Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Searching for a lost key beneath a streetlight — not where it was dropped but where the light is better — Ven Jampa Gendun opens this nearly two-hour session with the argument that all genuine solutions lie within the mind, never outside it. A parable about a king who learns to wear sandals rather than carpet his kingdom reinforces the point. A guided breath-counting and loving-kindness meditation follows. The second half turns to Tsongkhapa’s Three Principal Aspects of the Path — beginning with the text’s opening homage verse — then examines the spiritual teacher’s indispensable role at length, drawing on Pabongka Rinpoche and Lama Yeshe: a living lama matters not to hand over peace of mind, but to kindle genuine confidence in the student’s own capacity for transformation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 3PA 2006 08 14.mp3
UUID: 290072f9-d94a-4e6f-bc1e-b1fe21a5e669
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principle Aspects of the Path 2006-2007 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 2006-08-14
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 118.8 minutes
Words: ~12,331
Can Can everyone hear me okay? Can you hear me in the back? Okay. It’s it’s terrible when you say something brilliant, and people come up to you later and say, I didn’t hear a word you said. So first, if I say something stupid, there’s a there’s a certain advantage to it.
So we begin by adjusting our motivation. The decisive heart searching is the beginning of the way in a man’s life. It is, again and again, again, the beginning of a human way. So, you know, when we talk about the the path, the path to awakening, the path to enlightenment, path to the solution to our troubles, our problems, problems, and the beginning of finding real happiness in our lives, the solutions to all our various difficulties. It begins where we’re where we’re actually at.
It begins with our self. That’s where we start. Start. No matter where else we’re where we would we might like to be, where we wish to be, where others might have suggested we are, we have to get in touch where, in fact, the path begins for each of ourselves. We begins for each of ourselves.
We have to actually confront ourselves and begin to ask ourselves some some questioning. Where where do I find purpose? What helps me to feel alive, to feel challenged, to feel good about myself, to feel connected with others, to feel connected with something beyond my own narrow individual ego. So the path begins with when we when we start to try for ourselves to ask about what do I admire, and the emphasis is on what do I admire? What do I actually believe in?
You know, another word, and it’s a very seldom used word perhaps, is what is sacred for me. So much of our lives is spent in a longing, in a search for what we do not know. So many of our ostensible goals, so many of the things we think we want turn out to be the masks behind which our real desires hide. They are symbols for the actual values and qualities for which we hunger. They are not reducible to physical or material things, nor even to a physical person.
They are psychological qualities, love, truth, honesty, loyalty, purpose, something we can feel is noble, precious, and worthy of our devotion. We try to reduce all this to something physical, a house, a car, a better job, or a human being, but it doesn’t work. Without realizing it, we are searching for the sacred, and the sacred is not reducible to anything else. Sacredness is, in a sense, a feeling, but a feeling that goes to the very heart of life. It is the feeling of recognition towards what is great and high enough to give our small lives meaning, to put our personal journeys in a greater perspective.
It is the feeling of reverence. What we call the sacred is ultimately a universe of meaning against which we measure our personal efforts, our personal lives, to see whether they too have meaning. You know, the path begins with trying to find out who we actually are, beneath all the various layers of conditioning, you know, all the various layers of social and cultural conditioning, beneath all the religious indoctrination, beneath all the taken for granted truths, beneath our ideologies and our psychologies, beneath all the shoulds and ought tos of our lives, beneath all our own self deception and self ignorance. You know, there’s a tell me for what you yearn, and I will tell you who you are. You are the image that you reach for.
You know, generally, when we want to know somebody, when we’re at a party or a get together, we ask, oh, where do you work? Or where do you live? And then we have a sense when they answer that we we come to know them in some way. You know, how many times do we ever ask anyone upon first meeting them? Tell me what it is that you in for.
Then you really know who they are. You know, these various superficial measures by which we judge people, by which we think of ourselves, you know, what is it that each of us is reaching for in our in our hearts of hearts? What is it that we’re really hungry for? What it is is it that we’re searching for? I think it’s important to stop and question ourselves.
Whether we find an answer or not, perhaps not important. Perhaps the questioning in itself is what is necessary, what is worthwhile. You know, what what is important for ourselves, for me as a unique self actualizing individual. You know, what what kind of picture within our minds, in our imagination draws us onward, that we’re trying to reach, unaware of ourselves that we’re actually trying. The world that we come to know, the world each of our own world versions begins with ourselves, begins with the images within our own imagination.
The world that we come to know begins with our own mind. And there’s a verse by Ryokan, an eighteenth century Zen monk, an old friend of mine. And he he once said, the Buddha is your mind and the way it goes nowhere. Don’t look for anything but this. If you point your cart north when you want to go south, how will you ever arrive?
The Buddha is our mind. You know, I don’t know what a Buddha is. I don’t know what a Buddha is. But I can begin to have a sense. I can create some kind of image in my mind.
In the way that a Buddha is the idealized image that drives our wanderings. That it is a it is a metaphor for the lived solutions to the fundamental problems of life and fulfilling our greatest potential that we can ever hope to achieve. Buddha is the finest story that we could possibly tell ourselves about ourselves, about who we could be and what we could do with our lives. Essentially, a Buddha is someone who experiences unremitting peace with inside themselves and fearlessly and skillfully works with others to help them to experience the same. And this Buddha is our own mind.
That is to say, the fundamental solutions to all our problems, the end of all our wandering begins with our own mind. It ends with our own mind. The reach for image that lies at the end of our journey already exists within our own minds. There was a Zen master, and this Zen master once said, If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. I’m not sure what he meant by that.
That’s a pretty radical pretty radical statement to say the best. But I can guess, if you see the Buddha on the road kill him, if you see the solutions to the fundamental problems of your life outside yourself, you’re looking in the wrong place. You know, the If you see the sacred out there, then you’re projecting something outside which can only be found within inside yourself. We can’t legitimately ask of the outside world that it give us what it’s unable to give. You know, there’s a certain dishonesty in demanding that the world be other than the way it is.
No matter how difficult or how challenging and at times seemingly unsurmountable the obstacles may be, we have to look for the solutions to our fundamental problems where they can actually be found. And that is nowhere other than within ourselves. If we’re ever to have any hope of actually finding them, any realistic hope of ever finding them, that we don’t really have much choice. You know, I think I think for most of us there’s nothing new in what’s what I’m saying. In one way or another, I think we would all agree.
It appears to be more or less some kind of obvious fact of life. That’s the way we think rationally or intellectually, but emotionally and terms of our behavior, we think and act very much differently. We act and think as if very much like a person who’s lost the key to their house along, you know, a dark street somewhere. But they they search for it beneath the streetlight at the on the corner, thinking how much easier it is to look there, to search there. Searching there, looking there.
How much easier it is to search and look there. But the fact is, no matter how easy this search may go and how optimistic we may be, how much hope we may harbor about finding it is what it is we are looking for. In reality, there’s no there’s never any hope of actually finding it if for no other reason that we are looking in the wrong place. You know, if we ever really hope to find a lasting fundamental solution to our difficulties, what it means to be an ordinary person who we all are, we have to at least begin to look where the solutions can be found within our own minds. Likewise, you know, what what we call a Buddha, and this this most far reaching fundamental solutions to the problem of human existence can be found nowhere else but with inside of ourselves.
You know, don’t look for it anywhere else but there. And the path leading to that Buddha, the path leading to the end of all of our suffering, all of our wonderings, and the beginning of the experience of real happiness and real peace in our lives, the finding of the sacred of our lives begins and ends within our own minds. There’s a story which illustrates something of this. It’s about it’s like many of these stories go. It’s happened during ancient times.
And there was a king who was out wandering, going for a walk through his countryside, and he stepped on a thorn, and he hurt himself. And he went back he limped back to the cat to his castle, to his palace, and he called together his ministers, and he put his royal foot up on the royal table there. And he said, look. Look. Look at my foot.
We can’t allow this to happen again. We have to do something whereby I can walk safely about my kingdom. And they and all the ministers, they thought, and they thought and they thought and they thought. And finally, one of the cleverer ministers spoke up and they said, I have an idea. We’ll cover all the roads in your kingdom with leather.
And that way, your feet will be protected from thorns and all types of rough objects, and you’ll be able to walk safely throughout your kingdom. And the king said, fantastic idea. Great idea. Let’s do it. And as is often the case in such stories, immediately the treasurer spoke up.
It be done. It can’t be done. First off, there aren’t enough cattle in your kingdom to produce enough leather to cover all the roads in your kingdom with leather. And moreover, even if there were, it would bankrupt the treasury. It’s not practically possible.
And so they all fell silent and they were quiet for a while. And finally, as is often the case in these stories, there was a wise old minister, and she spoke up and said, I suggest that we cut a shape of in leather exactly to the size of the king’s feet. And we take these two pieces of leather, and we take thongs, and we bind them to the soles of the king’s feet. And in that way, it would be as if you covered all the roads in your kingdom with leather. You you would be able to walk safely about your kingdom without the danger of harm from thorns and rough objects.
So, you know, this this story first illustrates an obvious, but quite often forgotten the fact of life that we can’t control the world. That is, we can’t realistically order the world about us to conform to our wishes, demand that it follow our our agendas, you know, that it that it that it fit with our particular needs. But nevertheless, we do. And when we do, we experience either a sense of rage because the world doesn’t run according to our wishes, that it doesn’t particularly fit with our individual needs, it doesn’t accommodate our unique agenda, or we experience a sense of emptiness, a sense of of powerlessness because we can’t do the impossible. But there’s another lesson.
There’s another additional quality of this story, and that it illustrates a not so obvious fact of life. And that is if we can control one thing, our own mind, it is as if we control the world. And that’s all we can ever hope to realistically control. This one thing, our own inner kingdom. But that, as it turns out, is enough to be happy in life, to begin to work through your problems, to to feel fulfilled in the world.
The mind is the measure of all things, the determinant of all things. The mind is in its place, in its way. It can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. You know, in in a very real sense, the people, the situations, the things about us are in a way neutral. The people and the situations and the thing about us depending upon our skill or our lack of skill or our attitudes or opinions or ideas, our our our ability to work with them can can become sources of heaven or sources of hell.
You know, they’re like a knife in the hand of a surgeon. The knife in itself is neutral, but in the hand of a surgeon, it can be life enhancing. It can be constructive. It can bring joy to people’s lives. It can bring a welfare to others.
But that same exact knife inherently of a of a murderer, in the hand of a thief, can bring misery, can bring destruction. It’s the same knife. It’s just a matter dependent upon our skill and how we use it and our motivation for using it. The people that we interact with, the things that we make use of, all the situations that we find about us, each in their own individual ways have the potential means to find happiness and fulfillment in our lives, or they can become sources of suffering depending on our ability to understand them, to make to make use of them in some skilled way. You know, I think in when we talk about dissatisfaction, you know, if you are dissatisfied, it’s not reality’s fault.
It’s you who are accountable. There’s nothing good nor bad which thinking makes it so. And at the we often lose sight of that simple fact. You know, wherever forever looking to others in one way or another for our happiness. And we’re we’re forever blaming others, holding others accountable for our difficulties, for our suffering.
You know, our own mind’s worldview can bring us either a life of fulfillment and freedom or a life of emptiness, a life of bondage. Thinking makes it so. You know, I think this is the main orientation of Buddhism. This is the crux that I think we need to learn. So this the path of awakening, the path to the solution of our problems and the finding of happiness.
It it is the basic reorientation from seeing the the the solutions, seeing the problems, and therefore, the solutions lies in lying outside of ourselves to seeing them lying within our own minds in terms of our ideas, opinions, our attitudes, our skill and and lack of skill in relating with all the world about us. You know, I think we don’t really quite know what we’re doing, where we’re going. You know, ours is a world where people really don’t know where they want to go. Yet they seem willing enough to go through hell to get there. Sooner or later we have to stop acting, stop speeding, stop distracting ourselves from ourselves, and what is our own actual lived experience, and begin to pause and ask, just where is it that I’m headed?
Is this where I really want to go? You know, unless we change our direction, you’re likely to end up where you’re headed. And now if you want to go north and you point your cart south, how are you ever going to arrive? And where do you want to go? And which way is your cart pointed?
You know, what are some of the preferred outcomes to the story that we are telling ourselves about ourselves. You know, if you’re not heading toward those outcomes, if you in fact want to go north, but then pointing your cart south, you’re never going to arrive where it is that you want. And a deeper sense of our lives. So the path begins with this this bedrock question. Does anything matter to me?
Do I care about anything? And if I can’t think of anything that matters to me, if I can’t think of anything that I care about, you know, can I can I search? Can I at least make some kind of fabricated idea at present? Can I get can I even can I stay with the unknown for the moment with trying to find out what matters to me, what I do in fact care about? And in the light of any answer that we may be able to draw forth from the the recesses of our of our hearts, you know, out of our imaginations.
And no matter how how vague those answers might be, how fallible they might be, begin to freely and consciously direct ourselves to those ends. And it’s kind of begin to construct a story which fits with what it is that we, in fact, want out of our lives. You take you know, we take to reach deep within our hearts. These these long ago dreams that we had once built in the air like castles, and begin to build real foundations beneath this dreamed of life that we all imagined for ourselves at one time. You know, find the find the sacred and take it out of that that place within our heart so it’s not it doesn’t rot there and be lost to us.
And begin to try these images on and see how they fit, they they feel, how they change us, how they make us the person that we want to be. You know, beginning to place solid foundations. And we have to dream. We have to get back in touch with our dreams. What is sacred?
What has meaning for me? We have to resist the numbing and the superficial quality of our lives, which would pass us for our life. We have to, you know, kind of commit ourselves to a process of living out our unique answers to some of these most difficult of questions. But, you know, I as I said, I think maybe in the deeper sense, the question is what’s important. Perhaps in the very question in itself, unnoticed to ourselves, someday we’ll live ourselves into the answer.
The answer that Buddhism calls awakening. But then then then the the important thing is to begin. So in this process, the the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha, the sacred within inside of ourselves, the solution to our most fundamental problems, you know, the the finest story that we could ever hope to tell ourselves about ourselves. And but we, you know, it’s not enough to hope, to dream. We actually have to build begin to build those foundations beneath that dream, that castle in the sky.
And so, we have to implement the dharma within our lives and the various trainings, the techniques, and most basically the truth of things, the way things actually are in their reality. And with this all occurs within the social context of a spiritual community. And those who who help us in all the various ways that we can help one another, who who validate our our Buddhist story, who understand us, admire us for what we dream, and a willingness to help translate our dreams into some kind of reality. But, you know, this we can’t we try to raise the level of our motivation, you know, the why behind and the reason for what we’re doing. This isn’t a dream that we can dream only for ourselves.
It’s not a story which is in which we are the sole character. Beginning to understand that that part of our dream is a dream of helping others. And that our dream is a is a like a feeling of a of a story of how we might be in the world with others and helping them to live out their dreams. So we relate we try to, as best we can, to again and again raise the level of motivation to to include our an ever widening circle of others. So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha, which we actualize by means of the Dharma in the social context of the spiritual community.
And we try again and again and again, you know, that we are going to do this just for ourselves, to raise motivation beyond our own narrow needs and limited self concerns to include an ever widening circle of others. Ultimately, we go for refuge to awaken ourselves for the sake of all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am awakened to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Through my practice of generosity in the other perfections, may I become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am awakened to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Through my practice of generosity in the other perfections, may I become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am awakened to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Through my practice of generosity in the other perfections, may I become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m awakened to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Through my practice of generosity in the other perfections, may I become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings.
May all sentient beings have happiness and the causes of happiness. May all sentient beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. May all sentient beings be inseparable inseparable from the joy that is without sorrow. May all sentient beings abide in equanimity, free from attachment and aversion to all. Okay.
Maybe we can we’re going to meditate. So if you like to stand for a moment, stretch your legs. So last week we talked a little bit about mindfulness of breathing. And I’d like to mention just to just go through I mean, I I realize that you are all yogis, so I hope you’ll be patient with me while I go through But let’s go through some of the fundamentals of the meditation posture very, very quickly, and then we can we can never mention them again, and then it’s finished. Okay?
So wherever you wish to sit, whether on the floor or on the seat, that’s fine. Whatever works for you, that’s what we should do. So generally, buttocks is raised off the floor, for example, with a cushion, or the cushion is raised in some manner. And we we I can tell you what the ideal posture is, and then we can adapt it to ourselves. That we we work with what you know, with ourselves and our individual characteristics.
But there’s what’s called the sevenfold posture of Vairocana. Vairocana is like the idealized form that we sort of model our posture around. And the posture, as I mentioned last week, that there’s an interdependence between the body and the mind. Assuming a essentially a very stable and firm posture is going to reflect in the quality of the mind. We’ll develop a very firm, clear, and stable mind dependent upon that bodily posture.
So Vairocana usually you can sit in the either the vajra posture which is where the both of the feet are on the thighs or you can you can sit in the half vajra posture or you can just cross your legs or you can sit in a chair. If you sit in a chair, bring your back your buttocks back to the rear of the chair and your feet flat on the floor. Okay? And then, ideally, the hands are placed about three fingers below the the navel. With in our tradition, the right hand is placed upon the left, and the thumbs are touching.
I don’t do that. I would if I could, but I can’t. I have a problem with my hand, so I usually just put my hands there. You can do that too if you like. Anyway, putting your hands in a comfortable position.
But this is I want to just present to you the ideal position. Okay. Something like that. And then perhaps one of the most important aspects of the posture is keeping the back straight, and sometimes it’s comparable to stacking up coins, like a column of coins, the vertebrae one on top of another. So whether you’re sitting on the floor or sitting in a chair, keep be mindful of keeping your back straight.
That’s probably the single most important aspect of the posture. And then the the mouth is closed and the but the jaw should not your teeth should not be clenched. Just just the upper and lower teeth are just resting. Lower the upper teeth are resting on the lower teeth. The tongue is placed behind the tongue the tip of the tongue is placed behind the teeth where it meets the pal upper palate.
The head is slightly pulled in. The chin is pulled in slightly. The neck is slightly bowed, but just in a very gentle fashion. So all of this should be done in a very gentle and easy manner, comfortable manner. The shoulders are level.
The the nose is in line with the navel. And one can make choices with the eyes. Sometimes it’s it’s normally suggested that one keep the eyes open. And by open, it means just a light a small slit of light is allowed to enter the eye that keeps keeps us alert. I I personally, sometimes, depending upon the meditation, I close my eyes, but much of the time I open my eyes, or that is to say, I keep them slightly open.
If you’re sleepy, if you’re drowsy, then keep your eyes open. You have to stay awake. Otherwise, there’s no meditation, is there? So you can work with that. You can make a choice for yourself.
So that’s the basic bodily posture. But most importantly is a sense of stability of and something that you can hold comfortably for some period of time without having to move. Moving will disrupt your concentration, you know, or any type of pain. So you don’t want to cramp your muscles. You don’t want to cut off any blood supply, but you do want to take a firm posture that you can hold for some time.
So but this might take some while to get used to to familiarize yourself with. And last week, were beginning with just counting the breaths. And we’ll we began with mindfulness of breath. And we said that the breath we were by breath we mean the physical sensations which we can become aware of, which naturally which occur with the natural breath. So we don’t adjust our breath in any way.
Whatever breath is there, that’s the one we’re working with. And there are various sensations, a physical sensation which is a which which arise associated with the breathing. And by physical sensations, I mean, for example, you might there’s a sensation of the air rushing in and out on your upper nostril or perhaps the rise and fall of your abdomen. So you can begin to rather than having taking a general sense of these physical sensations, begin to narrow down the focus of your awareness to either, and you can choose whichever whichever one you like. Either the physical sensation at the upper lip inside the nostril, the air rushing out in and out of your nose, or your or your abdomen rising and falling rising and falling.
There’s a certain physical sensation associated with that. So that’s the focus of our awareness. And we can begin to make use of some techniques. Two two of the most important factors in meditation are the factors of mindfulness and awareness. Sometimes mindfulness simply means memory recollection awareness.
In other words for awareness are introspection or alertness. Mindfulness is simply the mental factor which holds an object, like my hand holds this tissue. So, mindfulness holds various objects. It holds telephone numbers. It holds it holds our mind to the breath.
So, we want to hold our mind to the breath, these physical sensations associated with the breath. And one way we can help ourselves initially, and simply a technique, you can make use of it as you will or not, is by counting the breath. So breathing in, breathing out. I’m going to do this verbally, but you you would do this mentally. Breathing in, breathing out, counting one mentally.
Just a soft counting. Breathing in, breathing out, two. In out, three. In out, four. In out, five.
You get to five, go back down to one. One, two, three, four, five, six. You get to six, go back down to one. Now this isn’t the spiritual limit. So, you know, we’re not trying to see how far we can get.
And moreover, if you find that in the course of counting, let’s say you’re counting from one to five, you find that, you know, you you find that you become aware that you’ve been distracted, that you’re in terms of something in your environment, some sound or whatever, or maybe something within your own mental consciousness, like you begin to think about what you’re going to do when you go home or what you did yesterday, some memory or future projection. And the moment you become aware, bring your mind back to the breath and begin that sequence of counting again. And it doesn’t matter. You know, there’s some really wonderful people in the world who have never gotten to five. So it’s not a matter of of of you know, we have to we can’t allow what is in fact meant to help us to solve our problems become part of a problem in our lives.
We can’t replicate all the oppressive ways that we normally work with ourselves, you know, using our meditation as another way to fail. Yeah. We we have to we have to be disciplined, but we need a disciplined discipline, a gentle discipline. You know, it’s like one image that that comes to my mind. It’s like when you’re paper training a puppy.
I don’t know if you’ve ever paper trained a puppy. You know, puppy they haven’t spliced the gene yet for paper training. You know, some day puppies will be born and they’ll already know that they had, you know, the scratch at the door, they want to go outside, but it hasn’t been done yet. So we have to go through this process of paper training the puppy. And so you put, you know, you put the paper the puppy on the paper, and a puppy doesn’t know what paper is.
Doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t have any any conception about what a paper is, what to say, what it’s supposed to do there. So you you lay out lots of papers and you watch. And you and you see that all the puppies about to pee. And you pick very gently, you pick up the puppy and you bring it to the paper. And the puppy just it’s curious.
It’s and it just runs off. It doesn’t know what you want of it. You pick so you pick up the puppy again, and very gently with great patience, you bring the puppy back to the paper. And then one time, it pees on the paper, and you, you know, you scratch it behind the ears. You’ve got a nice puppy.
It likes that. So, you know, you do this a number of times over and over and again, and the puppy begins to associate pleasurable feelings with peeing on the paper. And it begins to go there in the hopes of finding pleasurable feelings when it goes there. And, you know, this is just conditioning, isn’t it? And so in a certain way, our mind is very much like a puppy.
It doesn’t know what we want out of it. Maybe someday they’ll work out the the gene sequencing for that, and they’ll splice in a gene, and we’ll have perfect concentration and so forth. We’ll be born with it, but at the moment, we don’t have that. So just like this puppy, we have to when it runs off, we have to, with great patience and gently bring the mind back to the breath. Bring the mind and it runs off.
We bring great patience and with great gentleness, we bring I keep wanting to say the paper back the puppy back to the paper. Anyway, it’s all the same thing. You bring the mind back to the breath. You bring the puppy back to the paper in a very gentle you know, if you if you get uptight, and the puppy’s not happy, you’re not happy, and that nothing works very well. The training doesn’t go right.
So we have to be patient with ourselves, understanding with ourselves, be kind to ourselves. But we need some kind of discipline, but it has to be a disciplined discipline. So just think of bringing the puppy back to the paper. But it’s important. There is a discipline involved.
And part of that discipline in this present context is and I probably I thought might have mentioned that, but I’ll simply emphasize it again. The moment you become aware, and you have to get in this habit, it’s important. The moment you become aware that your mind has been distracted, that’s wandered, and it will, for sure. The moment, not the second moment, not the third moment, but the moment you become aware, it doesn’t matter what it is that you’re thinking, how important you’re, you know, you’re about to discover the secret of life. You know?
Doesn’t matter. Even if God is about to speak to you. Yeah. You know? I’ll get back to you later, God.
Gotta get back to the paper. Gotta get back to the breath. That’s what I mean. You bring the mind back. You know, it doesn’t matter about the content of the thought or the emotion or what you’ve heard.
I mean, even if somebody’s stealing your car outside, you bring your well, maybe that’s different. You bring you bring your mind back to the breath. Okay. That’s that’s part of the discipline. But the way we bring it back, the attitude we we use in bringing it back, that’s the patience and the quality of gentleness that we need to employ.
That’s the discipline of the discipline. So, yeah, I’m getting carried away. Gosh. Anyway, let’s do it. So take a comfortable, firm posture, and I’m going to ring this bell at the end of fifteen minutes.
I’m sorry. Was going to do another meditation in addition, but I’m I’m a lousy time manager. I’m going to have to work something out because we, yeah, we can’t cover everything that I’d like to cover. So you have to be patient with me. Okay?
And gentle. So I have to take a firm, comfortable posture, and we can begin by getting in touch with our body, by first relaxing the body. Beginning at the crown of your head and the scalp and feeling the lines in the forehead and the brow beginning to smooth out, beginning to relax, feeling the facial muscles beginning to soften and relax. Working down to the neck, perhaps turning to the neck to the side gently once or twice. Feeling the tension moving down and out of relaxing your shoulders perhaps, rotating your shoulders a few times.
And your hands are limp. Your upper fore your your lower arms and upper arms, relaxed. Chest, relaxed. Your belly soft at ease. Your pelvis and buttocks.
Your upper legs, your calves, your feet. So notice any tightnesses, any tensions in your body. Bring your awareness to those areas and soften. Relax. Feeling the solidity, the tightness dis perse.
The body becoming comfortable, at ease. It’s a nice place to be in your body. It feels good in your body. And then bring your mind to the breath. Just the easy gentle inlet flow of the natural breath.
If you wish using the technique of counting the breaths. So now we’re going to meditate on loving kindness and we’re going to begin with ourselves. So imagine yourself in front of yourself. If you can’t see yourself, doesn’t matter. Just feel that what you’re going to think and feel is directed towards yourself.
Whatever you may have done in the past, the various mistakes that you may have created, you can simply develop a healthy sense of regret and you can begin again. And however you may conceive of yourself, whatever identity holds you, you can change, you can become anything that you want to be. But just for this present moment, we want to set aside the past and the future and simply get in touch with ourselves in the present and wish ourselves well. Wish that person in front of you, yourself, happiness. May they not suffer.
May all the good things of life be yours. May your suffering be ended. Be kind to yourself. Befriend yourself. And wish yourself well.
May I be happy. May I grow. May the good things of life come to me. Wish yourself well. Now think of someone that you like, that you love, imagine that person in front of you.
Just feel that they’re there and remember all the good times that you shared together, all the various kindnesses that this person has shown you. And begin to to direct outwardly towards this person the kind, caring feelings which naturally arise towards this person when you think of them in this way. May you not suffer. May you be well. May all the good things of life for years.
Wish them well. Wish them happiness. Now think of a stranger, someone you feel indifferent towards, someone who doesn’t matter to you one way or another. Imagine them in front of you. You don’t know their life story, but what you do know about them is that they want to be happy.
They don’t want to suffer just like yourself. And out of the simple basic kindness with your heart, wish them that happiness that they not suffer just as you do towards yourself. Now think of someone that you don’t like, someone who you have some problems with. Imagine that person in front of you. Perhaps this person’s method of finding their happiness, solving their problem has come in conflict with your methods of finding your own happiness and solving your own problems, but that’s just a conflict of interest.
And just as have to begin to forgive yourself for the mistakes that you’ve made, the hurts that you’ve caused others, You have to find some way in your heart to forgive this person for the hurts, the mistakes they’ve made toward you. At least don’t put them out of your heart and out of the richness of your heart, of the generosity of your heart. Just for this present moment, find a way to wish them happiness. They want happiness. They don’t want to suffer.
Just like you, wish them well. Now think of these four people together, yourself and these three others. Just feel that these four people are there in front of you now. They all equally want to be happy, they equally don’t want to suffer. Direct out a wish of happiness and well-being, a wish of caring to all four equally.
Direct out a wish of happiness to all of them. And all the people in this room, people who are trying to take responsibility for their lives, trying to solve their problems, to find happiness in a realistic way, wish that they find whatever it is they’re looking for, whatever would make them happy, love, a partner, a job, a house, whatever would make them happy. Wish that they had it. Wish that they didn’t have any problems. Radiate out a wish of happiness and well-being to everyone in the room.
Extend this wish out further and further to all of Fullarton, all the people in their homes watching television, cooking their dinner. All that they do, all that they say, they hope it’s going to bring them happiness. They hope it’s going to solve their problems. Direct a wish of happiness and well-being to everyone in Fullerton. Extending this wish out further and further to all of that, all the people in the cars and buses on the streets, in their offices and homes.
Further and further. Waiting out this wish to all of South Australia. To Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney, Brisbane, Alice Springs, Darwin, Perth, entire country. And northward to East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, all of Asia, And westward to Europe, South Africa, South America, North America. Take the entire world into your heart.
Everything that lives on the earth, black, white, red, yellow, all the animals, insects, is touched by your wish that they’d be happy, that they not suffer. And extending this wish, radiating out this wish to all the directions of space. Further and further. Without any sense of limits or limitations. Until finally, without any center, without any boundaries, simply the wish, may all be happy.
May all be happy. May you there be peace. And then bring your mind back to the breath. Easy gentle and out flow the natural breath. And then get in touch with your body, feeling sensations.
In an easy, gentle, relaxed manner, begin to become aware of what’s going on about you. There’s no hurry, so just take your time. I changed my mind. Would you like to stand up for a minute and stretch? So, aspects of the path by Jé Tsongkhapa.
Do people find it difficult to go till nine thirty? Is it comfortable for most people? I find as I I think I’ve said a couple times, I don’t manage time very well. So it always gets away from me. So the three principal aspects of the path.
We’re gonna use some basic divisions, looking at it, this small, very short text, is only about fourteen verses in a very systematic fashion. We’re using this text as a framework. We’re looking at these three principal aspects of the path. The principal aspect of the will to awaken, sometimes called the determination to be free or renunciation. The awakened heart, Sanskrit, bodhicitta, sometimes called the mind of enlightenment, and the awakened mind or the view of emptiness.
So the the short text, the way we’re going to divide it up is into three main divisions. There is what is called the prologue, then there’s the the main body of the text itself, and then there’s the epilogue or the conclusion. So we’re gonna begin with this prologue or the preliminary. And this, again, is divided into three sections. There is an offering of praise.
There is a pledge to compose. And then there is a words of encouragement to to that Jé Tsongkhapa directs towards the reader, encouraging the person to study it well and to practice it well. So tonight we’re going to begin with the first of those. So this is the the preliminary of praise, and this is contained in the very first line of the text. So once in a while, we’re actually going to look at the text.
It’s there’s a verse of praise which is contained which says, Homage to all the foremost holy lamas. Tsongkhapa’s purpose for paying homage, the idea of showing his respect or directing his words of praise toward the lamas at the beginning is to accumulate merit. You know, the merit can be thought of I think it’s many of these ideas, I think, are very profound and I can’t even begin to to understand them what to say or explain them. But one one way of thinking about merit is in this context, because he is he is creating merit in order to that there there won’t be any obstacles to his completion of his composition, and there won’t be any any interferences. He’ll be he’ll be able to to bring it to conclusion without any interruptions.
So the way that he can do this is by creating merit. And then the one notion or one image that I think of when I in this context is like a boulder rolling down a hill. You know, a boulder rolling down a hill has a certain momentum. It has a certain inertia, a certain potential. It’s the the more potential, the more momentum it has, the less it’s obstructed from following its course that it’s already directed on.
Likewise, in terms of ourselves, in terms of and his wishing to prevent any obstacles or interferences to his completion of composing a text. By merit, we’re not we we encounter fewer obstacles or interferences, and even those interferences, obstacles that we do encounter are easily they’re not insurmountable. They’re more easily overcome. Just like this boulder, you know, the small twigs and small trees, it hardly notices. Even big trees don’t stop it.
So likewise, if we have merit, we can direct ourselves and be assured of a greater assurance of success in in achieving what it is that we want. So in the beginning, Tsongkhapa is one of the purposes for his his preliminary of praise is to create this to ensure that he can bring bring his composition of the text to completion. And and he says, homage to all the foremost holy lamas. So here, by all, it means not only his immediate lamas, and by lamas, I mean a spiritual teacher. And we’re going to talk more about what that means and what that entails.
Not only his immediate or direct teachers, but his teacher’s teachers and that teacher’s teachers that teacher’s teachers teachers all the way back to historical Buddha Śākyamūni Buddha himself. There’s an unbroken line or lineage of teachers. So the word all is referring to all of them. It’s like it’s a lineage is like continuum of a particular worldview, a particular vision, an awakened vision of the world and how to be in it. And this this there’s a transmission of this vision from teacher to student.
And that student, likewise, internalizes those teachings and realizes them and actualizes them within their own being and transmits them again in turn to their students. So it’s a it’s like a recycling in a continuum, like a community of a vision over time. We have we have we are becoming a part of a lineage, a part of this community over time, a particular vision, a way a Buddha sees the world. You know, the way a Buddha sees the world, the world is no longer problematic. It’s no longer it’s seen as a source of bliss.
It’s kinda hard to imagine what that world looks like, isn’t it? How how the world looks out looks out of a Buddha’s eyes. But that’s the transmission. That’s the vision which is being passed down to us. And we simply have to begin to integrate that Buddha vision until we begin to see the world as a Buddha would see it.
This process of transmission has been taking place for the last two thousand five hundred years from the time of the historical Buddha himself down to our present teachers. So this, like, our our present teachers are inviting us to join their community, this particular vision, this this commitment to to a certain way of being in the world and relating with it. So, you know, we’re we’re involved in this integration of a world view. The world as seen out of a Buddha’s eyes. But, you know, this is nothing radical.
This is not you know, it’s not that this this is kind of otherworldly or eastern. Let’s say that a group of students decide, perhaps in their second year of college, that they want to be physicists. They take a course in physics. The experience of learning in this way is familiar to many of us. First, you hear new terms that you do not understand, but you leave your mind open and work with them.
You perform the activities through the examples that exemplify the views and the methods of the discipline. You do lots of problems and still have the uncomfortable feeling, I don’t know what this is, but I’m doing it anyway. One day, suddenly, you feel, ah, now I understand what it’s all about. At that point, can say, I have become a physicist now because the language is part of my system. The way you become a physicist was by doing hundreds of examples until sufficiently you understood.
A biologist or a medical student, an astronomer or a psychologist goes through this same process. Maybe it takes up to ten years to go through this process. Then finally, one is a biologist or a psychologist. So we begin to actively participate in this world view as communicated to ourselves by our teacher. And we begin to integrate this vision of the world, and we we begin to share the values of this world that it’s being transmitted to ourselves, and it becomes we become a part of that lineage.
And then we begin to incorporate this way of seeing the world. There’s no the world is given the world as it’s presented to ourselves is not is given to us through our interaction with the world. The world of meaning the that the world as we come to know it is a learned process. It is not as if we are passive observers, and the world, as it as it were, impinges impinges on upon us. What we have what we have come to know as the world is a product of our culture, our society, our society, our religion, our values, all that we’ve been taught, and all the ways that we’ve been conditioned.
With our thoughts, we make our world. Then we we are born into a world of meaning. The problem is much of that meaning that we have internalized is dysfunctional. We have become to know know a world which by its very nature is dissatisfactory. A Buddhist world, on the other hand, how the world how the Buddha sees the world out of his eyes is seen as there’s no longer a problem.
So there there’s there’s certain fundamental meanings and and values and ways of relating that we’ve learned. But whatever has been learned can be unlearned, and new learning can take its place. And we’re learning a new vision of about who we are and what constitutes the world about us. It is no longer a problem problematic world. It is a world where we can find fulfillment.
Maybe this process takes a lifetime, But finally, at some point, we become part of that lineage. Our teachers’ worldview has become the background out of which we look upon the world. It’s it’s the way that we begin to interpret our experience, what it is that we come to know. And it involves a commitment upon how we going to relate with that world, with the people and the things and situations about us, which I talked about before. So we understand and experience our world in terms of the context of the lineage.
So we’re involved in a learning process. This learning process is something much more than simply gathering together information. Or it’s it’s meant to be something much more than simply gathering of more and more information. That’s what you can do at a university, but this isn’t what we’re doing here. We’re trying to change the way we actually you know, it’s it’s like there’s a resistance against this in the world in academia, for example, in terms of that that one is not to become that as a as a one is simply to be an objective observer and to study things in that way.
That one is not to become involved as it were. One doesn’t allow the subject matter being studied to affect you in any way. Well, this is the very adverse event. What we’re studying is meant to affect us in a very profound way. It’s meant to change us and to transform us.
Think of a medical student attending a course in X-ray diagnosis of pulmonary diseases. He watches in a darkened room watches in a darkened room shadowy traces upon a fluorescent screen placed against a patient’s chest. And here’s the radiologist commenting to his assistant in technical language on the significant features of these shadows. At first, the student is completely puzzled, for he can see in the X-ray picture of a chest only the shadow of the hearts and ribs, with a few spidery blotches between them. The experts seem to be romancing about figments of their own imagination.
He can see nothing that they are talking about. Then as he goes on listening for a few weeks, looking carefully at ever new pictures of different cases, a tentative understanding will dawn on him. He will gradually figure about the ribs and begin to see the lungs. And eventually, if he perseveres intelligently, a rich panorama of significant details will be revealed. Of physiological variations and pathological changes of scars, of chronic infections, and signs of acute disease.
He has entered a new world. He still sees only a fraction of what the experts can see, but the pictures are definitely making sense now, and so do most of the comments made on them. He’s about to grasp what is being taught. It has clicked. So at some point in this process of becoming a part of our of our teacher’s lineage, one day suddenly you feel, ah, I understand what it’s all about.
Or or maybe it’s only, at best, a partial fleeting glimpse of what it’s all about. Yet, you have become a part of that lineage, that you are integrating that particular vision. You are changing. You are you are linked to an awakened view of life that has been transmitted in a living reality from the historical Buddha twenty five hundred years ago down to our present teachers. You know, you you are linked with the Buddhist world, and therefore, are linked with awakening.
Now throughout out all of this discussion in this initial part, you know, we’re talking about the Lama, we’re talking about spiritual teachers. At no time should you ever begin to think that I’m I’m referring to myself. So I’m just a mouthpiece repeating repeating these words, makes it okay for me to do that. Okay? So that’s kind an understanding we have to have.
Otherwise, might misunderstand me in some way. So in all of this, I’m not referring to myself, but to a spiritual teacher, to a lama. So that that so now we have to talk about, well, what do we mean by Lama? You know, Tsongkhapa says, homage to all the foremost holy Lamas. So the point in paying homage in general is to for Tsongkhapa to pay homage in general is to help the reader understand that the realization of these three principal aspects of the path necessarily depends upon a spiritual teacher, upon a lama.
And there and moreover, not just the teacher not just the teacher, but the quality of our relationship with that spiritual teacher. There’s a as I mentioned, think last week, there’s a a commentary by one of the great twentieth century masters, Tibetan masters, Pabongka Rinpoche. And he wrote a commentary to this very text, this short verse fourteen verse text by Tsongkhapa called the three his commentary called the Principal Teachings of Buddha. And in his commentary, he he quotes particular tradition of Kadampa. And one of the great masters of that tradition, Geshe Potowa.
So this is what and we’re talking about the necessity to rely on a spiritual teacher to gain the realization of the three principal aspects of the path, and moreover, the quality of this relationship with that teacher. To reach your liberation, there is nothing more important than a lama. Even in simple things of this present life, with things that you can learn just by sitting down and watching someone, you can’t get anywhere without a with a with a person without a person to show you. So how on earth are you going to get anywhere without a lama when you where where you want to go is somewhere you’ve never been before, and you’ve only you’ve only just arrived from a journey through the lower rebirths? And Tsongkhapa himself goes on to say, not Tsongkhapa, Pabongka Rinpoche says, therefore, you’re absolutely going to have to go and learn from a lama. Just reading dharma books is not going to work. There has never been a single person in history who gained his spiritual goals without a Lama, and it will never happen in the future either. And then we we tend to feel, and this is more or less the norm in our society, that we can help ourselves purely by reading lots and lots of books, and that we can we can can practice on our own.
But the teaching from from the books that we get are are always open to our own interpretation and for our own purposes in terms of our own agendas. And we can’t be sure the way we practice them is going to bring the results that we want. You know, our purposes aren’t often obvious to ourselves, and our practice might be simply some figment of our imagination, in fact. We don’t have any reality check to how we’re actually doing and whether we’re moving in the right direction. Are we going are we implementing the the dakini correctly?
Are we experiencing the results which are meant? So in coming to the practice of Buddhism, we are faced with a problem of a relationship with a lama, with a spiritual teacher. It’s unavoidable. You know, we’re talking about a real person, not someone who who you have an image of in your mind, not someone who lived a long time ago, not someone who is an image that you derive from a book, but an actual person with all their various apparent faults and excellent qualities. You know, someone who who is quite stubborn, who uncompromisingly communicate their vision, their lineage, which has been transmitted down to them.
Much what we first come to hear may be, in fact, first sound alien to ourselves. It may sound foreign and contrary to much of what we presently believe. You know, people people come to the practice of Dharma with some kind of fixed idea already in their mind, and especially with regard to who they’re going to get these teachings from and what they’re going to what use they’re going to make of it. And this is is the very notion that we’re going to get something from the lama, you know, whether whether whether it be happiness or peace of mind or wisdom, whatever it is that we’re seeking is one of the most difficult preconceptions. The role of the Lama is transmit happiness.
It’s not to transmit peace of mind or wisdom. The role of the lama, the central purpose of why we’re relating with the lama is to help us to begin to believe in ourselves, to that, in fact, we can achieve these goals and to give us the the the the the methods, the way to work to actually achieve them. And to and to help us to inspire us, to give us the courage to work through our problems in implementing these techniques, these methods on the way to achieving our goal, and moreover, to be a representation of the goal him or herself. The final result is dependent upon the method and your effort. And your effort is dependent upon faith.
You have to have faith in in the in the goal. You have to have faith in the method of achieving that goal. And you have to have faith in the teacher who is presenting you with those methods, who is guiding you, who is inspiring you. We have some understanding it is supposed necessary. So this is a a quote by Lama Yeshe.
Lama Yeshe, on this altar on your left hand side is three pictures. The the picture to the left is a picture of Lama Yeshe. He was he along with Lama Zopa Rinpoche were the the founders of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahāyāna Tradition of a of of which Buddha House is a member. He was a master. He changed many, many people’s lives.
It’s it’s because of him that we are sitting here now. It’s a difference that one person can make. This is what he said. We have to understand. We have to understand why it is both necessary and possible to abandon our ordinary limited view of ourselves and generate in its place the awakened self identity of a fully evolved being.
We have to realize that our low opinion of ourselves, which keeps us trapped in circles of perpetual dissatisfaction, only arises because we are ignorant of our basically our basic, essentially pure nature. By generating the prerequisite renunciation, it’s the will to awaken, bodhicitta, the awakened heart and wisdom, the awakened mind, and by delving in the clear nature of mind, we create the space in which true self transformation takes place. Yet it is not enough merely to know why such self transformation is necessary and possible. We must also generate strength and confidence that will enable us to follow this radical approach to fulfillment. In other words, we need to be inspired.
We have to know that the attainment of enlightenment, completion, Buddhahood, totality, or whatever it is we want to call it, is not only a theoretic possibility, but something that people like us can actually achieve. Although it’s true that the tantric teachings of Śākyamūni Buddha have been existent for twenty five hundred years, do they exist for us if we have not yet met a qualified Tantric Master? Are they real for us or not? Despite extensive explanations of such realized adepts as Naropa, Marpa, Tsongkhapa, can we say that Tantra is a reality for us before someone has introduced it to us? Of course not.
And the same is true for the teachings of sūtra as well. The fact that Buddha taught the four noble truths a long time ago does not make them true for us. They only become part of our reality once we have realized them, and they depend upon and that depends upon having met a guru who can show us their truth clearly in a way we can understand. If we do not have a living example inspiration of external guru, our inner wisdom will remain weak and undeveloped. And I know it’s a lot to listen to.
It’s quite difficult to listen to someone reading, but I’d like to read just a little bit more. He goes on to say, the main reason that religion in both the East and West has degenerated so much nowadays is the rarity of meeting good spiritual examples. If people never meet highly realized beings, they have no way of knowing the limitless possibilities of their own consciousness. It is not enough that there are texts recording the deeds and accomplishments of past masters. By themselves, such stories cannot inspire us very much.
In fact, they may only increase our feeling of remoteness. Buddha and Jesus lived so long ago, we may think, and their purity belongs to another age. It is impossible for someone like myself living living in this degenerate twentieth century to attain anything resembling the their level of purity. Or we may reject these accounts of past masters completely, dismissing them as fairy tales fit only for gullible children. The only way that we can lay to rest these feelings of doubt, incapability, and cynicism is by coming face to face with someone who has activated his or her highest potential.
Only then do we have an example of purity and spiritual evolution who can who can actually see and relate with. Thus, the outer guru is utmost importance. We need the example of someone while human like ourselves has developed beyond the bounds of what we presently think possible. When we see someone who has reached beyond selfishness, who has transcended the petty concerns of this world, who speaks and acts from intuitive wisdom, and who is truly dedicated to the welfare of others, then we can have faith and conviction that these attainments are possible for ourselves as well. Otherwise, if our only models are those of greed and aggression, our vision of what we are and what we can become will be sadly limited.
You know, a number of years ago, there was a here in Adelaide, I think it was maybe about ten years ago, there was union analyst by the name of Robert Johnson. Some of you may have heard him. He gave a talk, and his talk was on owning our shadow. You know, the the the shadow is is a part of our unconscious personality. It it represents unknown or or little known parts of ourselves.
It parts of ourselves which which are which we normally conceive of as reprehensible. Parts of ourselves that we don’t wish to identify as part of ourselves. And therefore, as in we disown them, little known attributes of ourselves. So Robert Johnson, this analyst, he talked about how over time in the process of analysis, the client eventually begins to develop a trusting relationship with the analyst. And over time, they are begin they become willing to get in touch with their shadow and begin to express it.
You know, the the qualities like of egotism and mental laziness, cowardice, inordinate love for of money, possessions. You know, things little things quite often that we would like we’d rather not think of ourselves. That we would want we don’t want to identify as part of ourselves. So they’re like they get disowned, and quite often they get dumped on other people. We see our shadow in others.
But he went on to say that even in this process of developing trusting relationship with an analyst. And even though these people would eventually begin to let the skeletons out of the closet, as it were, they would put up a terrific fight in acknowledging the goal. That within the shadow lies not only the dark, the reprehensible, but the divine as well. You know, noble qualities, divine qualities that within the shadow are golden qualities within inside of ourselves. And but we fight against this admission to begin to recognize these qualities that at some level we intuit from time to time exist within our side of ourselves.
You know, it’s to fully accept the divine within the shadow to to seek to actualize it, to find give it expression is to accept the great is to bear the weight of our own divinity. You know, weight that goes along with owning our shadow, the golden element within our shadow. You know, it begins to own our shadow, we have to begin to accept a greater responsibility, a responsibility that goes with growth. We have to to acknowledge the gold within our shadow, are forced in some way to begin to live it out. If we’re ever to be authentic, and that’s part of our shadow, to be authentic.
So it’s the Lama who who helps us to overcome our our cynicism, helps us to who helps us to soften the ego armor of our hearts, who helps us to become aware of and own, that is to integrate the divine qualities which exist within our shadow, which exist within all of us. The the lama is a mirror, but not just for our negativities, not for just what is wrong with us, but more than that, what is right with us. He helps us or she helps us to feel that to have an intimation about what we could possibly be. Help us to get in touch with the sacred within our own hearts. You know, we the the the role of the Lama is is to instill confidence in ourselves that we can change and to get to help help us to go beyond give us a sense that I can you know, it’s not a theoretic.
It’s simply not an academic or intellectual exercise. To feel that we actually can go beyond these perpetual cycles of dissatisfaction, that I can be something so much more than I have ever thought I could ever be. To help us to help us to break through these these self-defeating limitations which we have placed upon ourselves, which we’re continually which are continually being reinforced in one way or another. The lama inspires us by his very being, by his very by her very presence, by who she is. That there isn’t there is something other.
There is a different way of being in this world than than what I’ve known up to now, that I don’t have to use the models of aggression and greed and consumerism as my models of who I want to be, who I’m going to be. So his the lama inspires, gives us confidence, is is a living reminder of the real possibilities of actually achieving what we’re talking about. So it is no longer simply a theory, an abstraction. The lama can make it a living reality by representing the goal himself or herself. So so in in talking about, you know, the the the nature of our relationship with the spiritual teacher, the the word which is used is ten in Tibetan.
You know, the word ten in Tibetan has two ways that it can be thought of, that can be translated. One is simply to rely. One must rely upon a spiritual teacher. But the same word can also has the encompasses the meaning of devote devoting oneself to a spiritual teacher. So so this quality of a relationship with a spiritual teacher is not only one of of the mind, of rational, of the intellect, but is also a quality of the heart, a devotion of the heart as well.
Sorry. So I hope So we have to continue next week. Okay? So we we can dedicate the merit that we we’ve created. There’s positive potential.
That’s this it kind of gives this boulder that’s rolling down the hill some kind of positive direction. And we can direct it toward any purpose that we wish, but perhaps we can direct it towards something high and noble which be which befits what we can all achieve. May all beings everywhere plagued by suffering of body and mind attain an ocean of happiness and joy by virtue of my merits. May no living creatures suffer, commit evil, or fall ill. May no one be afraid or belittled, the mind weighed down by depression.
May the blind see forms and deaf hear sounds. May those whose bodies are worn with toil be restored on finding repose. May naked find clothing, hungry find food. May the thirsty find water and delicious drink. May the poor find wealth, those weak with sorrow find joy.
May the forlorn find hope, constant happiness, and prosperity. May they timely rains and bountiful harvests. May all medicines be effective and wholesome prayers bear fruit. May all who are sick and ill quickly be freed from their ailments. Whatever diseases there are in the world, may they never occur again.
May the frightened cease to be afraid, and those bound be freed. May the powers find power, and may people think of benefiting each other. Through these skillful actions, you may quickly become an awakened spiritual master, indeed, each and every being that awakened realm. May the supreme jewels of the three principal aspects of the path that have not arisen rise and grow. And may those which have arisen, may they never diminish, but increase more and more.
In the land circled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and well-being. Powerful Chenrezig, Tenzin Gyatso, please remain until the end of this cycle. Thank you very much. Thank you.