Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. This guided meditation leads practitioners through the eight sufferings that characterize cyclic existence, helping them develop the determination to seek liberation. Thubten Chodron structures the contemplation around the hardships woven into human life: birth and the shock of leaving the womb, the inevitable physical and mental decline of aging, sickness without choice or control, and death. Between birth and death lie constant secondary struggles: separation from what we love, encounters with what we hate, failure to obtain what we desire, and the fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a body and mind driven by ignorance and negative actions. Rather than inducing despair, this meditation aims to transform complacency into genuine aspiration for nirvana—a lasting freedom from suffering. The talk is pitched at practitioners ready to shift from seeking favorable rebirths toward the middle-level goal of complete liberation from saṃsāra.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 25 GM.mp3
UUID: cca1abe9-5fac-4b59-ae31-fea70153e50e
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~1,151
So we’ve now completed the meditations on the initial level of practitioner so that somebody who thinks about their precious human life and its value realizes it doesn’t last long and is concerned about what happens after they die. And due to that concern, they take refuge and then follow the Buddha’s fundamental instruction, which is to observe karma and its effects. And they do this in order to have a good future rebirth. Now we’re going to move on to the path in common with a middle level practitioner. And so this is somebody who contemplates the disadvantages of cyclic existence and its causes and the possibility of liberation, the path to that liberation.
In other words, the middle level practitioner focuses on the four noble truths, and they aspire to abandon the first two, suffering and its causes, and to actualize the last two, the true cessation of suffering and the path to those. So this middle level practitioner wants not just to have a good rebirth in the future, but wants to be completely liberated from cyclic existence once and for all. So to develop that aspiration to leave cyclic existence and attain liberation or nirvana, we have to contemplate the disadvantages of cyclic existence. So one way to do that is to contemplate the eight sufferings. And these eight sufferings appear very vividly in our human life, And meditating on them helps us accept the conditions as we meet them now, and it helps us aspire to eliminate them so we don’t have to experience them again in the future.
So if we can accept the suffering that’s happening to us now, then we create less negative karma. We have less mental anguish. And at the same time, if we can aspire to eliminate the causes of these sufferings in the future, then we really are on the path to liberation. So the first disadvantage of our present situation is just that we’re born. So think about the experience of being in the room where you’re crowded and shut in.
Then your mother goes into labor. You experience a lot of pain squeezing through the birth canal. You come out, and you’re greeted with harsh lights in a completely different world that you don’t understand and are unfamiliar with. And no matter how kind the people around you are, just because it’s so new and different, you’re frightened. So the whole situation of getting born is not a very pleasant one.
And when we think about this happening repeatedly, it helps us generate the determination to be free of the cyclic existence of which this is a part. From the moment that we’re born, we start to age. So even though our society idolizes youth and beauty, everybody without exception is in the process of getting older. And so how do we feel about the inevitable decline of our physical and mental abilities? Imagine yourself aging.
How are you gonna feel? So your body can’t do what it used to do. So you become forgetful. When you look in the mirror and there’s so much gray hair, so many wrinkles. How are you gonna feel when you can’t take care of yourself anymore, when your kids put you in an old age home, or even you live alone in old age, is that pleasant?
How are you gonna feel when young people disrespect you and think that you’re out of it? So all of us are in the process of aging physically and mentally. There’s no way to escape from it. How do we feel about that? Think of yourself being an old person.
And in addition, we’re always getting sick. We all wanna be healthy, but without our choice, without our control, we get sick. Anything ranging from the cough or flu to terminal illness, our bodies are ripe to experience physical suffering. So the purpose of contemplating this isn’t to get depressed. Purpose of contemplating this is so that we understand that it comes from being in cyclic existence, which is caused by our ignorance and the actions that we do from that ignorance, and thus to develop the determination to be free of that.
So the purpose of thinking about these disadvantages is to invigorate us so that we want to be free of the suffering instead of just going along complacently in a bad situation. So think about the fact that we get sick without control. How do you feel having a body like that? In addition, our body is eventually going to die. So how do we feel about death?
The whole situation we’re born into means that we’re going to die without our choice. So develop the determination to reach the deathless state of nirvana. And then between our birth and our death, we experience other problems. So for example, we’re separated from what we like. There’s all these things that we have, that we want, and we’re separated from them.
We’re separated from dear ones. We’re separated from our possessions. We get separated from our reputation. All the time, there’s this separation from the things that we want and we like. In addition, we’re always meeting with things that we don’t like.
So even though we try to avoid problems, we do everything we can. Problems still come to us without choice. So we try and avoid misunderstandings, but they happen anyway. We try and avoid bad financial situations. They happen anyway.
We try and avoid illness. It comes anyway. So constantly meeting with what we don’t like even though we try to avoid it. So make some examples in your life how that happened. In addition, we don’t get the things that we want even though we try so hard to get them.
So we wanna have good relationships, but we can’t meet the right person or the right people. Wanna have a good job, but we can’t get it. Or we get it and it disappoints us. We wanna have certain material possessions, but we can never get everything that we want. We want to have a certain education or a certain societal status, but that eludes us.
So even though we want so many things and try so hard to get them, we don’t always get the things that we want. So this is a disadvantage of being in cyclic existence. And another disadvantage is simply having a body and mind that are under the control of disturbing attitudes and karma. So just the nature of our present body and mind is something unsatisfactory. And when we reflect on all these eight disadvantages of cyclic existence, especially as they’re evidenced in our human life, we get a very strong wish to be free of them and to attain a state of liberation in which we can have lasting happiness.
So generate that aspiration. Generate that strong wish.