Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this Lamrim meditation session, teacher Valham guides practitioners through two integrated practices centred on Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion. The first half focuses on understanding human suffering as a gateway to renunciation, examining how physical pain, sickness, aging, loss and unmet desires pervade cyclic existence, yet also prompt the development of wisdom. Valham emphasizes that suffering and happiness ultimately depend on mental labelling rather than external circumstances, and that the mind possesses the capacity to overcome any affliction it creates. The second meditation trains equanimity by analysing the fluid, interdependent nature of the categories we project onto others — friend, enemy, stranger — revealing how these designations shift based on how people treat us rather than existing as fixed inherent qualities. Through this analytical approach, practitioners move toward genuine compassion free from attachment and aversion.
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File: 06 M.mp3
UUID: d5e55792-6bce-4297-9797-7c5d032aa90b
Teacher: Valham
Collection: Lam Rim Meditation (Valham)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,065
In the sun. Just like a, you know, a cloud forming in the clarity of space. Because of causes and conditions like that. In the clarity of our inner space suddenly appears Chenrezig, the universal compassion in the minds of all the supreme beings. You can visualize first kind of like a rough like a rough outline, just a white radiant body.
And then slowly, like you bring a camera lens into focus, You bring into focus and detail. The hands folded. First, hands folded with a wish granting jewel. Then the left shoulder being covered by the antelope skin. Then the radiant smiling face with a compassionate eyes gazing on us and all the universal human beings.
And then silk scarves and garments covering especially the lower part of his body and standing on the lotus flower, and all the hands stretched out with their wisdom eye in the palm, knowing how to act skillfully in the world with others. So in that universal compassion, we take refuge and, you know, offer our prayers, wishes, and, you know, gifts, even offer our body, speech, and mind. Reverently, I prostrate with my body, speech, and mind. I present clouds of every type of offering, actual and imagined. I declare all my negative actions accumulated since beginning of time and rejoice in the merit of all holy and ordinary beings.
Please remain until the end of cyclic existence, and turn the wheel of dharma for living beings. I dedicate my own merits and those of all others to the great enlightened. And while you recite the mantra then, Chenrezig communicates with white radiant light from his heart. So now the suffering of human beings in cyclic existence has a great variety. The the hellish experiences of being physically and mentally tortured, the unbearable sufferings that goes on that we cause each other.
Or the suffering of the ceaseless grasping, like a hungry ghost. We suffer from the wanting mind that doesn’t stop wanting and that doesn’t stop craving and never gives us the expected, you know, satisfaction. That’s another form of suffering. And like the animal, we have also suffering of uncertainty and because of not knowing, close mindedness. This more or less, you know, reflect the sufferings going on in the even lower realms of existence.
We can get an insight and feel for the suffering in the lower realms because we have a similar experience as ourselves. But also, are many other sufferings among us human beings that gives us just enough feeling, you know, just enough insight into the nature of samsaric existence. That we can see there is no there is no true lasting happiness once we have taken a samsaric body, whether it is human or animal or, you know, hungry ghost, hell being, or even the god. Even in the god realms, there’s no lasting happiness. There’s no real satisfaction.
So these are the benefits, actually, of human suffering. We have just enough to be able to generate, you know, renunciation or a wish to liberate ourselves from the cause of suffering. Like if we contemplate the suffering of sickness and the incredible worry and fear that comes with it. Probably one of the greatest sufferings for us human beings is the aging process where we go from losing all the powers of our body that we are used to, to losing all our friends, and the pain of loneliness. Then sooner or later comes the pain and suffering of sicknesses, one after another.
So we end up eating boxes full of pills. You know, so many pills every third hour. And the pills, again, the medicine takes away so many other pleasures. Even the medicine itself makes us sick in some other way. And then sitting in the waiting room of death, where nobody wants us anymore, and we are just a bother for everybody.
We are a problem for everybody. There’s no way, you know, one can find any happiness except if one has well developed mind. If one inner experiences, if one has Dharma in the mind, then aging can be peaceful, can be the path of transformation, waiting for the final big one, the pathway of death. But if there’s no Dharma in the mind, it is only suffering, only pain, and approaching a great fearful death. Actually, the difference between the human suffering of somebody who has a Dharma in their mind or a spiritual path And those who have no spiritual path is like earth and sky.
The same with the suffering of having to separate from desirable beautiful things, people, situations, and objects. And meeting again and again with undesirable situations, people, you know, and objects. This again becomes totally depends how we’re going to react. It totally depends on our mind and our view. If our mind is able to see that all these experiences comes from our own mind, And that whatever good and bad we experience in life is something we labeled ourselves, we created ourselves.
Because we don’t like something, we label it a problem. When we like something, you know, we label it happiness. So the problem has come from our own mind. Our own mind creates the problem. There’s no problem from its own side.
Even abuse, even sickness, any of our experiences that we think AIDS and cancer, you know, or whatever problem we have in our life. We are too thin or we are too fat or we are we have this or that emotional problem. Which our mind has made into a problem by labeling. This is a problem for me. If you don’t label if one does not label a problem, there’s no problem.
Nothing is a problem. So you can contemplate like that also. Think in your own life, in your life experience, what you have regarded as a problem in your life. Then try to see that process, how it became something become became a dislikable experience. And just from that feeling, one labeled problem, then that grew into a problem.
And one finds oneself focusing on this one problem again and again. And the problem becomes bigger and bigger. What in the beginning might have been quite small becomes in the end huge, like a mountain, like like if it covered the entire universe. It becomes one’s universe. No one can contemplate how much anger, aversion, and, you know, misunderstanding.
Comes from comes about by being created, you know, by one’s own mind. Having some disagreement with somebody, not liking how they speak or what they say. So then the thought comes in one’s mind, I have a problem with this person. And the more one thinks about it, the bigger and bigger the problem becomes. And one carries the anger in one’s mind, you know, for years and years.
Anger and aversion, all sorts of emotional reactions. And even it it causes sickness, you know, one becomes sick or ill because of the turbulent emotions and the focus on this person is my problem. Putting the blame, you know, on other people outside. Because of him and her, I had this problem. By then, the problem has become concrete.
And we don’t realize that it was totally created by one’s own mind, That that doesn’t exist anywhere in the entire universe. We totally made it up. Our own mind created the problem. The whole thing comes from our own mind, not from anywhere else. You You know, when we think about the human life, we can see that there are many sufferings that gradually become unbearable.
Some very difficult to overcome. But at the same time, the human beings also have a very intelligent wisdom unlike most beings in some cyclic existence. To comprehend, you know, that all are both happiness and suffering comes from the mind. It’s not it’s not something that we can acquire or that we, you know, that we receive from the outside. It is a dependent arising that depends on mental labeling ultimately.
Without the mind labeling happiness or suffering, good, bad, there’s no independent suffering, as well as there’s no independent happiness. So because of this, we can understand also that there is no suffering, there is no problem that the mind cannot overcome. That the mind cannot dissolve, you know, just like it created the problem in the first place. It can also dissolve and overcome any problem, any suffering. So that is the beauty of the human mind or human intelligence.
The most important thing is just to put one’s human intelligence in the right channel. So think. Whatever merits, whatever good energy, strength we develop through our meditation practices, especially thinking about, you know, human suffering problems, May we develop in our mind a wish not only to liberate ourselves and heal our own wounds and overcome our own hurts and pains, But it may become an inspiration for us to wish to eliminate the pain of all living beings. Since suffering is the same wherever it appears, and whether in ourselves or others. Meditation two.
Let’s begin this session by simply visualizing Chenrezig as much as you can. The most important, you know, is having some kind of feeling that you have, you know, or that the universal compassion is emanating in front of you, and that you somehow are communicating from your heart, sort of from heart to heart. That you have some feeling that that compassion exists there even if you can’t visualize it clearly. And then imagine the communication taking place through the recitation of the mantra and light radiating from Chenrezig’s heart, you know, from the very essence of compassion is radiating towards you, filling your body and mind. Surrounding us again, as usual, the universal living beings, mother, father.
And they are experiencing the same shower of white radiating compassionate light. And now in this session, we’re going to attempt to analyze the ordinary view that ego grasping rooted in ego grasping, that projects friend, enemy, and stranger on people that we encounter in our life. Even to the point where we divide the entire world, up into friends, you know, dear ones, enemies, people we don’t like, and then the rest of humanity are strangers to us. And we feel indifferent about, more or less indifferent about. There’s also a type of judgmental attitude that means well.
It’s not an aggressive attitude, but it is a definite preconception in our mind to hold strongly that there’s such a real reality, that there’s such a real thing as a real friend, a real enemy, you know, and a real stranger. When one analyzes, because we don’t analyze that we believe everything we see, everything we feel. But somehow, to understand reality, one cannot believe what one sees and what one feels. One has to use a wisdom that goes beyond the immediate appearance. Somehow things don’t exist just the way they appear to us.
So let’s now see how there is a reality beyond this appearance. And let’s first let’s first pick. In your immediate experience, you pick somebody that you would call a friend. Visualize such a person, or, you know, that category of person in front of you. Next to them, you visualize somebody that annoys you, that you have aversion for some reason or other, whether they have harmed you, hurt your hurt your friend, or you just find them disagreeable.
And you can always find somebody like that. It doesn’t have to be heavy, that they have abused have abused you in a heavy way. It can be something small, but you feel aversion for them. Then the third person is the stranger. Just the face, a person that you don’t know, you haven’t interacted with, you have no feeling one way or the other.
So now when you start analyzing, you think first of your friend. Think how The friend is usually somebody that we have a good communication with. Somebody that we feel is helpful. And the core of the reason why we are friends is because they are treating me in a nice way. So nothing, first of all.
This friend or any friend has not always been friend. They are not sort of inherently existing friend. At one point in time, they were also a stranger. Until we started to interact. And because it pleased me, you know, we became friends.
But what would happen if that person changed their attitude towards me? What would happen if they start to abuse me or lie to me? Or if they suddenly turned away from me? You know, not pleasing me anymore, what would happen then? Most of the time what happens, that will happen with so many friendships in our life already, is that we drift apart and become somehow strangers again.
If one thinks of the many friendships we had when we were young, you know. We might have felt extremely close, like inseparable at that time. But later on, life changed, and we became like strangers. Or even some became our enemies, or people we dislike. In any case, we can never say for certain.
What will happen is dependent, you know, on how we feel, and it will definitely change. It will never remain exactly the same. So think. There’s something flexible, you know, also in friendships. Then, analyze the so afterwards you can continue analyzing like this.
You analyze also the person you dislike. And when even you look at this person, what is being, it arises the same feeling in you of aversion. But if you really think hard, I’m sure you can also find some qualities in this person. You can also find that you had sometimes some good interaction, not only, you know, bad interaction, and not always bad interactions. Maybe some interactions were negative, but there were certainly also some positive interactions.
And you can find some good qualities in this person. And the possibility that, you know, our feelings or our, yeah, our feelings now can change with some effort. Even just sometimes one word can change a negative relationship. And it is also flexible, not fixed. It has not always been the same.
It will not always be the same. And then you go on thinking about that stranger, the person who didn’t treat you either nicely or in a bad way. So we feel neutral about them. Also, a neutral person is not definite. Anytime, this person can become either friend or enemy.
Simply depending on how they treat me. You know, just that reason is behind it or the whole thing. How they treat me, or my friend, or my family, or my country, whatever I regard as my, you know, possessions. If they treat me well, they will become friends. If they treat me badly, they will become enemy.
All these three, friend, enemy, and stranger, they can change place at any time. Depending on how I interpret their actions towards me. Underneath the appearance, in other words, there is a sameness. Let’s think a little bit about this one. And analyze yourself and see how whether it is true or not, you know, in your own eyes.
First, try to get an idea how these categories that we put people in is not hundred percent. There’s nothing so fixed about it. They change all the time from one to the other, one to the other. It’s more a product of our attachment and aversion and close mindedness. They are a product of that rather than being real friends, real enemies, real strangers from their side.
Just like I myself. Think of yourself. To some people, you are a friend. They regard you as a friend. Other people regard you as an enemy or a dislikable person.
And again to others, one is a complete I am a complete stranger. But there’s no inherent such existence within myself as if I was an I was an inherently existing friend, or I was an inherently existing enemy or stranger. That is temporary. You know? Depending on our human interactions.
And changes even in one day. Even in one day, a person can go from being stranger to friend to enemy, even within twenty four hours. So think again, contemplate again how that is just superficial change like waves on the ocean going this way and that way depending on how the wind blows. Especially if you think, you know, sometimes short time, sometimes over a period of time, it’s just like that. And you find underneath it all, we are exactly the same.
Simply being human beings, wishing for, you know, happiness, wanting to be free from suffering, that is something that unifies, you know. That is a unifying quality of all, you know, human beings or living beings. And underneath this surface view, there’s no difference between ourselves and all others, no matter how they appear to us temporarily. If you can experience even just a little bit for a split second The sense of equality, you know, underneath the appearances. That we are exactly the same.
We are sometimes friend, sometimes enemy, sometimes stranger with every other living being, and there is no inherent difference between us. Then if you can reach that sense of even mindedness, you know, without negating necessarily the appearance, just going beyond the appearance, Then try to focus single pointedly on that feeling of equanimity. Just let your mind stay there and spread out from the three people that you visualized and yourself to all the universal living beings, thinking this is the true. Fundamental reality of all living beings. Complete equanimity.
That’s a dedication, that’s think. By meditating in this way, again and again, you know, many, many times, and entering a feeling of equanimity with our mind. Being able to dwell on that unifying aspect of living being, and this way cut that exaggerated judgmental attitude that focuses on a wrong object, you know, on a false object, on a permanent, independent object. May we be able to cut that out. And lay the foundation, you know, the solid, strong foundation for generating a genuine sense of love, a genuine sense of compassion towards every living being.
Free from both the extremes of attachment and aversion.