mull over it.
This is when the learning of contemplation comes in that you have to really check for your own experience. And then the last one is even more subtle. Sometimes this is called pervasive suffering or the suffering of conditioned existence. What this one means is no matter what our subjective experience is, no matter what realm we’re reborn into, because Buddhism talks about realms characterized by extreme suffering, realms characterized by extreme sense pleasures, we call them often the God realm or the Deva realm, no matter what realm of existence we’re born into, just the fact that we’re still subject to that cycle called Samsāra, we’re still subject to karma and delusion, That in itself is a very subtle form of suffering. Just the fact that we’re not liberated yet from saṃsāra.
Okay? So no matter what our subjective experience is, and in some of these god realms or deva realms, they say, you know, for eons, huge lifespans in those realms, it’s the peeled you know, being fed the peeled grapes by the goddesses and you’re beautiful and everybody else is beautiful and you’re having extreme sense pleasure. And Lord Buddha said, even that realm is characterized by this third one, because you’re not free. That it’s always going to end and then because of karma, you’re always going to take another rebirth. So, this one is just being subject to the forces of karma and delusion.
Right, no matter what our experience in the moment is. So, questions about those three to clarify? Okay. The third one is quite subtle. It’s just the fact of our unliberated state, you know, if we are.
And again, I’m making assumptions, but Right? If we’re not liberated, that’s the fact of that unliberated state. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
And Right. Right. In all of those situations, but even no matter what environment we’re living in, even if you’re a, you know, a San Bushman in the middle of the Kalahari Desert or if you’re a middle class person living in Adelaide, we’re always seeking out a reduction of discomfort and an increase of comfort. You know, and it’s relative, I think, considering our environment. Volunteer work in Ghana, in West Africa when I was like twenty one or something, and I was living in this village building a school with a group of international volunteers, and I got malaria and dysentery at the same time, which is really fun, believe you me, you know, having them simultaneously.
And, you know, I’m off in this village and there’s no medical care whatsoever and blah blah blah, and I just had these extreme experiences. I remember when I went back to the States, I was a college student at the time, I went back oh, and then after being really sick, I was in this in the nearby town waiting for a bus, and it was one of those countries where the bus might come Tuesday or it might come Wednesday or it might come Thursday. So you just sort of camp out and wait for whenever the bus comes. And so we went, like, to early Tuesday morning and we’re there and we’re hanging out, and you just hang out and wait. And I remember I came back to the States and I was going out with my friends.
It was like the day after I came back from Africa. And I’ll never forget we were in a car waiting for a traffic light to change and my friend who was driving got really impatient because the light didn’t change. I remember sitting there going, I’ll never be impatient at a traffic light again. Man, I’ve waited three days for the bus. But, of course, by, like, three weeks later, I was impatient at the traffic light too.
It’s all relative. Right? It’s all relative. So it sort of doesn’t matter what our environment is. I think we have a amazing ability to adjust, but we’re always looking to reduce whatever discomfort at whatever level we’re experiencing.
You know, does that help answer your question? Is that Yeah. So we say and we’ll get to it when we talk about karma, we say our general environment is determined by karma but within that, we’re always just looking for subjective experiences of happiness and pleasure. We’ll talk about it more with karma. And we’ll talk about it more actually when we talk about the twelve links.
We don’t have a choice in terms of what karma is ripening in the moment to give us our experience. Our choice lies in how are we gonna respond to it? Are we gonna, you know, react to that unpleasant experience in a way that just creates causes for more unpleasant experiences or are we gonna use our wisdom to respond in a way that then cuts the cycle? That’s really where choice comes in because Buddhism says, your karma that’s ripening to give you whatever you experience having in the moment ain’t a lot you can do about that. And we try, don’t we, to manipulate it, to change it?
Oh, no. No. You know, but we really can’t. What we can do though is choose how to respond. And that’s the big thing, you know, about our practice is are we gonna respond with tolerance and patience and are we gonna use it as a lesson, even our suffering, or are we gonna just freak out and react in all these ways that just perpetuate that cycle?
So we’ll talk about that a lot when we get especially to the twelve links of dependent origination because it shows where you can just cut through the cycle in this really specific place, which is incredibly cool to understand and to really work with in our daily practice. You know, we’re talking about daily practice. That’s where, as we say in the States, the rubber meets the road, you know, at that moment. So we’ll talk a lot about that because you don’t have to just be sitting I mean, Dharma practice doesn’t work if it’s just the forty five minutes a day that you’re sitting cross legged. Nothing much is gonna change.
It’s all perspective towards what your karma is serving up to you and how do you respond differently. So that’ll really answer your question in a lot of detail. Good, good. Jumping ahead. See, I’m giving you sneak previews so that you’ll wanna come back.
Alright. And then another list of suffering that Lord Buddha talked about, and I really like this list because I think it’s quite characteristic especially of our human realm existence, you know, in the kind of suffering and dissatisfaction that we go through. And yeah, this list will be in your handout also on page six. So, the six types of suffering. The suffering of uncertainty.
We can’t count on anything. Nothing is stable. Right? And we talked about that a little bit when I said, you know, it’s like we think that things are gonna you know, we’re gonna get it all together in the perfect house and the perfect partner and the perfect job and everything and then we expect it to just last and stay stable. Like you put so much energy into getting it all right.
But it can’t, by its very nature. Buddhism says that everything that’s a product of causes and conditions is undergoing change moment by moment by moment. Momentary change eventually adds up to gross change. We can’t see the momentary change directly, but just by their very nature, everything that’s a product, that’s a functioning thing, that’s a result of causes and conditions is going through this momentary change. So it’s unstable by nature, and it will change.
Right? And that’s a huge source of suffering for us, isn’t it? That suffering of uncertainty. We don’t know. It’s I I kind of feel sometimes like, you know, we set up our life and it’s like this really sort of delicate house of cards, you know, and everything is delicately balanced, but don’t exhale too much because the whole thing will kind of come falling down.
By its very nature, it’s unstable. And this is a huge source of suffering for us because we expect it to be different. We’re trained that way and that’s a huge delusion for us. You know, it’s ignorance for us. And one of the steps of the path and one of the things that we work on generating a realization of is of impermanence, of things being in the nature of change.
Because then we won’t freak out when they do change. We’ll expect it and it won’t be such a shock to us. Right? We think that things are sort of like this. If we could graph it, you know, we would think things come into existence and then they’re stable and then maybe they go out of existence.
And if you’re an American, you think this is your fault, you know, that it went out of existence. But as it is, doesn’t work like that. It’s not this linear kind of progression and suddenly it comes out of existence. Moment by moment by moment, things are changing. So then, eventually, we can perceive some kind of gross change and an ending to whatever it is that we have.
And the more we get used to that again, it’s not pessimistic. The Buddha wasn’t a pessimist. He just talked about the way things really are. And when we get used to that realization and there’s meditations we can do. You know, we’ve got a lot of information to cover in this class, so we won’t do a lot of meditation this weekend, but there’s meditations on impermanence that we can do to get used to that idea.
And it’s really important for us to do it because then we’re just not so shocked when things happen and it reduces the amount of suffering that it causes us. But this is a big one, isn’t it, in your life when the things that you’re counting on, you know, end, right? Which is very, very classic, very characteristic. And then the suffering of dissatisfaction. No matter how much we have, we always want more.
No matter even you get the good stuff, even your karma serves up to you the goodies. You you end up being dissatisfied. Right? You want more, better, bigger. I was in a car a couple of years ago in California.
I was being driven to a teaching and this student had it was back when they were relatively new, a Prius, a hybrid car. And so the student’s driving me in his Prius, he’s all excited because he’s really into the environment. And it’s got this huge thing on the dashboard that to me was, like, totally distracting, showing, are you using the petrol or the electricity? And then the pistons were kind of the arrows are, like, red, and they’re going in this direction if it’s the petrol. And he’s showing me, and we’re going down this busy highway, and I’m like, dude, could you pay attention to the traffic, please?
He’s, like, pointing, and he’s going, look, you know, now we’re going uphill and the arrows are red and they’re going this direction. Now we’re coasting and it’s sort of like this and then the thing, you know, and then of course, we had we stopped at a petrol station because we had to because it’s perfect world and, you know, we needed the petrol. So, he fills it up and then he gets in and he’s had this car for like six months and he’s got it and he’s all into it and then he gets in the car and he goes, And you know what? They just made this new thing, you know, that I can retrofit the engine for a mere two thousand dollars more and make it fully electric. And, I thought, oh, that’s this.
You know, when he got the car six months ago, it was the perfect thing that he thought was absolutely gonna give him perfect ultimate happiness. But then, there’s always more. And that’s the way it is for us, isn’t it, our experience? You know, we have a goal, we get it. And I find, for me, and we’ll talk next about disturbing emotions including attachment, you know, which is a big one.
I think, actually, when I look at the things that I think give me pleasure in life, it’s actually the anticipation that fools me into thinking that the thing made me happy. Right? It’s sort of like I don’t have it yet but I’m building up to it and I’m having this anticipation of how great it’s gonna be and often when you actually get it, you’re like, is that it? Isn’t it? So we’re fooled by anticipation often into thinking that that thing is really gonna because often we have that disappointment, don’t we, when we actually get whatever it is?
You know, or you’re really stoked for a couple of days until you get a couple of dents in the new car door, you know, or whatever. You see the next best thing. So this is also really characteristic of our life and, again, gives us that little niggling level of out of kilter trolley thing, doesn’t it? You know, it’s never quite in fact, the Buddhist scriptures say, you know, chasing after samsaric happiness is like drinking salt water. You know, the more you drink, the thirstier you get.
And you really see that. There was an ad in you know, sometimes they use spirituality to sell things nowadays because it’s kind of hip. And I remember seeing in I think it was like Time Magazine or something in the States. There was this sort of young upwardly mobile couple with their four wheel drive ute and their, like, stereo and the skis and the this and the that, like, surrounded by all of these, you know, accoutrement, all of these and then the caption said something like, in order to renounce, first, you have to have it all. And I was just kinda going, oh, wait a minute.
And they were using it to sell the new cars. I mean, they’re like, you know, Zen says, before you could renounce, like, you have to have it all first. Right? But, it is the more we grasp after happiness externally, it’s like drinking salt water. Okay?
So we check that one too with our own experience. Now, next two are sort of related and there’s a way of looking at them in terms of rebirth but then there’s a way of looking at them at a subtler level in terms of our even experience in this life. So one says, shedding your body over and over. Okay? Buddhism says we keep dying and being reborn.
And every time we shed our body, you know, or as Ram Dass, the spiritual teacher from the States says, rebirth is like trading in the old Ford for the new Toyota, you know, and if we kind of saw it that way, it would be less suffering. But we identify so much with our body as being me that often at the moment of death, and some of you I know work with hospice and dying people, there’s this panic sometimes when people are dying because they feel their consciousness being kind of ripped away from their body and there’s this panic because there’s a huge identification with the body is me. So that’s suffering that we have. As long as we’re reborn over and over and over again in saṃsāra, there’s a suffering that comes along with that and repeating the pattern over and over, which we can think of as being reborn over and over and over again. You know, sometimes I think, you know, I hope that my spiritual path is really motivated by a wish to be of benefit to all living beings, but sometimes I really think if I were to be honest with myself, it’s about being liberated so I don’t have to go through seventh grade again.
Like, that would be so great, you know, not to have to go through sort of puberty and that awkward, horrible stuff. Just repeating over and over and over again, you know. And we can think of that not only in terms of rebirth, but in terms of our life. How many times have we had to shed some major identity, right, and start over again? You know, the classic thing would be like the empty nest thing that you go through when your kids grow up and finally leave the house and you’re no longer mom or dad anymore, or the horrible awkward thing that you go through when you graduate from university and you’re no longer a student anymore and you have to get a serious job and be a grown up, you know, and we go through these phases over and over again even within this life.
And just the repeating the pattern over and over and over. We had this one Tibetan Lama who’s teaching in California and this is years and years ago And he’d been living in the States for a number of years. He taught at a university. He lived in Seattle, and he taught at, you know, the University of Washington State or something. So he spoke really good English, he really got how Western people are.
And he was explaining this one of repeating the pattern over and over and he goes, it’s like this. You wake up in the morning, you get dressed, you eat breakfast, you brush your teeth, you come home, you eat dinner, you watch TV, you go to bed. You wake up in the morning, you get dressed, you eat breakfast, you brush your teeth, you go to work, you come home, you eat dinner, you watch TV, you go to bed. You wake up in the morning. You get dressed.
You eat breakfast. You by about the fourth or fifth time, we’re all just kind of like, ugh. And it’s just that, like that tedium. And remember I said before, what we call life is trying to fix saṃsāra. You know, all the energy that we put in to making those fine course corrections to try and get our unenlightened existence to work.
And we’ve been doing it according to Buddhism. I mean, it’s tedious enough when you think of this life. When I first started meditating and all of this, was about like in my early thirties. And just looking at what I’d done in thirty two years of life was tedious enough. And then you think, that’s what we’ve been doing since beginningless time.
Right? So thinking like that makes you really interested in getting out, doesn’t it? Okay? So repeating the pattern over and over. Again, I said these two can think in terms of rebirth, but also just in terms of even within this life we have these cycles.
Okay? And then going from high to low status, that also we can refer to rebirth, going from high level rebirth to low. Remember I said as long as we’re subject to karma and delusion, we have no choice. Buddhism doesn’t say we have a choice about our rebirth until we’re at a very high level of realization. It’s just forced on us by our karma and it’s like, you know, a ping pong ball, up and down, up and down, up and down.
Even within this life, there’s no guarantees. Our karma can shift. You know, you’re always reading stories about some big business executive that was skimming all the funds, you know, and had the mansion with three kitchens and five Porsches and the mistresses in the penthouse and then got caught and was sent to the minimum security prison and stripped of everything. That happens all the time, you know, in our life. We’re always subject to losing whatever we have because it’s not stable where it’s just forced on us by our karma.
And then the last one, going through life alone. Nobody can really completely share our experience. This is one when I was doing these long meditation retreats. Retreats. Sometimes I’d have some experience in meditation or some insight.
Sometimes I’d think, wow, nobody will ever completely know what I went through because nobody’s kind of in your head with you. You know, you just need to go through life alone. There’s a Tibetan expression, born alone, die alone. And we really go through things alone and this is difficult too. Have you ever had an experience and you tell your partner or your best friend and you’re really explaining something that was incredibly significant, you feel like they understand and then like three days later, they reflect back to you what they heard you say and you just go, you don’t understand me at all, you know, isn’t it?
Like sometimes you feel wow, nobody ever really gets it. I teach in prisons, kind of all over the world. And one time, I was doing a class on the four noble truths with these guys at a prison in California. And it’s so interesting. They are, you know, in a cell with another guy that they don’t know at all about the size of a suburban house’s bathroom.
Right? Never alone. Sometimes they have to wake up at three o’clock in the morning to meditate because by the time everybody’s awake, it’s just so chaotic and noisy that they can never meditate. For a lot of them, it was this last one because I kind of gave them homework. Like when I teach this over weeks, say, think for the next week, which one of these six kind of comes up the most for you?
And for so many of them, even though physically, they’re completely crowded into these you know, sometimes they’ll now in the States, the prisons are so overcrowded, they’ll take the gymnasium and turn it into a dorm of three hundred people. I mean, it’s just crazy with bunk beds in these massive rows. And still, it’s just the fact that nobody can completely really share their experience, you know, came up for them. So it’s interesting in your practice to meditate on this and just see how does this apply to your life. You know, that’s part of contemplation.
Is this list that Lord Buddha gave true for your life or not? You know, and there’s lots of nodding when I go through and explain, so I think we can all relate. And again, this is a subtler level of quote unquote suffering. You know, when we started this morning, you’re sinking of the heart attacks and the bitter divorces, but this is just a subtler sort of undercurrent of that out of kilter wheel thing that we all experience. Okay?
So, questions about this list? Anything to clarify? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That was one like, when when I talked to them, it was interesting for a lot of them out of the six because I what I told them was, think about it when we come back next week, you know, which one causes the most sort of suffering for you on a day to day basis? Which one of these do you resonate with the most? And for a lot of them, it was that. Like, even though physically, they were so kind of packed in, but just that feeling of isolation that they felt. And for a lot of them, you know, they had the Buddhist I mean, it was lucky in this one prison.
They had the Buddhist group that met about once a week, but it may not be guys that they’re in the same kind of housing block with. So especially if they’re interested in Dharma and they’re the only one in whatever their cell block is, then often there’s this huge feeling of like they’re on a different page than everybody else. So that added to that one too, I think. You know, just sort of their mind and what they’re getting interested in is just so the antithesis of of kind of everybody else that was in prison with them. Yeah.
Yeah. I think that’s part of it, but the Buddha said it’s not just about coping. It’s about really ending our suffering. You know, in the meantime, I think it’s important to understand, to accept, to honor our uniqueness, all of that. But the Buddha said, it’s not really about coping with all of this stuff and accepting it.
It’s really about getting free. All of these are caused, you know, as we shall see next. So it’s cutting through the causes. Sometimes nowadays, and this is one of my pet peeves that those of you who are at the Wednesday night class heard about, there’s a presentation of Buddhism as if it’s sort of some sophisticated psychology, you know, and it’s all about reducing stress, becoming calm. I’ve had students when I’ve taught this, especially in Asia, you’ll get these big classes of, like, fifty or sixty people from all over.
I had this one young British man argue with me passionately that the Buddha didn’t really teach that you could end your suffering. It was just about coping with it gracefully. And I was like, uh-uh. That’s not what the Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths. And sometimes, you’ll get a presentation and people are calling it Buddhism.
It’s like stress reduction, coping. No. The Buddha said, it can end completely because it’s caused. We don’t have to be subject to this anymore. So I really think it’s important to posit that quite radical vision of Buddhism and not to I mean, it’s great for people to be calm and stress free.
Really important. But that’s not the goal of Buddhism. You know, it’s not the ultimate goal. It’s great in the meantime in mindfulness meditation and all of that stuff. Awesome.
It’s great to be stress free as you’re on the path towards enlightenment and liberation. You know, so it’s really important to kind of have that goal in mind. Anything else about these, either list? Yeah, Jen. Yeah.
Sure, sure. Yeah. And again, I think it’s fine, and I told a story Wednesday night, some of you were here, that there’s an American man called Jon Kabat-Zinn, and he started this thing called mindfulness based stress reduction that he uses in hospitals and people with chronic illness. Fantastic. He went to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, to present his program when he had come up with it.
And His Holiness, very interested, really supportive, really was like, this is great. This is great. But he told him, he said, but just be careful. Don’t call it Buddhism. Right?
Present it as a technique borrowed from Buddhism for stress reduction, but His Holiness said, be really careful. Don’t lead people to think that stress reduction is the goal of Buddhism. You know? So that’s the point. It’s great, but you need to be clear about what is the context.
That’s that’s all. You know? And I like I said, I think it’s fantastic to use these different techniques and borrow them. But for people who really are interested in the whole path, don’t shortchange them by presenting an incomplete path. That’s all.
I think these things can really help people who maybe not interested in Buddhism. I mean, there’s tons now of, like, Catholic monastics using Zen meditation and mindfulness. You know, they’ve kind of lost the lineage of their own contemplative tradition, so they’re borrowing from Buddhism, and I think that’s fantastic. But His Holiness also, when he does these interreligious dialogues, when it gets to emptiness and the ultimate nature of reality according to Buddhism, he refuses to teach the Catholic monastics because he goes, that’s Buddhist business. You’ve got your own path.
We can teach techniques of compassion. We can technique teach techniques of, you know, focus and contemplation, but I’m not gonna teach you the philosophical worldview of Buddhism, which is gonna be at odds with your view. You know? So I think it’s really important to know enough to know when you know, what to take into which context. Like, His Holiness is the master at that, and I think we can use him as our example for sure.
Alright. So you’d be really relieved that we’re done with the first noble truth. Ta da. That’s it. But that’s just the first truth to be understood.
So now we’re gonna launch into the second noble truth. Are you all okay energy wise? You okay for another, like, half hour, five minutes? Okay. Great.
You guys are awesome. Alright. So this is this is where we’re getting into the really cool part. Now I always like to get into the next stage before the lunch break because it guarantees that people will come back. You know, when you just end with the truth of suffering, it’s just too the truth of depressing and people go, oh, I don’t think I’ll come back.
Alright. So this is, you know, of all of the flip chart pages, this may be absolutely the most important because this shows the relationship between the truth of suffering and the truth of the cause or the origin of suffering. And remember, I keep saying, the more we understand this, we’ll understand how all of our Buddhist practices work because I posit that all of our Buddhist practices somehow short circuit this chain reaction leading to suffering. And that’s the whole point. Remember the story of the Buddha and the handful of leaves.
Right? And he said, that’s the whole point of everything that I teach is stop this chain of causation. You know, the whole point. So we’ll look at each piece and then we’ll look at how do our practices short circuit. And to me, this has been you know, understanding this has been so important to me because remember I said, the more we understand really logically how it works, the more faith we have in our practices.
And we’re not just doing it with this blind faith because the Dalai Lama said so. That doesn’t really work for us. That might work a little bit better for traditional Asians that are super devotional. But for us, it doesn’t really work. We need to understand it.
For me, always keeping this in mind and seeing how whatever I’m doing cuts through. Okay? So we’ll look at that. We’ll look at each component in turn and then we’ll look especially at the karma piece this afternoon. So the first component of the cycle and this comes up at the top of many flip chart pages as we shall see.
Alright? Is ignorance. Now what kind of ignorance do you think this is? Is it the ignorance that I have when I go to teach in South America because I don’t speak Spanish and I need a translator? Or the ignorance I had walking through Victoria Park the other day when there are all of these birds I’ve never seen in my life, and I had no idea what they are.
They’re so cool to come to these countries because I’m really into kind of wildlife and birds, and some crazy thing landed on a branch, like, all multicolored. And I was like, what the heck is that? I have no idea. Is that what we’re talking about? That kind of ignorance.
What what kind of ignorance are we talking about, Jan? The ignorance of not knowing anything to say really. Yeah. So we were talking about that before. I hinted, right, at this dichotomy between the way things exist and the way things appear to us.
That’s the main ignorance that we’re talking about here, especially in terms of what object of appearance. What what do we misunderstand? What’s the most fundamental misunderstanding? Which thing in particular? Yeah, which object?
Yeah. How we exist. Okay? So we misunderstand how everything exists in exactly the same way, but the big troublemaker is thinking that we exist in a certain way that we don’t. Right?
We’ll talk about that a lot more in detail. We have to kind of be linear a little bit, but it’s basically misunderstanding of how the self exists. We think the self exists in a concrete, independent, inherent way. And most of our actions are all about somehow reinforcing that idea of how we exist. Right?
So, we’re kind of trying to invoke things and experiences that build up that sense of self and pushing away things that threaten it. And this, again, accounts for a lot of what we do in our life. You know? Ego gratifying experiences and objects and aversion towards things that seem to threaten this sense of self. The Buddha said, we don’t exist like that at all.
Now, the Buddha didn’t say we don’t exist. The Buddha didn’t say we’re not sitting here in this room. It’s all the hallucination. But we don’t exist in the way that we think we do. That’s all.
We do exist. It’s not all just an illusion and a hallucination. Otherwise, we could do whatever we want and why the heck are we sitting here on a nice Saturday morning? We do exist. We just don’t exist in the way we think.
And we’ll get into that a lot more. So it’s that fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of reality, especially in terms of me. K? Big troublemaker. Now there’s a second kind of flavor of ignorance that we often also talk about that’s related to that first one.
Does anybody can anybody think what the other kind of flavor of ignorance that shows up here would be? Another kind of misknowing or misunderstanding. Well, that’s in there for sure. It’s not what I was thinking of, but, yeah, our ignorance of the nature of reality also extends to things like impermanence too. Yeah.
Anybody have a guess? Do you have a guess, Sandra? Well, that’s kind of the first one. You know, that’s kind of what we’re talking about. So it’s us and all other beings, all other things same.
So it’s the ignorance of the law of cause and effect. Okay? So that’s the other form of ignorance that’s the big troublemaker. And there’s kind of two classic wrong views about where things come from. God invented it and God is the puppeteer, or everything’s random.
And those are two wrong views about where things come from that the Buddha refuted because he says, things are a result of causes, cause and effect. So either the idea that there’s a supreme being that is in control of everything or everything’s random. You know, you can do whatever you want. You’re not really creating the cause for any kind of result. It’s all just this sort of anarchistic randomness.
Okay? Buddha said, no. Everything operates in this very specific pattern of causes leading to results. Nothing will result unless you’ve created the cause too. So it’s not like fifty percent is random and fifty percent is cause and effect.
It’s all cause and effect. So an ignorance about that is also a huge troublemaker as you can see. You know, you just think everything’s random, then fine. Do whatever you want. What the heck?
You know? Eat, drink, and be merry because it’s random. Right? So those two flavors of ignorance, the fundamental ignorance about the nature of reality, especially in terms of me and the ignorance of the law of cause and effect. Now, that ignorance leads to disturbing emotions, Sometimes translated as mental afflictions, sometimes translated as what are some of the other translations?
Disturbing emotions, afflictive emotions, mental afflictions. Couple of different translations that you’ll see in your reading for this word. The Sanskrit word is klesha. You may have heard this word. The Tibetan word is nyon mong.
So different translations of that. What do you think the the basic definition of a disturbing emotion is? Very, very basic definition. Yeah. Any thought that disturbs your peace of mind.
So, any thought that disturbs your peace of mind. This gets interesting because I’ve used here the word emotion. There isn’t an exact translation for the English word emotion in Buddhist philosophy because what are some of the ideas that you have when you think of the word emotion? Just the English word emotion, what are some of the connotations of that? Feelings?
Yeah? Reaction? What else? Yeah. So negative and positive.
Isn’t there sometimes also this idea that it sort of takes you over, that it sort of controls you and it’s almost this thing that’s, you know, nothing to do with your thought process. It’s just What’s that? Yeah. Not your fault. It just sort of takes you over and you’re out of control.
That’s not a Buddhist idea. Actually, Buddhism says these things that we call disturbing emotions are thoughts. They’re what we call mental factors and some of you may have studied a little bit mind and mental factors. So, there are these mental factors that are, you know, some of them always present any time our mind is operating and some of them might be there to sort of flavor our experience. And this is the nature of these things.
They’re mental factors that flavor our conscious experience. And there’s already a lot of space in that, isn’t there? As if we think of these things as thoughts based on a misunderstanding and that’s the key to dealing with them. Okay? So it’s not like we’re just subject to this thing.
The thought comes first, the misunderstanding comes first and then there might be some sort of physiological response. Now, I was investigating this because people would sometimes say, Well, what about the fight or flight thing? Right? Isn’t that an emotion and isn’t that physiological? The physiological reaction lasts for ninety seconds unless we perpetuate it with our thought process.
Right? So, it all goes back to, right, the mental process based on ignorance. Okay? So, that’s cool. It’s a different sort of perspective.
And the study of well, not just the disturbing ones because like Jan said, there’s positive mental factors and negative ones. What are some of the positive ones? Yeah, love, compassion, faith, right? These are some of the ones that we work through our practice on building up. There’s a list of fifty one of these mental factors, fifty one of these things that sort of flavor our primary consciousness, eleven of them are positive and virtuous and then there’s a list of twenty six negative ones.
And it’s the twenty six negative ones that we’re talking about here. So that’s a whole course of study, mind and mental factors and it’s cool to actually study because you learn which ones are always present with every moment of consciousness. There are five which we call omnipresent mental factors but these ones are the ones that are very fundamental. Any of these mental factors that disturb our peace of mind. Okay?
And this gets interesting because sometimes, I think one of the first steps before we even start to look at techniques for dealing with this is being ready to have peace of mind. Right? A lot of times, I think, in Western countries, what we call happiness is this sort of excitement or this sort of charged up sort of adrenaline rush thing almost. The great Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh noted once, he’s this master who lived Vietnam and then was exiled because of his protest of the Vietnam war and has lived in Southern France, you know, ever since and travels around a lot teaching. So he has many decades of experience in Vietnam and also in Western countries.
And he said once the main difference that he noticed between Western people and Asian people is, he said Western people call happiness excitement and Asian people call happiness peace of mind. So an Asian person’s kind of view of what happiness is is like shanti shanti, you know, peace of mind. Whereas we’re always looking for the next kind of rush. Right? And he said it was a really fundamental kind of thing that he’d noticed and you noticed that.
I mean, I have this sort of pet peeve about extreme sports, you know, and we’re always looking for that sort of experience. But one of the one of the keys to approaching these practices are, are we really interested? You know, sometimes, it’s more of the young people who haven’t quite suffered enough, you know, and they come to beginning Buddhism classes and they go, no. It’s the roller coaster that makes me feel alive. You know, they’re like, don’t wanna kind of mellow out this sort of like the ups and downs and I’m like, the roller coaster obviously hasn’t crashed yet.
You’re twenty one. Just wait. When the roller coaster crashes, you wanna get off. Okay? You know, but often you’ll see this.
It’s like just sort of the ups and downs, you know, they find quite exciting. But like I said, I think it’s the young people that are more often like that. But that’s one of the things, like are we really even interested in peace of mind as a goal? Are we really interested in kind of looking at how to do that? Okay.
Now, like I said, these are based on ignorance. There’s a list of twenty six. The main ones are attachment and aversion. So we’re gonna talk about those a little bit. Now when I say the word attachment, what kind of kind of connotations do you have that go along with the word attachment?
Yeah. Dependency. Okay. Good. What else?
Grasping. Okay. Good. Attachment. What comes up?
Lacking things too much? Dependency? Grasping? Right, right, right. Okay, okay.
So there’s some sense of sort of exaggerating. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. Excellent. Anything else?
That’s what makes us happy. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Good. So, you’ve hit on most of the elements of the Buddhist definition of attachment. Okay? Good. So, Buddhist definition says that we’re experiencing a pleasant object, something that does cause us pleasure, but we exaggerate the pleasant qualities of that object and then think that by having it, we’ll have lasting happiness.
Right? So it’s the exaggeration is in there, the grasping is in there, and then we misunderstand and think. And the the the ignorance about impermanence is in there too because somehow we think we’ll live happily ever after and don’t all our fairy tales tell us that we will. So that’s what attachment is, and it’s based on a misperception. And that’s how it’s based on that ignorance.
It’s based on that dichotomy between how things exist and how things appear. Like, Jen used the perfect example, and that’s the example I always use too, is the new boyfriend. I mean, it’s been a long time. I’ve been a nun for a while. You know?
But, you know, I remember at one point, I mean, it’s just so ridiculous when you look back from a Buddhist perspective. I think it was like the mid eighties, and I totally fell in love. I mean, just madly in love. And then there’s always the stage when you first fault in love. By the way, years and years before I was a Buddhist nun, just to, you know, to be clear about that.
There’s always the phase where you just kinda wanna be around the new boyfriend like twenty four seven. And then there’s the next stage when you wanna introduce him to all your friends. Right? Like after you’re kind of doing that thing. So then I take him to a party.
You know, I told all my friends about how great he is and now we’re gonna go to a party. So I remember, you know, take him to the party and you’re like And, you know, he’s meeting your friends and and you can tell they like him and then the next day, you’re checking with all your friends, aren’t you? You know, what are they thinking? So, you’re with your friends and you’re like, what do you think? Isn’t he awesome?
And they’re going, yeah, honey. You know, he seems nice. You feel really happy. Do you wanna go to the movie at seven and have the pizza before? And you’re like, no.
No. But isn’t he amazing? They’re like, yeah. He’s great. Let’s have the pizza after the movie.
And you just think your friends are blind and stupid because they don’t see what you see. Or heaven forbid, they’re like, I don’t know if he’s right for you. You know? He’s cute and everything, but I don’t know that you have enough in common. And then you get really mad at your friends.
So how does it progress? So you, you know, you get together and then maybe you move in together. And for me, it was always six months. You know, six months later, you’re living together and then suddenly you can’t stand it because he leaves the toilet seat up in the middle of the night and you can’t stand the way he chooses food. You know?
So this big exaggeration you had of Prince Charming suddenly like, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, all faults apart. And then what do you say? You’re not the person I fell in love with. Well, sure, he’s not because you fell in love with your own exaggeration, didn’t you? You know, is this classic?
Can we remember at least? Right? This is the way it is. We fell in love with our concept. We weren’t seeing that he, like everybody else, is a mixed bag.
It doesn’t mean he doesn’t have those good qualities, but it means he lifts the toilet seat up in the middle of the night too. Like everybody, it’s a mixed bag. And so, it’s the disillusionment because we’d exaggerated so much in the beginning that leads to the disappointment. And, that’s why attachment causes suffering. If it caused happiness, Lord Buddha would have said, you go for it, you know, be my guest.
But, the reason he taught to be clear about attachment and to try and apply the antidotes is because it’s really a cause of suffering. But we don’t really get that. We think that attachment is a cause of happiness for us, and so we have to meditate a lot on this. This well known American Buddhist nun called Pema Chodron, who’s written lots of books says, people are always coming to me asking for advice about how to deal with their anger. They never ask me about how to deal with their attachment because we’re fooled into thinking that it gives us happiness.
But when you really understand the definition of attachment, you can see the pitfalls. Now, is wanting anything necessarily attachment? Because there’s sort of a Dharma rumor, isn’t there, that if you’re a Buddhist, you’re not supposed to really want anything much, and you’re supposed to be kind of, like, stoically detached and not really care about anything. Is that true, do you think? Yeah.
So what’s the difference? Yeah. Now, you’ve become a dear. Right. So it’s another exaggeration.
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that, by the way, is the definition of aversion.
It’s exactly the same definition, but a hundred and eighty degrees. We’re experiencing something as unpleasant, exaggerating the unpleasant qualities and thinking that by being separated from that object, you’ll have lasting happiness. So all our relationship with our exes is that. I mean, unless you’re one of those really great people that’s best friends with all your ex boyfriends and girlfriends, I was never one of those. I was always, like, bitter and disappointed.
You know, I never was quite but it’s that. Exaggerating again, you know, like Cathy says, the negative qualities. So it’s that same exaggeration. Now, do is it okay for somebody on the Buddhist path to want things? What do you think?
Okay. Tell me more. Yeah. That’s right. Because sometimes there is this idea that if you’re a Buddhist, you’re not supposed to be passionate and really want anything.
Well, Bodhisattvas really want all beings to be free from suffering incredibly passionately. But the difference is it’s based on wisdom. It’s not based on ignorance. Right? So as a Buddhist, it’s fine to be passionate.
You don’t have to just be sitting there stoically, not reacting like a, you know, stone statue or something. And, I mean, look at His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, tirelessly. I mean, he’s twenty years older than me and his his travel schedule is so punishing. It would kill me. But out of his passion to be of benefit to beings, you know, and there he is, and you can just feel the energy radiating out of him.
So it’s fine to want things. You know, the there’s a difference between wanting desire and attachment. We can use the word desire for what His Holiness does and we can use it for the boyfriend. It depends what are the qualities of that desire. Right?
Like Sandra said. You know, and if it’s mixed with wisdom and if it’s mixed with the truth about the nature of reality and if you’re passionate, that’s awesome. Okay? So it’s really important to clarify that a bit because there is this thing, you just hear the word attachment and suddenly you think you’re not supposed to really like anything very much or you’re not allowed to like chocolate or have any kind of preferences too. Oh, you just kind of take whatever it is and you’re not I love chocolate, but I don’t think that chocolate is gonna give me lasting ultimate happiness.
In fact, nowadays, my Tibetan doctor doesn’t want me to eat it, and that’s okay because I realize with wisdom, it’s better for me not to. You know, it’s kind of a shame, but it’s not the end of the world. I like that. Yeah. Those are so cute.
Goodness me. Yeah. That’s I mean, if there’s the wisdom Yeah. Right. And it’s all in your perspective.
You can’t really tell from looking at the outside whether it’s attachment or whether it’s some wise kind of desire. Even the spiritual path can be attachment if you’re exaggerating. Right? Like a lot of people with the relationship with the spiritual teacher, is it wisdom or is it attachment? It all depends.
I was talking to some friends of mine recently, these two nuns and Lama Zopa Rinpoche is in California now and one of them was telling me that when he arrived, there’s another nun who is like completely angry at everybody if they feel like they’re keeping her away from Lama Zopa. It’s one of those things like she has so much grasping towards being around him that if she feels like people aren’t telling her the minute he arrives in town so she can rush off and be there. She just has a mental affliction attack. And we’re kinda going, well, wow. So in a case like that, that would be attachment to a spiritual being, but it’s that exaggeration.
You know, because she really feels like unless she can just be right there at Lama Zopa’s feet, life isn’t worth living, and that’s exaggeration. So we can’t tell whether it’s exaggeration or wise wanting or desire from the object. We can only tell by are we having that exaggeration or not. Are you just being thrifty and wise and why not keep the same car if it’s working? Or is it exaggeration like you’re gonna be, you know, completely gutted when it finally does fall apart and have to get towed away?
It’s only in your own mind. Right? So that’s really important. It’s not dependent on the object whether it’s wise or not. It’s really dependent on your relationship because, yeah, you can have a very distorted relationship with the whole spiritual path and there can be a lot of inappropriate attachment there too.
It’ll still probably do you good. Better that this person is attached to Lama Zopa than the boyfriend, probably, eventually, but it’s still not terrific that there’s so much grasping there because it really causes her suffering. And you see that a lot with spiritual teachers. You know, it’s all about they’re the one. They’re the pipeline to any positive feeling that I’m ever gonna have, so I have to grab onto their ankles for dear life.
Okay? Yeah. That attachment, that’s different than devotion. That’s right. That’s right.
Devotion, you know, devotion, and again, this is one of these words that a lot of people don’t really like, the translation guru devotion. One of my friends, Thubten Chodron, this other American nun, really prefers relying on a spiritual teacher and that’s based on wisdom. It’s like the analogy is if you’re going trekking in the Himalayas and you just head off without a map and without a guide, you’re gonna fall into the chasm. If you’re heading off on some path that you’ve never been on before, you need a guide. That’s just smart and it’s not the clutching thing.
So a lot of people don’t even really like the phrase guru devotion because it’s sort of a little bit the blind faith clutching connotations and they really prefer proper reliance on a spiritual guide. I know like Alex Berzin, the translator and Thubten Chodron and some other people like that better because it’s just showing you need a guide if you’re gonna traverse the path. The point is the path and the point is the Dharma and the guide is just who’s showing you. Right? So, yeah.
Yeah. You need to really understand. Yeah, Sindhu. Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely.
Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. So all of that and we need to really check and this is again where, you know, for me, working with this and this is a whole weekend course in and of itself, dealing with disturbing emotions, you know. But for me, a key is if I feel like I’m losing my peace of mind, I look at what am I exaggerating. You know, my dharma in daily life check-in is if I feel disturbed, if I feel off balance somehow, if something’s bothering me, whether it’s a situation, a person, something in my mind, I look at, okay, if I’m feeling disturbed, I’m exaggerating something. And it’s always true.
And if I can just look at what is it that I’m distorting and exaggerating about this situation, that’s the key to me in dealing with this. And then there’s a lot of really specific meditations depending on whether we’re dealing with attachment or aversion or jealousy or any of the other disturbing emotions. But I’ll just share that with you. That’s my own personal technique is just trying to get quiet and sit and analyze what is it that I’m exaggerating about this situation. And I always find what’s disturbing me and if I can just somehow sort of wipe out the exaggeration and just see things a little bit more the way that they really are, then suddenly, you know, that disturbing emotion often just disappears.
Now, as I said, we’ve got a list of twenty six disturbing emotions and we don’t have enough time to go into the whole list. We talk about and you may have heard this phrase, the three poisons or the three poisonous minds, which are ignorance, attachment, and aversion. So these are the main ones. And then all of the list of of the rest of them are some combination of ignorance, attachment, and aversion. And in these texts on Buddhist psychology, it gives the recipe.
Right? Like, jealousy is mostly attachment, a little bit of aversion and a healthy sprinkling of ignorance. Right? So for each of the disturbing emotions, jealousy is one, pretentiousness is one, pretending to have qualities that you don’t have. We talked about this in the Bodhisattva vows class.
Hypocrisy hiding your faults is one. Pride is a big one. Right? All kinds of wrong views about the nature of reality. Even excitement is one And excitement is defined as a distraction towards a pleasant sense object.
You’re supposed to be meditating on, you know, breath awareness, emptiness, whatever it is, and your mind keeps going towards the holiday in Fiji. Right? It’s your mind being pulled towards thinking about a pleasant sense object, which is the main distraction that we have in meditation. Right? Ninety nine percent of our distraction in meditation is fantasizing about pleasant sense objects and that’s called excitement.
Okay? So even that, even though it’s subjectively pleasant in a way, it is disturbing to your peace of mind because it’s pulling you away from a virtuous object. So there’s a whole list and that’s a very cool thing. And in fact, next year when Thubten Dondrub comes, you should have him do a class on mind and mental factors if you have have you had one recently? Yeah.
Yeah. Have well, there are two aspects. Oh, awesome. Perfect. Perfect.
And what better person? Great. Amazingly learned teacher. So great. Great.
So, yeah, there’s this whole study of the mind. Awareness is a knower’s is one aspect of it and mind and mental factors is another aspect. And it’s really great to study because you apply it to how is your mind relating to things. You know, it’s all about valid cognition. How do you know if you’re having a valid awareness of something?
You know, that whole thing we’re talking the other night about doubt, and there can be doubt leaning towards that which isn’t correct and doubt leaning towards which is correct, which builds you up towards having a correct view of things. So it’s a great, great thing to study. So all these combinations of disturbing emotions, and he’ll get into that when he does that class. Now, that leads us to karmic actions because all and by the way, since we’re talking about the first two noble truths still, negative karmic actions is what we’re talking about here. Because there’s positive karmic actions too that are motivated by one of the virtuous mental factors.
Factors. But remember, we’re focusing now on the cause of suffering, so we’re emphasizing a bit here negative karmic actions. Always motivated by one of those disturbing emotions. Okay? So, for example, I’ve said killing, stealing.
For those of you who know know the ten non virtuous actions, that would be examples of these negative karmic actions. So always motivated by a disturbing emotion. If it’s a negative karmic action, that disturbing emotion in turn motivated by ignorance. So this afternoon, we’ll get into karma in a lot of detail. There’s a lot of information about karma and we’ll get into that.
And then that results in suffering. Okay, so negative karmic actions resulting in suffering. By definition, and we’ll get into this when we talk about karma, negative karma never results in happiness. So, if you do a non virtuous action by its nature and by definition can never result in happiness, virtue can never result in suffering. So, if you give a donation, you write a large check to your favorite non profit and then walk downstairs five minutes later and twist your ankle and you go, why did that happen?
I just did something really virtuous. Why did I twist my ankle? There’s not a cause and result relationship. You’re fooled by proximity and we’ll talk about that this afternoon. Right?
karma, unfortunately, takes a while to ripen into a result. If we if it were instantaneous, boy, believe you me, our lives would be a lot more virtuous. But we don’t there’s a lag period, this very pesky lag period, and we’re often fooled by that proximity. Your act of generosity, by its very nature, has to result in an experience of abundance for you in the future. You twisting your ankle is a result of something that may have happened in a previous life.
Because we say most of our experiences are a result of karma that happened even in previous lives, not even earlier in this one. And that’s kind of a drag because we can’t really see directly cause and result. You know, when you’re a Buddhist teacher, you often get students to try to give them the papal dispensation to engage in non virtue, you know, and a lot of it is about, like, spraying the cockroaches or killing the ants or like engaging in something. They’re like, is it okay? And I had a friend who used to teach in New York and all the big apartment buildings had cockroaches and they’re really you know, it’s hard to get rid of them humanely when they’ve infested the entire apartment building.
And my friend used to get these questions and he’d say, you’d never ask me that question if when you went to squish the cockroach, your own ribs would start to break. And that’s the perfect example. They don’t in the moment just because that gap between cause and effect isn’t instantaneous. But if we knew the results of our actions, you know, if we had that kind of clairvoyance, our actions would we’d really straighten up. Right?
So we’ll talk more about karmic actions, but always those negative karmic actions lead to suffering results. Okay? So this is a super important kind of diagram of the mechanism here between the relationship of the first two noble truths. And like I said, I think we’ll get into more how to short circuit it after the lunch break when everybody’s revived their blood sugar levels. But like I said, understanding this and keeping this in mind helps us understand all of our Buddhist practices.
Because just briefly, for example, there’s all of these, you know, ethical behavior to short circuit at the level of karmic actions. So we take vows. For example, whether you’re a monastic or a lay person, you promise not to engage in killing, stealing. So that short circuits the whole chain reaction here. And, it’s easier actually to subdue your actions than your mind.
So, even though this is the direction of causation, it ceases backwards. Right? First, we work on subduing our actions. You can still be really angry, but it’s easier to stop yourself from punching somebody in the face. You might still be angry.
So we work first on this level and we find that working on our ethics helps to subdue our minds. You know, you start really trying to live ethically, your mind starts to calm down and then there are a lot of mediteachings that we can use to deal with our disturbing emotions and then the hardest part, you know, frankly, is seeing the ultimate nature of reality directly. That takes a long time. This is easy, This is a little more challenging. This is hard.
But we work in this direction, you know, first, subduing our actions and we notice the effect it has on our mind. And then, with a very peaceful mind, easier to meditate deeply with perfect concentration, which is what we need to see emptiness directly. We’ll talk when we get to the path, we’ll talk about what we call the three higher trainings, ethics, concentration, and wisdom. And they’re they support each other by leading an ethical life. It’s easier to meditate and develop perfect concentration.
Really hard to sit down and have a good meditation when you’re just out there hurting people, you know, and behaving in unethical ways. So you’re able to develop that concentration and we say the wisdom that’s the antidote to the ignorance is completely dependent on a certain level of concentration in your meditation. Have to have that level of concentration in order to meditate deeply enough to see the ultimate nature of reality so they support each other. So we’ll look more at that when we look at the path. Yes, Sandra.
That’s kind of a depressing thought. Yeah. I do. You know, I spent the many other things. Oh, it’s true.
When I think of, you know, the decade of my twenties and the energy that I put into kind of my academic training that I haven’t used in twenty years, I think, God, I really hope in my next rebirth I meet the dharma younger when I have that mind. I mean, of how easy it well, I’ll give you a totally mundane stupid example. It’s so hard for me to memorize any Tibetan prayers. You know, a four line prayer that I repeat over and over and over again. And then if I have to lead the prayer, I’m like, oh.
Every Joni Mitchell song, you know, that I listened to over and over and over again when I was seventeen, it’s still there. I know all the lyrics. You know, if they’re playing an oldies station on the radio, I know every lyric to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Cat Stevens. It’s all in there. And I go, all that mental energy that I had.
So, yeah, I think that is an example, you know, which is one of the reasons that they, in the Tibetan tradition, they look for reincarnate lamas to put them in those conducive conditions as young as possible when we have that mental energy there. So for sure, you know, it does it does sort of diminish. One of my friends who’s a Buddhist teacher pointed out, and I thought this was really interesting, and he said, there’s a certain he said, the mid thirties, he said, it’s when most highly realized beings actually had their main realization. Jesus, Lama Tsongkhapa, Lord Buddha, he said, you sort of calm down enough from all the crazy energy of your twenties. You’re just starting to get serious, but you still have a lot of mental energy and vitality.
You know, it’s like way too late for me, but I thought that was very interesting that he said when you look historically at many of these figures, it was really sort of their early and mid thirties was when they had their major realizations of the path. So that’s Did you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And it’s not like, you know, absolutely restricted, but I think you’re right. I mean, I noticed for myself with my meditation, it’s really changed. My my physical stamina has shifted a lot, my mental clarity. You know, I’m still doing my best, but like I say, I hope in next life, I have the karma to meet the path early enough to really, you know, get serious about it much earlier.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How are you doing? Everybody okay?
Starting to glaze a little bit. I could tell that last ten minutes may have been a little bit too much. So let’s have now, let’s discuss. Did people bring your lunch with you? How many people brought?
Okay. So we don’t need then enough time for everybody to go all the way up the street. Is an hour enough? Is an hour enough to revive? Okay.
Yeah? Let’s give an hour. Yeah. Yeah. And also, you know, I don’t know if it’s raining right now.
Get some fresh air too, like walk around the block and just have a break from being in this room to sort of revive your mental energy. So why don’t we we’ll dedicate the merit from the morning session and then why don’t we come back at one thirty and then we’ll have another session from one thirty to four thirty with another like twenty minute break. So kind of the same thing that we did this morning. Mostly this afternoon will be focused on karma. Okay?
Because there’s a lot of detail there. And then if we can, we’ll start to talk about the truth of the cessation. But like I said, spending a lot of time on on these bits really help when we start to talk about the path because then it’s very clear what we’re doing with the path. Okay? So let’s just take a minute to sit and reflect on all the positive energy that we’ve generated this morning.
So, so amazing to think of all the people on this planet and all the things that they’re doing this morning and how many of them are devoting so much energy into trying to understand their spiritual path, really deeply trying to understand the mechanism in order to eventually break free. So we generated a tremendous amount of positive potential of merit this morning. Let’s dedicate all that positive energy that we might be able to progress along the spiritual path without hindrance and attain perfect enlightenment for the benefit of all living beings. Teacher, and he teaches a lot in India. And for a couple of years, we were teaching classes at the same centers, we’d always check-in with each other about, like, how the class was going.
And once I went up to him and he goes, how’s it going? And I go, oh, man. Today was really intense. Like, all these questions. I just felt like there was a it was a group of, like, sixty people, and I just felt like this tidal wave.
He goes, what were you teaching? I go, karma. He goes, oh, karma. Hot Hot hot topic. Hot hot topic.
Was like, yep. It’s a hot topic. We’ll launch into the hot topic of karma. Now, there are in order for us to understand, there’s a couple of lists of how karma works. So we’ll start launching in.
And you’ve got these in your handout as well. This is all under the heading of the second noble truth. So karma operates in four there are four different characteristics of karma. Sometimes we call them the laws of karma. Now there are a lot of wrong understandings, wrong views about karma.
And a lot of times when we start talking about karma people, you know, for new students, they freak out a little bit because it sounds a lot like somebody’s punishing you for being bad. And a lot of people who’ve rejected the religion of their upbringing, you know, feel like, hey, wait a minute. Now I’m getting into this religion that’s telling me I’m bad and I’m gonna suffer because of it. karma is it’s like a physical law. It’s like physics.
In Buddhism, there’s nobody to punish you. You’re not being punished. It’s like, I think it’s Newton’s third law of motion. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. It’s like that.
It’s just like physics. It’s completely impersonal. Okay? Energy in your mind stream serves up to you in the future a certain experience. Nobody’s keeping track.
It’s not the little ledger with the white marks and the black marks and somebody’s punishing you for being bad. So let’s just you know, that’s a wrong view that I think for us, you know, our culture, the religion of our upbringing can be quite triggering, but keep reminding yourself that’s not what karma is. Okay? It’s just like energy. You know, at the risk of sounding very Californian, it’s an energy thing.
Okay? So it’s like energy in our mind stream that we carry with us that eventually manifests or ripens or matures into a certain kind of experience. Alright. So the first characteristic of karma, karma is definite. And what this means is that the result corresponds to the cause in terms of type.
And remember I said before, by definition, suffering is a result of negative karma, Happiness is a result of positive karma. And we’re fooled by that proximity thing. Remember before the break, I said, you know, you give you’re really kind to somebody, you give a big donation, and then you stub your toe. And you go, hey, wait a minute. Why did that happen?
No relationship, no cause and effect relationship between those two experiences couldn’t have been because there’s a definite relationship in terms of type between cause and effect. Okay? And, like I said, there’s this huge pesky lag period between the time the cause was created and the result that was experienced. And, by the way, knowing exactly which cause corresponds to exactly which result is something that’s only directly perceivable by an enlightened being. So, we can figure out through logic general correspondences, but only a Buddha can say, Hey, the reason you stubbed your toe was because of this thing that happened ten lifetimes ago.
They say only the omniscient mind of a Buddha knows exactly those correspondences. So this is one of those things we have to take the word of our teachers in terms of knowing exactly which things correspond to what. Okay? That’s something only but through logic, we can, you know, work out in general the workings of karma. That is something that through inference and through logic, we can kind of sort it out logically.
But that’s what that first law refers to is just the correspondence in terms of type. Negative by definition leads to suffering. Positive leads to experiences of happiness. karma increases. Now, oh, by the way, all of these characteristics correspond to positive karma as well as negative.
Now we’re still on the first two noble truths, so we’re still sort of emphasizing the negative. But karma increases both the positive and the negative. Okay? So from a small negative karmic action can result huge suffering results unless it’s purified between the time that the cause is created and the result is experienced. So the analogy that’s often given is you plant a cherry seed, you know, tiny little cherry pit, you plant it, you get this huge tree full of cherries.
So from a very small cause, a huge result can be experienced. And like I said, also true for positive karma, which is the really good news. You know, we shouldn’t waste any opportunity to engage in some virtuous action because that also explodes into a huge result. And the the scriptures are full of all kinds of examples. Like, I think it was king Ashoka, this really well known Buddhist king that established Buddhism and built all these stupas all over India.
I think he was this little boy at the time of Śākyamūni Buddha who didn’t have anything to offer. He and his friends were playing in the sand right before and Buddha was walking past. So he got his friends to prop him up on their shoulders and he grab you know, he took a handful of sand and offered it to the Buddha visualizing that it was gold. You know? So even an act like that, he didn’t even offer anything valuable, but he had this motivation to offer and did this visualization, created the cause for him to be reborn as this famous, powerful Buddhist king.
So it’s true for the good karma too. And this is also explains like, sometimes people resist karma because they go, oh, you know, that young child got molested. Does it mean they deserve it that they molested somebody else, you know, in their past life? Not necessarily at all. Again, it could have been a very small action that wasn’t purified and over time resulted in an extreme suffering result.
Yes, Sandra. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s you know, and to to do it all the time. Right.
That it’s expired. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember there’s this there’s this American TV personality that everybody all over the world, I think, has heard of, Oprah Winfrey.
Right? And so I remember hearing. I wasn’t there when he was watching it, but Lama’s Oprah Rinpoche was watching her show once, and it was full of this thing. Like, she she had she did it herself, and then she had a bunch of people doing it, going through a toll booth and paying for the person behind them. And then the person behind would come up, and the toll person said, oh, the person in front of you paid for you.
And they go, oh, okay. Then I’ll pay for the person after me. And it was sort of this chain reaction of kindness. And Lama Zopa loved it. He was so into it.
He wrote her a fan letter. So he wrote Oprah this letter, and he became convinced that she was this great bodhisattva, you know, just because of that ordinary small act. And he’s done it too in the back of, I think it’s the silver FBMT prayer book. It may be the first volume, but I think it’s the second volume, which is silver. There are all these things that you can do to to transform all of your ordinary actions, divert you.
So instead of being the cause of neutral karma, right, you create the cause of positive karma. It’s like walking up the stairs. Think that you’re walking out of the lower realms leading all beings behind you. You know, open the door, thinking that you’re opening the door. All these totally neutral stupid things that we have to do all day long, how to convert them into something virtuous just by our mental state.
Because Is it in the old one? Oh, it’s just incredible. And it’s like for someone, you know, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who has a direct realization of cause and effect, he’s going, okay, you guys. You can’t just only, you know, have a virtuous mind when you’re sitting there doing your prayers and doing your meditation. Here he’s saying, we have to do all this stuff all the time, walking down the street, opening the door.
You know, there’s something when you’re pooing to think of. You know, all of these things that we’re meant to think of to create everything into a virtue because otherwise, it’s just gonna be stupid old neutral karma that’s just gonna create yet more worrying stupid rebirth in Samsāra. Who needs it? You know? For me, I find those things a little bit overwhelming, and what I try and do is pick like one or two to really work on and habituate because it’s sort of like, oh, when I stand up, I’m supposed to think that.
When I walk to the door, and I’m supposed to think the other thing, and then and then you’re sort of paralyzed. You know? So it’s good to just pick a couple and then really get habituated habituated to it because that’s the way our lives are gonna change. You know? So it’s very cool.
So that’s the thing about karma increasing. I was talking to this friend of mine. I have a friend who’s one of the few western monks who has a Geshe degree, which is this advanced philosophical degree, because I always wanted to know the mechanism of how does that work, how does the expansion work, and we were talking about it. And it it feels like it’s something like we say that karmic seeds are this sort of energetic imprint in our mind stream. You know, it’s sort of something that’s carried in our mind stream.
And our mind stream is something that’s changing from moment to moment to moment. So we talk about a continuum of consciousness made up of these moments of consciousness. So it’s sort of like one moment of consciousness is sort of passing the baton like a relay race to the next moment of consciousness passing the karmic seeds. So every time that happens, the groove gets a little bit deeper, you know, and that’s one way of understanding the dynamic of how this works. Like, every time those imprints, they’re not experienced, they’re not purified, they just get passed to the next moment.
It’s sort of like just a little bit deeper, a little bit deeper, so that then by the time they’re experienced, that groove of the karmic energy and karmic imprint is quite deep. So that worked for me in terms of sort of understanding the mechanism of how that one works. I thought that was cool to think in terms of that. Now the next one is we’re not going to experience any result if no cause cause was created. So this is the one that says, nothing’s random.
It’s not like fifty percent of your experience is random and fifty percent is karma. Anything that you’re experiencing subjectively is a result of karma or else you wouldn’t be experiencing it at all. And sort of conversely, you’re never gonna actually experience a result unless you created the cause for that. So it’s no good, as I’ve said Wednesday night in the Bodhisattva vows, sitting around wishing to be a Buddha if it’s just wishing not backed up by the actions that actually create the cause for that result. And I mentioned there was this thing that was really popular in the States number of years ago called the secret.
And it was all about kind of sitting around I mean, I didn’t read it, so I might be being unfair, but from my what I heard, it was sitting around wishing for things would create them. Buddhism says we need to have the intention, but then we need to back up that wish or that intention by actions. Otherwise, we’re not gonna experience the result. So intention is the first step, then action, then results. So this says, we’re not gonna have those results if no causes were created.
So it’s kind of you know, there’s certain things that are drag in Buddhism. There’s no savior. That’s really kind of a bummer because it would be nice to have a savior. And you can’t blame anybody for what happens to you anymore. That’s also kind of a drag.
You know? So when you’re kind of whining and blaming and self pity, you just can’t go to that place anymore in Buddhism, you know, because we everything that we’re experiencing was created by karma. Right? So we can’t just blame or feel like we’re victims, you know, helpless victims of random experience. That just doesn’t work anymore.
Kind of a drag. Alright. Also, karma doesn’t just disappear. It can be purified. We’ll talk about that.
But it doesn’t just sort of melt away like the morning fog. And in fact, over time, the reverse, it it increases. So if we ignore it, if we pretend that it didn’t happen, even if nobody saw us, it doesn’t do us any good. Right? Because it doesn’t just completely disappear.
So those are the four characteristics of how karma works. And again, like a physical law, like physics, nobody’s doing it. It’s just the way that that energy imprint in our mind stream functions. So any other questions about these four? Yeah, Sid?
No. It sure. And karma functions whether we believe in it or not. You know? And Lord Buddha didn’t invent karma.
He just saw the way that things exist and the way things work. So, yeah, doesn’t matter if we believe in it or not. Of course, obviously, according to the Buddhist view, it’s still gonna function no matter what. Well, it’s not about punishment, but everything that we experience is created by a karmic cause. Right?
So punishment never enters into it, and we’ll talk about it because the next kind of subject that we’re gonna talk about is what are the results of karmic causes. One of them is environmental. So there are certain environmental results from specific karmic causes. And that’s one of the things that when we look at our karma quiz, we can see what are the causes of certain environmental experiences that we’re having. But again, not that we’re being punished, just that a cause was created in the past.
We’re all you know, and one of the things I think right now, you know, everybody in this room, we’re comfortable, we’re well fed. Personally, I’m a little too well fed, you know, comfortable living in a nice place. You know, we’ve got heat. We’ve got food. We’ve got shelter.
We’ve got everything. We’re riding on a peak of positive karmic experience. Absolutely no question about it. But Buddhism says until we’re at a very high level of realization, we have deep pockets of both positive and negative karma that could ripen at any time. So the difference between us and some starving Somalian is tick, tick, tick.
We’ve got the same absolutely no question. We’ve got exactly the same karmic causes that would result in that experience. We just don’t happen to be experiencing it right this second. You know? But we think I mean, that’s just within the human realm.
Buddhism says that’s not even bad. The starving Somalian is a lot better than the other realms of existence that we could be reborn into that are even worse. Right? Because we say that there are lower realms with even worse experiences. We’ve all created the causes for that.
And they’re there latent like time bombs just waiting to go off, you know. So we can’t kind of you know, one of the misunderstandings of karma is to feel sort of self righteous and proud like, oh, look, my good karma, I’m experiencing this and that poor person, it’s their karma that they’re suffering. Well, it is their karma that they’re suffering, but they’re no different than us. It’s our karma that we happen to be experiencing good things. And if we don’t use it to create more positive causes, we’re just gonna run out.
Our good karma is just gonna run out. And later in this life or in our next rebirth, all those negative karmic seeds are gonna ripen. Right? So it’s sort of there’s no difference between us and everyone else until we’re at a really high level of realization and no longer creating new negative karma. An ET, They don’t completely fit in.
But we’ll talk about what kind of a being no longer creates new negative karma. In fact, we say remember we talked very beginning of today about an aria, a being who’s seen the ultimate nature of reality, can no longer create new negative karma. That’s huge. Now, they still have old negative karma that’s been created before that they can still experience the results, but they’re no longer creating any new negative karma. And that’s one of the reasons that’s such a huge kind of milestone in our spiritual practice because that’s enormous to no longer have enough ignorance in our minds that creates the cause for new negative karma.
Right? But they’re not enlightened yet. They’re not even liberated yet. They still have old negative karma. But, yeah, that would be a being that is at this huge kind of turning point in terms of their experience.
What is it? You could call it that. Yeah. Yeah. You could definitely call it that.
And I think, you know, a lot of saints in different religions probably have very similar realizations, if not the same, as a lot of the, you know, language and sort of concepts that we have in Buddhism for different different yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the things in Buddhism, you can look at people like that, and one view is they’re great beings driven by compassion to manifest in that form to benefit beings. We would say they’re great bodhisattvas. Just take it choosing to take rebirth in a way that will benefit many beings.
You know, that would be the Buddhist perspective for these great saints, Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, absolutely Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Junior in the US, you know, all these beings. One Buddhist view is, yeah, they chose that rebirth to manifest a certain activity of benefit to others. But we’ll talk more about that when we talk about the goals of the past and then kind of the progression through. It’s very cool to see what’s happening between kind of the beginning and Buddhahood in terms of what are the abilities, what are the realizations that develop. So we’ll talk about that more.
Alright. We also say that there’s four components of a complete karmic action. Now, not all of the actions actions that we do are going to result in the full experience of that action. In order to be a complete karmic action, they need to have these four components. And I’m I apologize.
I’m gonna use the example of killing just because it’s easy to understand, not to be gross or anything, but it’s just easy easy to understand. The first component needs to be the basis or the object. So for the action of killing, let’s say a farmer is slaughtering the sheep. That happens a lot in New Zealand where I’ve been recently. The basis or the object would be the sheep.
Okay? The animal that was gonna be killed. So if you’re just thinking about it or planning to do it, it’s not a complete karmic action if the object of that karmic action isn’t there. Okay? So the basis or the object would be the sheet.
Then the second component is intention and that has three different parts to it. One is the motivation. That farmer is motivated to engage in that action of killing. Okay? They mean to.
They intend to. They have a motivation of doing it. The second one, they recognize the object. Okay. It has a recognition of the sheep that it’s gonna kill.
And then there’s some delusion mixed in there. And it could be just the ignorance about the nature of reality that’s the baseline delusion, you know, that we all have. For an action of killing, it could be attachment. It could be aversion. You know, it could be jealousy.
I mean, not for the sheep, but, you know, for action of killing. Could be any number of different delusions or disturbing emotion. So all three of those need to be in there. Then there’s the action itself. For some karmic actions, including killing, they say, you get the complete karma whether you do it yourself or you get somebody to do it for you.
So it doesn’t do any good to say, farmer John, please slaughter the sheep for me, and then you feel like you’re off the hook. Okay? So whether you do it yourself or you get somebody else specifically to do it for you. This doesn’t mean the butcher who works for Coles supermarket. And we’ll talk about vegetarianism because that question always comes up.
You know, it needs to be a specific request by you for somebody to engage in killing specifically for you. Okay? And then the result of that action, the action was completed. The sheep died. Right?
If it’s just wounded and it doesn’t die, it’s not a complete killing karma. So, the action was completed. You were able to do what you intended and you felt some sense of satisfaction. Now, it doesn’t mean you threw a party. It just means in your mind you go, okay.
Great. It that’s what I meant to do. Did it. Cool. You know, just some sense of satisfaction.
Now, it’s said that even if you have regret, even when you’re in the middle of the action, it’s not a complete karma. So if you generate a sense of regret, at any point during sort of the stream of the action, it helps to mitigate the karmic effect. It’s not a complete karmic action. Now, what would be some examples of something that were incomplete? We use the example of the farmer slaughtering the sheep with all four components complete.
What would be karmic action that wouldn’t be complete? Because sometimes when we think of karma, we only think about the action. We don’t think about the other component. The action can be there, but it won’t be a complete karma necessarily. What would be an example of one of those?
Well, you can’t have regret. You can have strong regret, and it mitigates, you know, the result of that karma. That would probably have everything complete but dissatisfaction if he felt really strong regret. But it would still have all of the other components there. Yeah.
Yeah. Anybody think of another example? Okay, tell me about that. How would that work? Yeah, right.
Yeah, right, right. Right, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, right. That’s right. Yeah.
Right. Right. So recognition is one. Right. Right.
And there’s, you know, times like, for example, the Jain religion in India. They posit in that religion that you can’t purify your negative karma. Any negative karma that’s already been created, you can’t purify it. The only way to attain liberation is to be sure not to ever engage in any more new negative actions. So Jain monks and nuns walk around sweeping the sidewalk in front of them because they think, even if I step on a bug by mistake, you know, without even seeing it, it’s still negative karma.
So their approach is, you know and it’s incredible. Beautiful. Beautiful religion. But in Buddhism, for example, and I have an example in my own experience. It’s so embarrassing.
One of the good things about being a Dharma teacher, you get to confess a lot publicly, like, in front of your yeah. It’s humbling. It’s humbling. So once years ago, I was in California and our teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, was there and it was a special holy day that we took these special one day vows. Some of you may have taken these called Mahāyāna precepts that you take for the day, and you have to take it before sunrise.
So we’re all in there and it’s like three o’clock in the morning or something and we’re taking these vows and blah blah blah, you know, and we’re gonna have This is winter in California. So it’s quite rainy. It’s kind of like winter in Annaly. And I’m walking along and I hear this crunch. And I’ve stepped on a snail right next to Lama Zopa.
I mean, do you want the ground to open up and swallow you? Like, I’ve just taken this special one day vow. I have a vow not to kill all the time, but then I’ve taken this extra special vow for the day, like renewed it, and five minutes later, crunch. So, which which of those components were there for that action? How about the basis?
The object. Okay. So, the snail was there. Okay. How about the three components of the intention?
Did I have a motivation? No way. Right. Absolutely. Yeah.
Did I see it? As Kathy said, didn’t even see it. Dark. I’m walking along. Didn’t see it.
Delusion. Well, apart from all the delusions that my mind is full of all the time, but no special delusion. So the second component was missing. How about the action? That’s right.
I mean, I did it. I killed the snail. How about the completion? Action was completed, but no satisfaction. So that was like the last one is about fifty fifty.
And in fact, I was completely horrified. Not only did I not feel satisfied, was like, horrified. So that wouldn’t be a complete karmic action of killing. Right? Because it was accidental.
Basis was there. Intention completely missing. Action was there. Completion half and half. Doesn’t mean I’m not gonna experience some result of that, but it will not be the full result of killing.
So it’s really good to know these four components because then when we’re engaging in some action, whether it’s positive or negative, really think in terms of these four act four components. Don’t just think about, should I do it or not? Think about what’s my motivation for doing it? Think about, am I gonna regret it? Am I gonna be happy?
And again, these four are true for virtue too. Don’t just do a virtuous action mindlessly thinking, oh, well, I did it. It’s virtue. Set your motivation really strongly. Have a strong recognition of the object.
You know, try and motivate as much as you possibly can, and then feel really happy about the virtue that you did. Sometimes when we learn about virtue, we just engage in these things without even really thinking about it, and we don’t get all the benefit of the virtuous action. So really use this in your practice. And also, as Jan said, if you feel that you have to engage in an action of killing a pest or something like that. I mean, I don’t think you really it’s debatable.
I don’t think that you really ever have to. But if you feel that you do, at at least generate a really strong feeling of regret that you feel pushed into doing something that’s non virtuous. Right? Because that will definitely mitigate the karma. Yes, Andrea, you’ve got some.
Okay. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama is often asked this question, especially in America for some reason. I can’t imagine why. You know, somebody says, so the burglar comes in and with a gun and is threatening my family, and I’ve got a gun. So are you telling me I can’t kill him?
And his holiness always says, shoot him in the leg. It’s gonna stop him. You know, I don’t know. I can’t really think of any circumstance where you actually have to engage in killing in self defense, really. You can stop an animal that’s attacking you, a burglar that you know, whatever.
You know, I think you can it’s okay to stop harm, and we should actually stop somebody. But, again, the motivation should be more to save that person from the result of their non virtuous action than anger towards that person. Right? And there’s an example of Lord Buddha doing it in one of his past lives, and he actually did engage in the action of killing. And you may have heard the story.
There was he was the captain of a ship of five hundred merchants, and he heard that one of the merchants was planning to kill the other four hundred and ninety nine. And some he was already very highly realized being through his clairvoyance. He saw that the only way he could stop that action was by killing the would be murderer. Now his motivation was not only to save the four hundred ninety nine, but especially to save that one person from the karmic results of killing four hundred ninety nine. So he was willing to do what we call in California slang, take the hit.
He had to experience a negative karmic consequence from that action even though it was carried out with complete compassion, but still the fact that he did engage in that action, but he was willing to experience suffering mostly out of his compassion for the would be murderer. So wow. Right? If we can yeah. If we can have a mind like that, that whatever our action is but in practical you know, this came up when I was teaching in prisons because there was this one group that wanted to take refuge and refuge vows and the five lay vows.
Now the basic precept of refuge commitments is non harming. So here I am in a maximum security unit with these guys that wanna take these vows. And so that we they asked me. You know, one of them said, listen. We’re gonna take these vows that involve non harming.
But in our situation, you know, this is a heavy duty American prison where there’s, like, gang fights in the exercise yard constantly. And so I said, hey. Look. I can’t come from this, like, hippie San Francisco peace, love, and the grateful dead and tell you guys what to do. I said, let’s talk about it.
What’s your experience like? And so they have these fights between the gangs. And so I said, okay. What happens if your gang and, unfortunately, usually, the gangs are racial. So it’s the African American guys against the southern Mexicans and the southern Mexicans against the Asians and the Asians against the white guys.
You know, it’s terrible. It’s all racial gang. Said, what happens if you don’t fight when your gang is fighting? And they said, so weird. If they’re a certain distance away, it’s okay.
But if they don’t enter in, then their own guys will beat them up later. And so I said, can you defend yourself and your friends and cause the least amount of harm without having aggression? I said, you know, if you’re in a kind of situation like that where you’re gonna get killed if you don’t enter in somehow, can you at least try to cause the least amount of harm, you know, to the other guys? Because I said, I can’t say absolutely be a pacifist because, you know, your life is literally at stake. And I said, I feel okay if you can do that.
I feel okay with you taking these vows. And then one of the inmates, so interesting, he raised his hand. He goes, I believe the energy if we take these vows will mean that those situations will happen a lot less. He said, I feel like enough of us take that vow will create the karma that those kind of situations. And I checked in a couple of months after they took the vows, said, Remember we had that conversation, how’s it been?
And they go, Oh, wow. Yeah. It’s been really peaceful out there actually. We haven’t really had much of an incident. And one of the guys was responsible for mowing the yard.
You know, in the exercise yard, they had all this grass. And so he said, after he took these vows of non harming, he said he would turn on the lawn mower and then rev it really hard so all the grasshoppers and things would like jump out of the way. I thought that was so cute. I mean, you know, that he would do that and he said, I go really slow and, like, make a lot of noise so that they all jump out of the way. So, yeah, that’s what its holiness says, and I think it’s really true.
We can we can defend ourselves and defend others if it’s out of compassion with the least amount of harm. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, that’s right. That’s right. Yeah. And I would just, like, burst into tears and, you know, luckily, I’m so big. I’m never in I’ve never been people are just terrified by my size, so I’ve never never had to worry about that.
But yeah. Yeah. And we can so think you know, there’s other examples where we can think of some of the components are missing. Right? So we won’t have the complete karmic result.
So it’s really important to think in terms of that. And like I said, don’t just think of the action because that’s where our mind goes. Know, think of the motivation. Think of your, you know, especially the things that you have control over, like your motivation and your sense of satisfaction kind of before and after. So any more questions or any more examples that you wanna discuss in terms of these four factors?
Oh, I never heard him say that. Oh. Right. Oh, that’s very cool. Right.
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But in terms of your own yeah.
Yeah. That’s great. Yeah. And speaking of rejoicing, there’s this very cool thing about rejoicing. You know, rejoicing is something rejoicing in virtue, being really happy about virtue.
And Lama Zopa and His Holiness say easiest way to create amazing amounts of merit is just being happy about your own virtues, other beings’ virtues, there’s this sort of mathematical equation that I think is really cool. They say, if you rejoice at the virtue of someone who’s at an equal spiritual level than you, you get exactly the same amount of merit that they did from doing it. And you didn’t have to do anything. You just were happy about it. Part of it.
Yeah. And then check this out. This is even better. If you rejoice through the merit of somebody at a higher level of realization than you and, of course, you don’t really know who that is, but for sure, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama and Lama Zopa are. So this is what I do sometimes on purpose.
I’ll log on to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama’s website, look at all the pictures they post, look at his schedule and go, Right on. That’s awesome. Fifty percent of the Dalai Lama’s merit I got from just being happy about it. Like, you know, from just going on and going. There’s this holy being who’s doing all the things he’s doing on his website.
They have all these pictures of, like, all the events that he’s done, and it’s the coolest thing to just sit there and they go through like a slideshow, and you’re like, wow. Far out. Like, he went to some Hindu temple in Northern India and did some puja, and everybody’s sitting around, like, completely blissed out, and you can be happy about that. And then it said, if you rejoice over the virtue of somebody with lower realizations than you, you get twice as much of their virtue even from doing that. You didn’t do anything.
You were just happy about it. So Lama Zopa says, you’d be nuts not to go around rejoicing as much as you possibly could all the time. And when you do these prayers with him, sometimes you’ll get to a prayer that is deliberately focused on rejoicing. He stops, doesn’t he, for, like, half an hour. And he’s like, rejoice in the merit of his holiness, the Dalai Lama.
And then he goes into this big long list and rejoice. Because it’s like, what? Are you nuts that you wouldn’t do that? Like, you gotta do it. You know?
So it’s very cool to actually really focus on that practice and so powerful, free, easy. You didn’t have to do anything except just be happy about all the virtue. You know? No. No.
I don’t say I’ve never heard it works that way. It just works for the rejoice er. Yeah. So nothing I do. Right.
Right. It’s still still really amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great deal.
Think about how much merit you’re gonna need. Yeah. Pick it up some space. That’s right. And, you know, we’ve got I mean, that’s one of the amazing things about technology because we can know about all of these incredible things.
In fact, there’s a website somebody was telling me about in New Zealand called something like karma Tube, and it’s a like YouTube, except it’s all of these really inspiring videos. Like, you can log on and just watch, you know, all of these completely inspiring things about, like, people totally helping each other, these really inspiring stories of somebody who overcame great kind of disability to do. And it’s all this, like, happy stuff. So that’s a great one too. You can just log on there.
I watched one, and there’s some guy in Bermuda who for like thirty five years has been standing on a street corner shouting out to all the morning traffic, have a nice day, smiling and way it was so great. You know, this guy with his hat and he just goes to work every morning at five o he stands there from like five to nine thirty for the whole morning rush hour just smiling and waving and blowing kisses to the commuters and saying, you know, and you just watched it and you’re like, how cool is that? Yeah. So it’s very sweet. Yeah.
Sandra. Yeah. That’s that’s really good too. That’s instead of the cup being half empty, you know, you really look at the I’ve started doing that, started keeping a gratitude journal because I felt like, God, my life is like an amazing miracle, and I don’t appreciate it nearly as much as I should. So, you know, when you really start to kind of note it down Oh, and by the way, we’re absolutely encouraged in Buddhism to rejoice in our own merits.
We don’t have to feel like it’s unhumble or, you know, proud. We’re super, you know, really encouraged to rejoice in our own virtues because it’s a really good antidote to low self esteem and also gets the sort of snowball effect going of, like, the more we are happy about it, the more we’re willing to engage in it. So don’t go into that sort of false humility place of like, oh, I shouldn’t really toot my own horn. In terms of your own virtue, it’s great. You know?
And when you feel pride arising, there’s antidotes to that. But, you know, we’re supposed to actually rejoice in our own own virtue. Yeah. That’s right. And rejoice in other people’s.
There’s actually a Bodhisattva vow, which we’ll get to in the Wednesday night class, probably in two weeks, about complimenting people and praising their good qualities. So we should, you know, publicly and verbally rejoice in our Dharma friends’ virtue too and tell them how awesome it is that they’re doing the virtuous things that they’re doing. That’s a practice that’s really beautiful to do too. Wow. We derailed on rejoicing, but that’s cool.
Alright. Let’s turned the page. Yeah. We did. We almost turned the page, but why don’t we have our afternoon we’re already up to the point of our afternoon tea break, and then we’ll come back and finish a few more bits and pieces about For Buddhist morality, right, is avoiding the ten non virtues.
Now, this doesn’t cover everything that’s non virtuous. This isn’t a complete list, but at least it’s the general categories, just about everything we can relate to these sort of general, you know, overall categories. So the first, there are three that relate to body, four that relate to speech, and three mental non virtues. Okay? So the first, physical non virtue, killing.
And this includes in Buddhism an animal, even insects. So it’s human beings and animals down to the smallest insect. Now, Lord Buddha spoke about what you could see with the naked eye. As in his time, there weren’t microscopes. Right?
So he spoke about any anything, even the smallest insect you can see with the naked eye. Nowadays, there’s some debates about bacteria, protozoa, algae, all of these things, microscopic organisms. The Buddha didn’t talk about those, but he said anything that you can even see with the naked eye down to the smallest insects. So that’s considered to be non virtuous. I think in Christianity, you’re not supposed to kill people, but animals are okay because God created animals for us to use or something.
But there isn’t that division in Buddhism at all. Any being that is sentient, which has consciousness and the ability to become enlightened, and we say that animals are also sentient beings. Okay? Stealing, taking anything that doesn’t belong to you. Okay?
So it doesn’t necessarily mean breaking and entering or robbing the bank. Taking anything that doesn’t belong to you, anything of value that doesn’t belong to you. Now, we need to be really careful these days about this one. Okay. You might think, oh, I never steal anything.
Copying CDs, bootleg software on the computer, you know, copying CDs and distributing it to all your friends. The lamas say, you know, follow the copyright laws in your country, right, to avoid stealing. Okay. So that’s something that’s easier for us to do without really thinking about it as stealing, but that’s something we have to be really conscious of. I taught a karma weekend in Colombia, in Bogota, in South America.
And I went back, I think two years later, and they picked me up at the airport. And the minute I get in the car, they’re like, oh my god. That karma course you did changed our life. We’re still working on it. You know?
And and this one woman said she wanted she had an Apple computer, a Mac, and she wanted to buy some software. And the streets are full of bootleg vendors with all the software. So she goes, But I remembered what you said and I went to the Apple store in Bogota to buy the proper, you know, official version. And the guy in the store is like, we don’t even carry it because you can get it for, like, you know, two hundred and fifty pesos on the street. He was like, what?
Are you nuts? And she goes, no. I’m a Buddhist, and my teacher told me that I’m not allowed to. And the guy didn’t even carry it, so he had to order it special for her because she’s like, I can’t. I just can’t do it.
But it was just so widespread that she couldn’t even find the official copy. So I was like, good for you. Right on. She was telling me on the way from the airport, like, whole thing that she had to go through. So have to be careful about that one.
Now if it’s something that is shared and the understanding is that it’s shared amongst a community, then it’s okay to use it. Or if there’s an understanding that for example, there’s a free box and you put your thing in the free box. It’s okay to take something if it’s really clear that it’s given up by the owner. Don’t take things out of the lost and found. Take things out of the free box.
You know, if there’s some understanding that something has been relinquished by the owner, then it’s okay. Tibetan lamas and me, I won’t even pick up money lying on the street except to take it to the lost and found because it hasn’t been mentally relinquished by its owner. You know? So this is something we have to be really, really careful about. Personal long distance phone calls from work, taking a box of pencils from the supply cabinet to use at home, all of these kind of things.
Because we’re not unenlightened because we’re robbing banks and knocking people over the head. We’re not enlightened because we engage in these little low level radiation actions all the time. You know, just the little cheating and the little this and the little that and the white lies and the this and the that. So, if we’re serious about our spiritual path, we have to be equally really serious about our morality because honestly, this is why we’re not enlightened beings because we’re doing these little non virtues all the time. And it’s just like the low level radiation is what kills you.
It’s not the big nuclear blast. It’s just the constant kind of low level. So we have to be careful about that. Sexual misconduct, the third non virtue of body. And for us, it’s mostly about cheating on a committed partner or having sexual relationships with somebody else who has a commitment if you don’t.
You know, it’s mostly about hurting and obviously things like rape, incest. Right? Things like that. The Buddhist scriptures, different commentaries also list other things in terms of sexual misconduct. One commentary says sexual activity in the daytime.
Well, that was cultural because if you live with an entire huge extended family in one little thatched hut in the middle of northern India. If you’re doing it in the daytime, you’re gonna scare the children and freak out grandma. Right? So there are certain things that you’ll find in the commentaries that are cultural. My teachers have said inappropriate partner, inappropriate time and inappropriate place.
Inappropriate partner would be the partner of someone else, someone who doesn’t consent, right? Anybody but your committed partner if you have one. Inappropriate place would be in a shrine room in front of your teachers or in close proximity, which is pretty horrifying. Who can imagine? I was trekking in Sikkim once, this Himalayan area of India and, you know, was already a Buddhist.
And I went to this little village, and they had a shrine room. They had a temple, and I wanted to go in to do my practice. And I remember there was this whole big thing about getting the key. They’d recently had to padlock it because a lot of Western trekkers had gone in to just camp out there and had sexual activity in the shrine room. So they had to buy a padlock and padlock it, and I had to kind of say, no.
I’m a Buddhist. I’m, you know, gonna go in to do my practice. So inappropriate place. An inappropriate time would be if you’ve taken, for example, I mentioned these one day vows that we take. It’s a twenty four hour celibacy vow.
So if you take those vows, any sexual activity during that twenty four hour period would be considered sexual misconduct. For those of us that are monastics, any time is the wrong time, as we take in lifetime celibacy vows. Okay? So sexual misconduct, lying, deceit, you know, leading somebody to believe something that isn’t true. Now, even though this is considered a non virtuous speech, you can do it by silence too or body language.
If you indicate somehow, even by body language, something that’s not true, like somebody asks you a question, you go, and that leads them to believe something that’s the opposite of the truth, it’s still considered lying even though you haven’t spoken. Now, you have to know that what you’re saying is untrue. If you’re just, you know, repeating something that you’ve heard that you believe to be true and it’s not, it’s not lying. But we have to be really careful about repeating third and fourth hand gossip too, something that we haven’t verified ourselves. Be careful about that even though it’s not considered lying, you know, strictly speaking because you do believe that it’s true.
Divisive speech is defined as dividing people that are in some kind of a relationship. Either they’ve got a good relationship and you cause a rift or there’s already a rift and you make it worse. And this can be by saying something that’s true or untrue. Right? So you can say something that’s true that was better left unsaid.
So we have to be careful about that too. If you take a vow not to lie, it doesn’t mean that you have to say the truth all the time in every circumstance. Just blurt out things that might be better left unsaid. Okay? And that’s when it’s really hard.
And that’s where this thing we call in Buddhism skillful means comes in. Right? Because you don’t wanna lie, but you also don’t wanna hurt somebody’s feelings or create. It gets tough. The Buddha, in one sūtra, I’ve forgotten the name of the sūtra, he says, criteria for when you should speak.
And he said and this is really beautiful. He says, if it’s not true and not beneficial, don’t say it. If it’s true and not beneficial, don’t say it. If it’s not true, even if it’s beneficial, don’t say it. And then he says, only if it’s true and it’s beneficial and then wait for the right time.
Isn’t that interesting? Right? So it doesn’t mean we just blurt out everything. But, man, it’s hard. You know, the skillful means business.
You need a lot of wisdom. You need tact. You need to know the people. And so it’s very, very hard, you know. It’s it’s one it’s part of our practice really is learning, you know, how to how to sort of navigate.
Right? Yes. Bambi. Sumper. That’s right.
That’s right. Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. And that’s sort of what Lord Buddha said too, you know.
Don’t choose blurring. So people say, okay. What do you do if, you know, your friend comes up to you and says, how does this dress look? Does it make me look fat? You know, how do we deal with these things?
And the lamas say, Don’t say, No, it doesn’t make me look fat, if it really does. But say something like, Oh, I’ve got this great scarf that’ll look so great with that. You know, or just sort of change the subject. Like, don’t lie if it’s you know? But don’t you know, just don’t hurt their feelings, but don’t lie.
And sometimes it is this sort of dance. You know, there’s there’s in the scripture about lying, there’s an example of the hunter comes running up with the gun and says, direction did the deer go in? And most of my llamas say, if the deer went that way obviously, you don’t say the deer went that way. They go, if the deer went you know, don’t say it went the opposite way either because that’s lying. Just say, wow.
Look at how blue the sky is today. They’re like, change the subject. And I’ve done that sometimes. I’ve just totally gone off on a tangent. I mean, you have to overcome your pride because it’s kind of weird to do that.
But usually, people are so bewildered, they sort of drop it. You know, I’ve done that before with with negative speech. In fact, I remember once, there was a a friend of mine where a bunch of us were at the airport and this mutual sort of new acquaintance came up and my my good friend came up and he was somebody I really liked, like this new friend that I was super hitting it off with and I really liked him a lot. And one of my best friends came up and said, oh, I’m really having trouble with this guy. I find him really like, she’s sort of disrespecting him and like saying all this stuff.
And I remember at that moment just going, oh my god, what do I do? I just feel so different. And I did this thing without even thinking. I just acted as if she said that he was her new best friend and I said, wow, yeah, I like him so much. You know, we’re really hitting it off.
And she was so sort of shocked that she just backed off and quit talking about him behind his back, you know, because I felt so uncomfortable. So sometimes do weird things. It’s okay. You know, it prevents you from engaging in non virtue. You don’t always have to make sense, but it’s better to avoid engaging in non virtue.
You know, I always remember that because like I said, it was very instinctive, but I’ve used it in the past to get out of situations where somebody’s gossiping behind someone’s back and like because that’s one of the things that’s so hard, you know, when somebody’s trying to engage you in that kind of speech and you just don’t wanna go there. Yeah. Alright. Harsh speech, that includes criticizing, abusing, yelling, also includes swearing. Right?
So any of this kind of harsh abusive speech. Now they say the person or the being has to understand what you’re saying. They have to speak your same language. It needs to be a human being. If you’re shouting at your dog, it’s not terrific, but they don’t understand the subtlety of your insults.
Right? So for this one, it needs to be somebody who understands your language. Right? For the full karmic effect. Now, idle gossip, this one doesn’t seem that bad.
The problem with this one is we just do it all the time and it is a huge time waster. That’s the biggest thing. And this is just spending a lot of time talking about things that are meaningless, acting as if they’re meaningful. How many hours do you spend at work the next day talking about what was on television last night or politics? I mean, I’m so glad I’m not in America right now.
You know, before every presidential election, the amount of talking, how, you know, how much can people talk about something like politics? And one of the other problems with this is how much can you indulge in this before it starts starts slipping in this direction? You know, you’re just really talking, talking, blah blah blah, meaningless things. So easily can it slip in the direction of harsh, divisive, and lying. Yeah.
Oh, absolutely. Majorly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah.
Yeah. And one thing that we can do too with this is when you’re with a group of people, try to introduce meaningful subjects. Right? Now, it doesn’t mean that you only talk about the four noble truths all the time. You know, of course, in the in the the commentaries on the vows say, to get along with people, to get to know people, sure.
Talk to people about what’s going on. This is just about wasting time talking about meaningless things all the time. And sometimes I think in those situations, like with the divisive speech, with the slander, with this, you can elevate the tone of the conversation. Like with your workmates, often people say, I can’t even go to work anymore as a Buddhist because I sit around having lunch with the my workmates, and we’re just talking about who’s not there. But we can take responsibility for that and try and, like, elevate the tone of the conversation and try and talk about subjects that are more meaningful, I think, also.
Also, in the time of Lord Buddha, there wasn’t television. You know, I think that’s a huge time waster, just checking out in front of the tube or reading newspaper. I mean, we need to you need to keep informed, need to relax, but really looking for our own lives. You know, how much time are we spending in any kind of meaningless activity? It sort of relates to this one too.
Yeah? And then there are three mental ones, maliciousness or ill will. Sometimes this is called ill will, and that is delighting in the misfortune of others and wishing others harm. You know, very anti Buddhist activity. Okay.
So wishing others harm, delighting in their misfortune. Covetousness is wishing to possess things that belong to someone else. Okay. Something else. So it’s sort of on the way towards stealing, isn’t it?
The mental ones, you can see how this one’s kind of on the way towards killing or harming others. This one’s on the way towards stealing. We say that this is these two are complete. Right? We have the completion, the fourth component.
That is fulfilled when you decide to do something about it, when you make a definite decision to engage in harm or to possess that which belongs to someone else. Right? So we kind of have a continuum. For example, we’ve got attachment over here, then covetousness, then stealing. So it’s kind of like that.
Attachment is just sort of wanting something. Covetousness is that something that I want belongs to somebody else. And it’s complete when you make the decision to actually take action, and then the action would be stealing. So you can see how it’s kind of a continuum of non virtue. And then wrong views is considered going against the teachings of the Buddha by refuting things like karma, rebirth, the possibility for enlightenment.
Now, it doesn’t mean when you’re a new student and you’re just sort of checking it out. That’s not considered wrong view. But you have enough evidence to show you that it is likely that these things exist and you’re going against it. You know, vocally trying to convince other people that it’s not true. That’s considered non view wrong view.
So it’s not this sort of intermediate state of just sort of exploring and checking and, you know, I’m not quite sure yet. That’s not considered wrong view. So these are the major non virtues. And like I said, they don’t cover all negative actions, like punching somebody in the face isn’t on that list. But it’s the major kind of categories of the actions of body, speech and mind.
So, other questions about these ten? In the list of the non virtues it’s killing, now, the non harming is the first refuge commitment. So, that might be what you’re thinking of. The non harming is like the most basic kind of Buddhist morality, and if we’ve actually taken refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, that’s our first commitment is non harming. So that’s yeah.
That’s much broader. Yeah. Any other questions? You ready for your karma quiz? Alright.
Alright. How exciting. Now, you don’t have to turn these in, show me or anybody else. This is just for your own own kind of spiritual practice, but be honest. Now before I pass it out, I need to explain a little bit.
There’s a little flap that’s closed. Keep it closed until I tell you to open it. Do I have everybody’s promise? Girl Scouts honor to keep it closed. Okay.
Okay. So, there’s two columns that are showing. One is called personal experience and one is called general environment. Okay? So, your personal experience and the general environment with a bunch of phrases there.
Now, there’s a little box next to each phrase. If, when you read the phrase, you feel that it’s like characteristic of your experience, check the box. And I always say do the first thought thing. You know, if you just have a charge around that like if you read it and you just kind of go, oh yeah. If you have to do a bunch of analysis and maybe it happened one time when you were six and a half, you know, but it hasn’t happened since, don’t check it.
Now, some people say that there’ll be something that was really characteristic in the past but hasn’t happened for a long time, you might want to make a little note of that because your karma shifted and it’s kind of cool to see, okay, what’s that about? You know, sometimes people have a certain experience that just happened a lot. But in general, your recent experience is a characteristic of your more recent experience and not just something that happened once necessarily, but maybe it’s been significant to you or something that keeps happening. Okay? Kind of like that.
And go ahead and ask if you’ve got any questions about that. And then the general environment, very similar. Is it characteristic of your environment? Now, these phrases come directly from the sutras of Lord Buddha. So, for example and Lord Buddha lived in this agrarian culture in Northern India, right, where everybody grew crops.
So there’d be things like disappointing fruit in trees and your crops failing. Well, it’s quite possible, in fact, highly likely that nobody in this room is a farmer. So you might feel like that has nothing to do with my experience. But it’s true. Yeah.
Or did your investments fail or your small business tank? Right? So some of them, especially under the environment, I’ve been true to those sutras and haven’t wanted to change the language. But for those, think more broadly. There’s one about rough difficult terrain.
And I had this one student in California and she was like, oh, rough difficult terrain. I live in San Francisco. No. You know, that doesn’t apply. She realized the next day as she was driving to work, she couldn’t drive on the highway because her car had all these things wrong with it.
So she had to drive on the little back streets. She noticed the next day she’s driving to work because of the thing with her car, she’s driving on these back streets that have all these potholes and like redwood tree branches, and she’s just kind of like that’s right. And so she was just kind of like, oh, duh. Like, the rough difficult terrain. So think about, you know, kind of more broadly how it relates to your experience.
Okay? So that’s the first step. And then we’ll go to the second step, which is opening the flap. But just leave the flap closed until I give you permission. And I’m got my eye on all of you, so don’t misbehave.
Have you got any questions about what any of them mean exactly? Call out. Yeah. Just tick anything that you feel like is representative of your experience. Yes.
It means that or somehow there’s been some rift between you and them. It could be any of those things. It would that would be something like you take delight in or enjoy things that are impure, like, you know, an example would be, you know, a dog fight or something. You take pleasure in that, like something that’s kind of disgusting appears to you as something kind of pleasant and enjoyable. Maybe, something like that.
Yeah. Or that horrible rap music full of misogynist words and things. You know, it would be sort of things like that, like things that are actually unpleasant appear to you as pleasant or pure. Nobody in this room would ever check that box, I’m sure. Is this so subjective?
Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah. I’m feeling fine, so I’m not taking more. Right, right. But and it’s interesting also, I’ve had I’ve had some students who’ve done this over, you know, with a couple of year gap in between and noticed that their answers have really changed a lot.
So it’s interesting to do, you know, a year later, two years later. Or like I said, think of things that may have happened when you were younger that were very characteristic but now have shifted as well. So what sort of lost span was my thinking of things like? Which part? Oh, the karma quiz?
I would say things that are more characteristic recently, unless there’s something that you just go, wow, that was so the case, you know, and really characteristic of my experience. And then it’s good to make a little note because you see how that karma wore out. Right? To you know, you had the karma to be having that experience, and that’s really shifted, and now you’re not having that experience anymore at all. Yes.
Either or. Either or. Like, you you have a lot of illness in your in your life. You’re good, you know, you you’ve yeah. It’s characterized by okay.
But if it but if you have a lot of illness, then you check that. You know? So, again, it would be either or, either one or the other. It might be both. I mean, we don’t really know if we have a short life because we’re all still alive and we could die tomorrow.
Right? So that one’s yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that one, we don’t we don’t know for sure.
So we’d focus more on the illness, I think, for that one. So wait, where’s the wars and dangerous animals? Right. And that would be the general environment, again. Like, you know, if you were living in a place that was in the midst of a civil war, for example, and your life was in danger that way, or there were lots of dangerous animals around, so you felt like you had that threat.
What’s that? Right. It’s about kind of threats to your life. You know, if there were if you did live in a place where there were animals that could actually kill you and that was part of your experience lately, probably not lately. Okay.
Okay. Well, then it’s yeah. And you might want to make a note that that was your previous experience. Yeah? You know, and look at that, look at the causes, but that shifted because in Adelaide Say again?
Okay. Well, then you wouldn’t check that one if you don’t have that experience because it’s just about your your experience. Yeah. Yeah. And if you feel that it’s a threat to you, mostly.
Who needs more time? Anybody need more time? Everybody done? Okay. So, next, open the flap.
And you’ll see in the third column, the corresponding non virtue that creates the cause for that experience. And now, what what I want you to do is total how many boxes you checked for each non virtue. So, you see each for each non virtue, you got two rows that correspond to it. So, a possibility of four experiences that correspond to each non virtue. Do you get that?
Okay. So check how many of each four did you get and write that in the left hand margin. For example, if you check three out of the four boxes that correspond to killing, write a little three right next to those first two rows. If you check one of the boxes that correspond to stealing, write a little one. So do your tally.
Do you understand, Sandra? Okay. So see how for each non virtue, you’ve got two rows that correspond to it. Right? So you’ve got four different items that correspond to killing.
See that? So the first two rows, right, correspond to killing. Yes. So you’ve got two of personal experience and two of general environment, all of which correspond to killing. Right?
See that? And then just how many of those boxes did you check out of the four that correspond to each non virtue? Right. So you do your totals. And then just just note that in the left hand column.
Just put a little number. Because mostly, instead of being sort of totally evenly spread out, we have clusters. So we’re going to work look at that next. Right? Maybe you’ve got a three one or two threes, one or two twos, whichever ones kind of rank high.
So did everybody have maybe a few that ranked higher? Do you have some clusters of things? Okay. For now. But if you’d done it thirty years ago, you would have done a lot more.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, okay. Good. And that’s why it’s useful to, like I was saying, if there’s something that was really characteristic in the past, to note that and say, Well, that karma shifted, you know, because we say these experiences are a result of karma, and that karma can pass and give you a new experience, a different experience. Now, when you look at the things that rated high in terms of your corresponding non virtues, Does it make sense to you?
Are you surprised by any of the things that rated high? You feel like, I can’t really relate to that at all. Yeah? Well, we said one of the results of karma was also having the habit to do it? So, a lot of times people find, not always, but a lot of times people find the things that rate high are things they know that they’re work you know, that they’re struggling with in terms of non virtues or habits that they know they have.
Okay? So sometimes, it makes sense. You kinda go, wow. Wow. That’s really true.
I just didn’t know that those experiences related to that karma. So for some people, doing this quiz actually gives them a lot of faith in cause and effect because, like, who would know that this experience necessarily related? But when they look at the corresponding non virtue, they go, yeah? Wow. Okay.
Yeah. I know I struggle with that one. Sometimes, not always. Because remember I said, you could have created the causes for something in past lives that you’re experiencing now and not have any idea and maybe really not have the habit of doing it. So it’s not a hundred percent, but a lot of people kind of go, oh, yeah.
Right. Like, I know I’m struggling with that. So, when we talk about purification of karma, target, you know, and in terms of your awareness of your actions, target your problem areas first. Really work on those because one of the ways that we can, you know, creating new non virtue is by being really mindful of that behavior. So if you know, for example, you have problems with divisive speech, that was one of my big ones.
I sort of grew up in this culture that it was sort of witty and funny to say these, like, really smart, kind of horrible remarks about people behind their back. That was just sort of, you know, this culture I grew up in. And after a few years of getting involved with Buddhism, I realized how really awful it was. Like, I still really had that strong habit. It was funny and everybody laughed, but I thought, oh, this is really ugly.
I don’t wanna do this anymore. So I really worked really hard for a long time trying to be super mindful of my divisive speech and really work on it. And one of the tricks that I did to sort of cure myself of that habit was I made a deal with myself and I said, okay, if I’m gonna say something really nasty about somebody, I have to say something really nice about them in the next sentence. So talk about like so I started doing this like totally schizophrenic thing, but it really worked to cure me because I would say, Oh, that guy is such a jerk. And I’d be like, Oh God, I did it.
And he’s so devoted to Lamazopi. He worked so hard. And my friends would be kind of like, That’s weird. But I noticed by forcing myself to say something nice, I started curing myself and actually I started thinking nicer thoughts about the person. And then when I think of that person, I think more kindly about them.
So it’s very sort of, what’s the word? Kind of deliberate and contrived in the beginning sometimes when we’re trying to work on our negative habits, but it’s okay. Just go ahead and be really contrived about it. And if we look back at our chart that we had here, this flowchart thing, it sort of relates to that when we get back to whoops, where are we? So it’s sort of like by deliberately doing the antidote in the moment to that negative karmic action.
I just did the opposite. Like, there was this imprint, this energy of dissing the person and I immediately forced myself to say something nice, by doing that, the energy of that karmic action was weakened and I found it had an influence on my disturbing emotion of, you know, I felt like I’d really had this terrible habit of fault finding and being critical, you know, and I really realized how much suffering that caused me. But when I started doing it, it’s like suddenly, suddenly I started feeling more about the person. I started appreciating more how devoted they were to Lama Zopa, and I wasn’t noticing so much that they were a jerk. So it kind of goes like that.
So work on but the reason he was a jerk was because I had that concept in my mind. I was having that perception. So it’s amazing and it really works. So think of things like that. And when you see you’ll see in the fourth column the solutions.
So and we’ll talk more about this. I think we’ll talk in the in the morning about purification. We’ll get into how to purify your negative karma. You’ll see in the solutions there’s two for each non virtue avoiding that non virtue and then doing the opposite. And now remember I said that your karmic imprints are like, you know, this energy in your mind stream.
I think of it as like a conveyor belt kind of carrying, you know, along these seeds. Sometimes we use seeds as the sort of metaphor of karmic seeds. Every time you do something that’s the total opposite of whatever that karmic seed is, in a way it detonates it. I’m mixing metaphors. It’s sort of like there’s a bomb and you’re defusing it.
So it’s never gonna explode on you. Right? So to purify, be really mindful to avoid whatever that non virtue is, and then engage in the opposite action as a way of defusing those bombs. I have a a good friend in California who is Israeli, and like every other Israeli, he was in the army. And he’s about my age, so he’s in this really kind of heavy conflicts in the Sinai Peninsula and all of this stuff in, like, the seventies.
And so he doesn’t know for sure that he’s killed a human being, but he’s pretty sure he probably has. I mean, he never really saw shooting the drop the person dropping, but just because of the conflicts and situations he was in. So he’s now a Buddhist student, and he’s he also is really into animals. We we share that. And he started this animal rescue thing in the States.
I don’t know how many of those you guys have in Australia. We have these breeds of dogs called pit bulls that are really vicious. And so he has kind of devoted his life really to saving these dogs that would be in danger of being euthanized because they’re so vicious. He’s amazing with these dogs. He’s just like the most alpha person that you can imagine.
So he tries to retrain them. And some of them he can train so that he can find homes for. Some of them he’s the only person who can deal with them and he knows he has to have them for the rest of their lives. And he’s taken this on as part of his karmic purification for his killing karma. And he does it very deliberately as the antidote to his Israeli soldier killing karma.
You know? And he’s also a Buddhist student, so he does these things like he has the dogs line up for their food and he plays mantras and sutras and Lama Zopa reciting. So they’re sitting there like waiting for the food going, and they have to listen to like the Diamond Cutter Sūtra or something before they eat. So he’s trying to give them really positive imprints. Recently, when Lama Zopa Rinpoche was in California, he invited Lama Zopa Rinpoche over and Lama Zopa Rinpoche came with all of his personal relic collection and they did this whole collection, and they did this whole animal blessing of now he’s got, like, eleven of these dogs, and most of them can’t be let out at the same time.
So he has to keep these six in cages, and the other three can go on a run together. And then he puts the other three back, and then these two are okay together. But if he has them all out at the same time, if he’s not right there in sight, they’ll, you know, go for each other. And it happens, you know, it still happens. But it’s incredible.
And he’s doing that as his solution for killing karma. So we can engineer a purification plan. You know, if you don’t like having these things happen to you, you know where they come from now, we’ll do something about it. You know? So this is fantastic data for our own karmic purification.
And we’ll talk more about how purification works tomorrow. In the meantime, just sort of mull over this, try and brainstorm and come up with some ideas. I confessed that divisive speech was one of my problem areas. For a while in the nineties, I worked as a volunteer for this organization that did community conflict resolution. And part of it was, I mean, I was interested in learning conflict resolution.
I sort of got into it and then I realized, oh, that’s perfect. Right? For the antidote for my divisive speech karma is resolving conflicts. So there’s creative things that we can do, you know. I think and we’ll talk a little bit in the morning about the classic purification antidotes, you know, to negative karma because there’s some very classic ones in Tibetan Buddhism reciting certain mantras, doing certain visualizations.
But I find, especially for Western students, I think it’s really good to do a combination of the very traditional practical ones. You know, we’re very pragmatic and we can relate to doing the opposite thing. So I think it’s really nice to do a combination of the traditional ones plus coming up with ideas in your own life of how you can defuse fuse those karmic seeds that you’ve now seen, chances are if you’re having the experience, still have those seeds, you know, especially if it’s something habitual or that keeps coming up over and over again. So it’s very cool to work with this and come up with a purification plan. Okay?
Any questions about your results or about the solutions or any and we’ll talk more about kind of ideas and how to work with this tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.
And he just pretty much assumed it probably was. Like in his case, he felt yeah. And the fact is too, you know, when we’re purifying, it’s good to target things that we know that we’ve done, and we also do this sort of everything else too. Because for sure in past lives, we’ve done it all. Right?
So you’ll see in in, you know, some of the prayers and the purification ceremonies we say, you know, think specifically of things you know you have trouble with, that you know that you’ve engaged in, heavy non virtues that you’ve done in your life, and then you just throw everything else in there too. You know? So for him, it may not even be that he’s specifically killed human beings in this life, but for sure he has at some point, and so it’s gonna be great that he’s doing all this kind of animal rescue stuff. But, yeah, it’s very effective if we know for sure that we’ve done it and then target a specific, you know, action to do. Now, one of the things that the lamas say, when you’re doing that, don’t just do it forever, you know, because at a certain point, you have to feel that that negativity is purified.
So for something like killing, it’s not gonna be one day of reciting twenty one Vajrasattva mantras and then you’re done. But so you kind of think or if you have a spiritual teacher who can help you, that’s best to think of a chunk of practice to do for a certain period of time. And then they say, it’s really good at the end of that when you’ve done it sincerely to go, okay. Great. That’s finished.
That’s purified. I don’t need to worry about that. So you’re not spending your whole life because then we get into this sort of burden of guilt thing, and that’s not good either. You know, it’s good to have regret. It’s not good to just feel burdened with guilt.
You know, so the lamas often say, pick something that corresponds to the karma that you know that you’ve created and then feel like it’s finished. And I’ve had a couple of times with Lama Zopa Rinpoche where he’s in fact, one time recently, was talking to him about something that I felt like I’d done that I’d become really aware of and some practices that I’d done to purify that karma and he wrote me, you know, an email through his attendants that said, you can feel like that’s finished now. That’s purified. So it’s like, you know? So it’s great.
And that’s one of the things about having these teachers with that level of insight and clairvoyance that they can go, nope. Still got to work on that or you’re cool. You know, you did it. You’re you’re purified. But even without that guidance, we can still work out these karmic purification plans, you know.
So it’s really great to do it, especially if you know there’s some problem area. I had a friend who was you know, years ago when we were living in India, about twenty years ago, and she had had an abortion before she was a Buddhist, which according to Buddhism, birth control is no problem. Anything that prevents conception is totally okay, but abortion is considered a non virtue. And so she went to her teacher to confess that. And and she was just getting ready to do a three month Vajrasattva purification retreat.
So he said, great. That’s your purification for that karma. At the end of that three months, you know, generate and feel really strongly that that’s purified. So that was a real relief to her, you know, to be able to do something very specific for that karma. Yeah.
But we’ll talk a little bit more about purification tomorrow and I think what we’ll do tomorrow morning is talk about purification a little bit more. We’ll look at the twelve links of dependent origination which is great to do when your mind is fresh. It would be a real mistake right now because everybody’s like flatlined, but tomorrow morning we’ll do that. And then we’ll launch into the truth of cessation and then the truth of the path. Now we have a somewhat shorter day tomorrow because there’s a morning meditation at nine.
So we begin this class at ten thirty. So what we’ll do is have another two hour morning with a briefer break, maybe like a ten minute break in the morning, and then the afternoon will be about the same, about one thirty to four thirty with our kind of seventeen minute tea break in the afternoon. Did you wanna announce? Okay. Good.
We might just do a seven minute stretch or something, you know. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. We might just have let everybody stretch. Or we could have a shorter morning session, a slightly earlier lunch break, and then a twenty minute afternoon break. We’ll just see how it goes and where we are. Alright.
Thank you very much for your attention to all of this. I know it was really a lot today, and you did great. So let’s take just a minute to dedicate all of our positive energy from really getting into the first two noble truths. We’re pretty much pretty much done with the first two. So, again, thinking how incredible it is, not only to be interested enough in these teachings to devote an entire day, but to get an explanation of where our suffering comes from.
Huge, huge virtue in understanding this because it’ll enable us to cut through, stop that cycle of suffering. So let’s dedicate all the positive energy from our practices today towards that goal of cutting through that endless round, the chain reaction that causes our endless rebirth in Samsāra and attaining liberation and enlightenment, focusing all of our positive energy from today towards that goal.