Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Lobsang Namgyel introduces the fourth perfection, joyous effort, a mental quality that takes delight in virtuous action and becomes transformative when paired with bodhicitta—the resolve to achieve enlightenment for all beings’ sake. In this 55-minute teaching, he traces how the Indian master Atisha created the Lamrim, the structured path to enlightenment that synthesizes Buddha’s 84,000 teachings into a progressive sequence. Namgyel then walks through the foundational meditations—precious human rebirth, impermanence and death, karma—explaining how these build the motivation needed for sustained joyous effort. He contrasts joyous effort with laziness and procrastination, illustrating why practitioners must seize today rather than postpone practice indefinitely. Finally, he addresses Western obstacles: multitasking, TV, perfectionism, and guilt about positive actions. His core teaching: reinforce virtuous behavior with rejoicing; sit daily on the cushion with complete focus; dedicate merit to all beings. Suitable for practitioners familiar with basic Lamrim concepts and bodhicitta.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 15 Joy1.mp3
UUID: d2867665-258f-40dd-8ad2-24ee7c01fc33
Teacher: Ven Lobsang Namgyel
Collection: VenNamgyel Thought Transformation (Ven Lobsang Namgyel)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 55.0 minutes
Words: ~8,652
So now we have the perfection of joyous effort. Joyous effort. So the definition is joyous effort is a mental factor taking delight in objects of virtue. Okay? Joyous effort is a mental factor taking delight in objects of virtue.
So that’s the definition of what we’re talking about. And then when we join it together with bodhicitta, then it becomes the perfection of joyous effort. So just by itself, if you if you have joyous effort, it’s only the quality, the mental quality of joyous effort. So in order for it to become a perfection, when we’re talking about the six perfections of a bodhisattva, then you need to conjoin it with bodhicitta. So I think some of you don’t even know that we’re talking about the six perfections, because some of you haven’t been here before.
So why we’re talking about the six perfections is that in the Mahāyāna tradition, then we have this text which is called the stages of the path to enlightenment. So this is all the teachings that Śākyamūni Buddha gave, and then Lama Atisha put into a certain format, a certain way of studying. Because originally, the teachings were given in various villages by Śākyamūni Buddha, in different places of India and Nepal. And so when Śākyamūni Buddha would turn up in a village, he would have a begging bowl, and then he would stand outside somebody’s house and he would get enough food. And then he and, his followers would sit down in a shady area and they’d eat the food, and then the villagers would come afterwards and they’d say, I’ve got a business problem.
What should I do? I’ve got a relationship problem. What should I do? So very similar to the problems that we have today, and Śākyamūni Buddha would give teachings. So we ended up with eighty four thousand teachings, but they weren’t in any particular order.
So I often joke now about Google, and I say, well, you can Google anything. In those days, they didn’t have Google. So if you wanted the answer to your problem, then you needed somebody who knew about all of these eighty four thousand teachings. So they had to be able to access the right teaching in this gigantic library of teaching that was going to be the answer to your problem. So then, we get to the ten into the eleven hundreds, and there’s Lama Atisha, and he was the greatest lama of the time.
He was a Bengali prince and really wanted to become a monk even from when he was a child, and his parents wanted him to become the king, very similar to Śākyamūni Buddha. But he had this determination. He was going to become a monk. So he became a monk and he became the most famous, person for his learning, but also for his actual practice, for his Dharma practice, putting the Dharma into practice, not just talking about it, but he was a practitioner. Then the Tibetans, wanted him to come to Tibet.
They, very strongly asked him to come to Tibet. And to make a very long story short, he went to Tibet. And as he was going into into Tibet, his main practice was purification. So this was the first teaching that Lama Atisha gave, that you have to be aware of the vows, the promises that you’ve made, and you have to be aware of when you’re breaking them. Because when you’re breaking them, you have to fix them.
You shouldn’t leave it a long time. Then when he arrived in the capital, Lhasa, he said to the king, what do you want? You know, what am I here for? And he expected the king to say, we want the very highest teaching because this was what they would say in India. And the king said, well, actually, we could ask for the very highest teaching.
We could ask for something incredible. But what I’d really like is something that will be of help to everybody, whether it’s the yak herders, the monks and nuns in the monasteries and the nunneries, something that’s gonna be of use to everybody. Because I really don’t think we understand how to practice the Dharma. We’ve received many teachings, but now there’s a great confusion over, what we call Hīnayāna. This is the individual practitioner, with individual liberation vows.
So that’s a sort of Buddhism that you get in Thailand, Burma. You see the the yellow robes. So these are called Hīnayāna practitioners. Then we have Mahāyāna, and then we take the same vows as as the Hīnayāna practitioner, but we have Bodhisattva vows. And then there’s the tantric practitioner who on top of that takes tantric initiations.
So a tantric practitioner should be practicing Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna, and Tantrayāna simultaneously. But at this time when Lama Atisha got to Tibet, there was a great confusion, and the monks were saying, well, we can’t practice tantra because we have these individual liberation vows. And then the lay practitioners were saying, well, we can’t practice this because we’re lay practitioners. So there was this confusion. So Lama Atisha thought of all the texts, you know, these eighty four thousand teachings, all these different texts that he knew, which one is gonna suit the very uneducated people, not even any reading or writing, right up to the highest person in the land.
What sort of text is gonna suit everybody? It didn’t exist. It just wasn’t there. And so he said, okay. Give me a bit of time, and I’m going to write something new.
Now the danger of writing something new was that if it wasn’t correct, then, you would be ridiculed, and that was the end of your career. And, he had he’d had quite an illustrious career up to this time. He was in his sixties. So, you know, it was a big gamble of that time. So he wrote this text called Lamp on the Path to Enlightenment.
Some translators say light light on the path to enlightenment, but usually Lamp on the Path to Enlightenment. It was published by Anzen in the nineteen eighties. So if you want to read it, this is the first Lamrim text. So the Tibetans always talk about Lamrim. You better get used to hearing it because it’s what you hear all the time.
Lamrim, Lamrim, Lamrim, you know. What what sort of teachings will we get Lamrim? What are the high teachings? Lamrim. What are the lower teachings?
Lamrim. So Lamrim is it, you know? It it incorporates, encapsulates every teaching the Buddha gave, but in a short form and in a particular format, in a particular way. So Atisha wrote this, and he sent it back to India because he was supposed to go back to the monastery to be the abbot again. And they said, don’t be gone long.
You know? You’re the best person we’ve got. So he sent this text back. And when it got back to India, they all looked at it. There’s a committee looking at the text, you know, and they said, wow.
This is incredible. Even the Indians, us Indians who are very high level, even us will get something from this. You know? So this is the highest brains of the time were saying, even we will get something from this. This is great.
A teacher should stay where he is. Because he’s with these uneducated Tibetans, he’s had to come up with something new, something, more interesting. So they wrote back and said, stay where you are. Now write a commentary. Because the text wasn’t, very easy to understand.
You needed a commentary. So then he wrote a commentary, and this is the first teaching that he gave in Tibet. So Lamrim means stages on the path to enlightenment. So it’s in a particular order, and it’s supposed to make it easy for you. The problem with us is it starts with guru devotion.
So the very first teaching, guru devotion. And then people say, oh, you know, no need for that. So we’ll remove that chapter and then, with precious human rebirth, oh, that sounds quite nice. Yes, I’ll keep that. And then we have impermanence and death.
Well, we’ll keep the impermanence, but let’s remove the death because I don’t want to think about that. And then the sufferings, oh, it sounds terrible. Let’s remove that. And so we tend to want to pick the nice things that we enjoy, and the things that we don’t enjoy, we want to remove them. But actually, it’s all there for a reason, because it’s steps.
It’s building one on the other. So why do you need a guru? Because it’s an oral transmission lineage. All of Buddhism has been based on the fact that it’s been passed on from, the mouth to the ear century after century after century. This means nothing changes.
When it’s written down, we have editors, and they say, oh, I don’t like the way that reads. I’ll just change this sentence, and I’ll move this around. But with an oral lineage, it doesn’t change. It stays exactly as it is. You know, recently in, I think it was some somewhere like Zanskar, you know, one of these way off the track places, they found a text which was over a thousand years old, one of the originals, and is memorized in the monasteries because, they memorized eight hundred, nine hundred pages.
You know? Here, us, we can’t even remember one mantra. They’re they’re, you know, they’re sort of memorizing eight hundred pages. And you can’t get a teaching on the text until you’ve memorized it. So this is what’s radically different about us to Tibetans is the fact that in order for them to receive a teaching, then they would go to a lama, and he’d say, here’s the text.
Go on go away and learn the text. And when you can come back and recite the whole text word perfect, then you will get a teaching on it. So it could take you five years. You know? Every single day, another four lines, another four lines, another four lines until you’ve got the whole thing.
And then you go back, you recite the whole thing, and he said, okay. Now I’ll start teaching you. We want to know what it means before we start. Right? I mean, we’re not gonna memorize it.
We want the teachings. And then later, maybe I’ll memorize it if you’re lucky. But, you know, most of us won’t because we don’t feel we can. We don’t feel we’re capable of it. They don’t have that concept.
And so, they found this text, which was about eight hundred odd pages. It’s a text that is still used in the monasteries today. So they went to a Tibetan lama and they said, recite this text. And he recited all of this text, and they went through the text that they just found word for word following it. Not one word was changed in one thousand years.
And they said to the Lama, do you agree with the wording? And he said, well, sometimes I think it could be changed in one way or the other. One word here, one word there could be changed a bit. You know? Why haven’t you?
Because it was given to me by my teacher, and so I can’t change it. That’s the responsibility. You keep it as it is. You pass it on. They keep it as it is.
They pass it on. Right? So that’s the oral lineage. So it was always said that we needed this oral lineage, this, purity being passed on from teacher to disciple, but also the fact that you’re receiving something that isn’t written down. What’s written down is just the bare bones.
In order to practice it, you needed to hear it from somebody. And so that was the idea of having a teacher. And so it’s not to manipulate you, use you, or do anything bad to you. The idea was that they would guide you to a place that you didn’t know how to get to. You know?
If you’re trying to get to somewhere out in the bush that’s very dangerous, you’d find a travel agent who knew how to get you there. You know? That’s what we do. We’d Google it. Right?
Treacherous place with tigers and whatever, and how to get there. And then the trip advisor would say, you know, do this. So we have gurus, you know, Google’s the guru and the trip advisor’s the guru, and we don’t just do it ad hoc, do we? We we try and figure out the information. So the idea was you had somebody who was the repository of experience and information and who could pass it on to you.
So you got on with it quickly rather than you trying to figure it out. So, this is the first teaching that Lama Atisha gave. And then he talked about precious human rebirth and impermanence and death, and these are the things I’m talking about next Saturday. So I’m not going to talk about them, but particularly that you have a human rebirth. You know?
This is very important and something that we really should think about as our motivation for today because we’re talking about joy. We need to get up with a joyous effort. So how do you get out of bed with a joyous effort? So in the Lamrim, it’s that you’re thinking about your human rebirth, what makes it precious. Okay?
So you think about your lives, and you can do this in a meditation. Think about your life. Think about the freedom that you have, and think about the freedom that many beings in this world don’t have just as a human. Right? Then think if you were an animal.
You know, down in Coromandel, we have cows, and they’re put into the field, and then they’re put into stocks, you know, they’re sort of pushed here and pushed there. They’re not free. If you have a dog or a cat, you know, you want to know where they’re going or what they’re doing. Where have you been? What have you been doing?
So you don’t just let them go, you know, willy nilly all over the place. So think about your life and the preciousness of it in that what you can achieve with it is precious. Alright? So what do you want to achieve with it? Now to our level of mind, we might be thinking, well, a bit more money would be nice and a bigger house and a nicer car and, few less arguments at home.
And and, you know, but it might be all worldly. It tends to be on a worldly level. But what we’re actually talking about here is future lives rather than this life. Okay? So think about your future lives.
What would you like for yourself as a continuity in the future? Would you like to be a human again? In which case you’ve got to create certain causes for it. It doesn’t just happen. Right?
So you have to create the cause. So if you are going to be human in the future, where would you like to be? Would you like to be in, New Zealand? You know? It’s it’s the sort of thing you might never think about.
But unless you think about it, you you’re not going to create the causes for it. So you should think about what sort of rebirth you want, where you would like to be. If you’re a Dharma practitioner, you want to think about continuing your Dharma practices. So wouldn’t it be helpful if it was a Dharma family, for instance, rather than a family that was completely against what you’re doing? So what sort of family would you like to be born into?
So these sort of considerations. And then, we know that this life is impermanent, that time is passing. The teachings on impermanence are very important because you know that if you’re feeling lazy at the moment, it can change. If you’re feeling joyous at the moment, it can also change. So anything is subject to impermanence.
If you’re feeling angry, it’ll change. If you’re feeling sad, it will change. So the really good thing about impermanence is knowing deep down inside whatever I’m experiencing, whether it’s good or bad, is going to change. Therefore, when you’re experiencing a really good time, maximize the benefit of it. When you’re experiencing a bad time, know it’s going to finish, but also you need to make some effort to make it finish.
So that’s why we’re talking about joyous effort. Then death, we don’t know when we’re gonna die. You know? This is the big thing, basically. We know we’re going to die.
If I ask every one of you, do you know you’re gonna die? You say, yes. But do you know the time? Do you know the day? Once in Dharmasala, I said, you know, when we’re born, we don’t get a a certificate telling the time of death.
And there were two elderly ladies in the back who couldn’t hear very well. Their hands went up and they said, Excuse me, we do. And I said, You do? And they said, Yes, we’re English. And I said, You know, Gosh, the English are way ahead of any other country.
You know? They’re now issuing death certificates at the time of birth. So they have clairvoyance with crystal balls, you know? Oh yes, I can see that you’re going to have a long life. So I said, they give you a death certificate?
They said, no, no, birth certificate. I said, I said death. So the birth certificate’s usual. And each one of us thinks, well, I’m going to live until I’m seventy or eighty or ninety, isn’t it? So we put things off.
And particularly in relation to joyous effort, you need to think about that in relation to procrastination, putting things off. I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow. It’s a mantra. I’ll do it tomorrow.
I’ll do it tomorrow. You know? Today is so busy. I’ll do it tomorrow. And it goes on like that.
And assuming there always is a tomorrow, we book holidays, and we book theater tickets, and we book all sorts of things thinking we’re going to be alive at that time. So we don’t actually realize impermanence and death because if we did, we wouldn’t be thinking, oh, there’s definitely going to be next week, next month, next year. There’d be more of a feeling of, I must get on with it. Right? So you’re working from a different perspective, short term, and then you can have a long term plan.
That’s okay. You need the long term plan, but not to be assuming there’s always going to be another year, another ten years, another twenty years, because you’ll always put it off. We do. Especially if it’s meditation and Dharma practice, this is the easiest thing to put off. There’s always the television.
Interesting program tonight. You know? Especially, you’ve got cable, isn’t it? So you’ve got sixty pro sixty is it sixty channels in New Zealand? I don’t know.
Cable? Other parts of the world, you have sixty, hundred channels, two hundred channels. You can sit there all night. Oh, rubbish. Oh, rubbish.
Oh, rubbish. By the time you’ve been through the whole lot, you’re back to the beginning, and you start again. You know? And it’s a new lot of rubbish. Oh, rubbish.
Oh, rubbish. And so you just keep looking and looking and looking. And then by that time, it’s time to go to bed and you think, should have done the meditation. Should have done some practice tomorrow. And back you go to the TV.
So TV takes a lot of time and energy. The little computer takes a lot of time and energy. The mobile phone, just to send one message can drive you mad. You know, if it’s a long message, you’ll be and you get these spelling mistakes, you have to go back and delete and, you know, fiddle around. So thinking about impermanence and death, extremely important for giving the energy for this life.
Then, we think about karma, the sufferings. So this is basically, we experience difficulties. Where does it come from? We experience good things. Where does it come from?
From? Thinking about that. Right? Nothing is causeless. Everything is caused.
So where is, the good stuff coming from? We don’t just say, oh, I’m so lucky that I won the lottery, or I’m so lucky I have this good relationship or whatever it is. You actually created the causes that you don’t remember creating, but you created the causes to experience the result. So what would those causes be? If you really like living a certain type of life, you need to know what those causes are.
So for instance, if you’ve killed in the past, then you can have health problems, short life. If you’ve stolen in the past, you can’t keep hold of your possessions, and maybe, you don’t have so many resources. If you didn’t practice generosity, you don’t have resources. So it’s very interesting to go through the karmic effects, what it produces in the environment and also what it produces in your life. So rather than feeling powerless, you feel you have power.
You have the ability to change the situation. And this is the teachings on karma. It’s very important, but we’re not talking about that. So then we move on from there, so sufferings and karma, and we get into then what we call the upper levels, you know, the higher levels of the Lamrim, and then we start talking about generating bodhicitta. So what is bodhicitta?
It’s a word that’s used a lot, in Buddhism, so you need to have some idea of what it means. And if you split it into two, you know, bodhicitta, then chitta means mind, and bodhi means something like a a good mind or a a big mind, a compassionate mind, a loving mind. It actually has a whole lot of connotations, which is why we tend to leave it nowadays as bodhicitta. Because if you translate it into one English word, it doesn’t have a very big meaning. In Sanskrit and Tibetan, it has a very big meaning.
Means I’m going to become enlightened in order to remove everybody else’s suffering. I take it on as my responsibility. So that’s where we’re headed. You know? How do we develop bodhicitta?
How do we develop that all encompassing mind that sees every living being as some or something that we’re connected to? How do we develop that? Okay? So in the Lamrim, it talks about, two methods. One is the seven cause and effect.
It’s sometimes called six causes and one effect or seven cause and effect. Basically, the the fundamental point of that is, do you have a mother in this life? Were you born with a mother? Okay? Or did you have a miraculous birth?
So if there’s anybody here who had a miraculous birth, own up now. Pardon?? No miraculous birth? No. Well, some people are born on a lotus.
So none of us has had a miraculous birth. Right? Otherwise, the the logic falls apart. We’ve had a mother. Right?
Because we had a birth in this life and we’ve had a mother, then we look back and we look forward, and we see that life is not just confined to this one time. We’ve had past lives, and this life is the continuity of that. And when we die, there’s a continuity forward from that. So Buddhism says, your rebirth is countless. Countless or limitless?
And there’s an interesting reason why it says countless. Because if you started to count them, there’d be so many babies being born again. They say countless sentient beings. Well, the as you’re counting from the beginning. So you start counting sentient beings.
One, two, three, four. There’s some already being born. Like, second, maybe there’s a child being born. So as you’re counting, there’s new ones being born, some dying, so you’d never be able to count in that conventional sense. So that’s why it’s always a countless limitless.
It’s to give you this sense of an inconceivable number. Alright? So you’ve had that number of rebirths, an inconceivable number of rebirths. Have you had a mother in every rebirth? No matter whether you were a dog or a bird or whatever it is, you’ve had a mother.
Where’s that mother now? You can’t remember that you’ve had that mother, but you had a mother. If you’ve had countless rebirths, the logic is you’ve had countless mothers. So, therefore, whoever you look at has been your mother. So do you understand the logic of it?
That you start off with, you’ve had a mother in this life. You’ve had countless rebirths. Every life, you’ve had a mother. So therefore, every person that you look at, every being that you look at, and we’re talking about birds, cockroaches, every being has been your mother. Suddenly, every being becomes important.
Bless you, my child. It’s past life. Isn’t it? Switch. Nothing wrong with that.
Was to stop spirits going going in, wasn’t it? That’s why you you were supposed to say, bless me. No. Wasn’t. I’ve watched the program on TV where they say, why do have all these sayings?
It was because one the Christian thing was that when you sneezed, then it was like your spirit could go out, and then a spirit could go in, ghosts could go in. And so why you say bless me is to stop the spirits from going in. Another reason is probably also the health reason, the black death. Maybe they call thought the spirits cause the illness which caused the death, the black death. So yeah.
Anyway, little sidetrack. So back to my positing. You’ve had a mother in every life, countless mothers. Every being has been your mother. So this is one way to open your heart to the situation of every other being.
Instead of thinking, just this mother, just this father or brother or sister or whatever it is, a limited number of beings, bodhicitta is starting to move the what do you call it? The gate not the gatepost. The the Goal. The goalposts. Yeah.
You wanna move the goalpost further and further away or the walls that you put around you that says, well, ten people is enough to give love and compassion to. That’s it. You know? So we say, okay, let’s go to fifteen and let’s go to twenty. And then gradually you’re moving it out and out because you know there’s good reasons for it.
You know that, you know, by saying, well, I’m not gonna help that one, then how’d you know that wasn’t your mother? How’d you know that wasn’t your father? How can you point to any being and say, we haven’t been related? Okay? So that’s one way.
And the other way is Tonglen, which is you recognize that all this suffering comes from self-cherishing, selfish mind. And how you remove it is by breathing in the suffering from others and breathe out your happiness or give you happiness from your heart. So this is called Tonglen. So this is the beginning of the the Bodhisattva path, and then we have the practice of the six perfections. So first, your mind is being persuaded into wanting to do something for others.
But then once you’ve made that decision, I really like the Bodhisattva path. I really would like to be a Bodhisattva practitioner. Now what am I going to do? What are the practical things that I would be doing in order to practice a big heart or a good heart? So the first one was and this is opening your heart, wanting to be kind to others by fulfilling their needs for food, for money, for whatever you can offer.
You’re opening your heart, and you’re looking at what they need, but also what’s skillful to give. You don’t just give what anybody’s asking for. So if it’s an alcoholic asking for money, it’s probably going to go on alcohol, and it’s going to harm them. So the gift should be something that is suitable. Bless you, my child.
Now they’re all going to start. Yeah? That’s really hard, that one, because when you when you have, you know, a figure or something like that asking for money and you know that they’re going, well, not a figure, an alcoholic or a drug addict, and you know that they’re just gonna go and spend it. But then you have to sort of I always think, well, you know, maybe that the fact that somebody is actually caring and giving them Mhmm. Paying attention to them and giving them something, maybe that’s going to work.
It might help them. I think going into withdrawal. Uh-huh. It could, but then there’s alternatives to giving money. I mean, you can you can give food.
You can give other things. But, you know, I think it’s really hard unless you’re there in that individual situation. I think you have to rely on your wisdom in the situation, your feeling of what you think is best to do at that particular time. I’m really wary about, you know, bringing down these edicts of this is exactly what you would do in this particular situation. Because there might be times when you see somebody and you think, well, actually, you know, I think the best thing to do would be to give some money to this person.
Even though, logically, I shouldn’t, you know, because they’re a drug addict or they’re an alcoholic, but somehow I feel that making the connection is important. You know? And, then maybe you can gradually be of help to them. If that’s not working for you, maybe supporting an organization that does look after people. You know?
So I say, if you can’t do it yourself, at least support somebody who can do it. You know, an organization that’s using the money to be a benefit to people on the streets or whatever it is. So, you know, it’s not just about generosity. It’s about conjoining it with wisdom. So then we were talking about we have six perfections.
When you’re practicing generosity, it’s not being practiced alone. The next perfection is ethics, and ethics is that you’re not harming. You’re trying not to harm. So when you’re practicing generosity, you should also be practicing ethics, trying to do the least possible harm. I think if you say no harm at all, it could be nearly impossible in our day and age.
It’s so difficult for us whether we’re driving a car, we kill creatures that are splattered in, you know, when you’re on the road, you’re driving along, you could be, killing so many ants. So the least possible harm rather than making yourself very guilty. So then we talked about ethics and karma and, you know, this sort of issue. And then the next perfection is patience so that when you’re practicing generosity and you’re trying not to harm, and then the person turns around and says, well, what did you give me this for? You know, ridiculous thing, whatever it is.
And you’ve gone to a lot trouble and you spent a lot of money, and they virtually throw it back at you. And then what could happen? Anger could arise, and then you could say things or do things that you wouldn’t like to do. So now we’re conjoining generosity with morality with patience. This is the first three of the perfections.
Then the fourth one is joyous effort. And this for me is using the saying that his holiness often uses, never give up. I think it’s the shortest way of thinking about it, that you’ve decided that this is what you do. I’m a bodhisattva. You know, I’m a trainee bodhisattva.
I’m a bodhisattva. This is what I do. This is who I am. Because it’s the quality that you believe in. You’ve opened your heart to benefiting others.
And if you’re doing that from the point of view of wanting something back, of course, sometimes you’re not going to get back what you wanted. Right? We know this with Christmas and birthdays that when you give this projection onto the situation that you’ve bought a really expensive present and you wonder how much they’ve spent on you, and it’s always got to be more than you spent on them, often the whole projection just fizzles out, and you can get really angry about the situation. So making projections makes a lot of suffering. Getting angry makes a lot of suffering.
So we need to develop the quality of patience when we’re trying to benefit others, and then we need develop the quality of joy. Okay? So in order to persuade yourself to practice joyous effort, then very much you need to think about the advantages and the disadvantages of practicing joyous effort. So if you practice it, then what you’re doing is you’re able to keep going no matter what the difficulties, no matter what’s happening in your life, you’re able to keep going. Whereas the disadvantage of not having joyous effort is that as soon as there’s an obstacle, then you’ll think, I’ll give up my meditation.
I’ll give up my Dharma practice. So we’re particularly talking about somebody who’s on the bodhisattva’s path who says, I recognize that all beings are connected to me, and I really don’t like to see them suffering. I don’t want them in this difficult suffering situation. I want to liberate them from their suffering. And so the easiest thing to start doing is practicing generosity, whether it’s with time, whether it’s with food or whatever it is.
This is the easiest thing to start. And then you start becoming more interested in, while you’re practicing generosity, I don’t want to harm them. And so you start practicing ethics. And then you think, well, actually, I need to be very patient because we’re not talking about just a few years. We’re talking about liberating all sentient beings from their suffering, and I’m going to do it by myself alone, which is Lama Zopa’s famous saying.
He always says, and you’re all going to do it by yourself alone, and don’t expect any thanks. Right? So you take it on as your task. You say, this is my responsibility, and I’m going to need a lot of energy to carry out this responsibility because it’s not just in this life I’m going to help others. It’s in every other life until every being is liberated from their suffering.
So, you know, we’re in it for the long haul. We’re not just doing it for a few years and then giving up because we’re not, finding people saying thank you or being grateful. You just keep going. So you have to think about the advantages and the disadvantage. Now the disadvantage is laziness.
What’s the opposite of joyous effort? It’s laziness. So is that the path that you want to follow? You know, basically, you have a fork in the road, and one way is joyous effort, and the other one is laziness. So joyous effort is the ability to keep going no matter what.
And remember that the perfection of this of this, practice is joining it with bodhicitta. I really want to stop others from suffering. I want them to experience happiness. I’m gonna do it by myself alone. All of that is in there.
And then when you think about laziness, this this opposite way of going, it’s often how our minds in the West fall into that sort of pattern. You know? So we work really hard during the day. We get home. We have something to eat.
And then you think after dinner, I’ll do my Dharma practice. And then the TV can go on. You can put some music on. Like I said, you can lose the whole evening. And then before you know it, the whole evening’s gone.
And then you think, oh, it’s too late. I’ll do it tomorrow. And then when you wake up in the morning, you know, you should do your meditation, but now you think, oh, I’m so tired and I’m late for work and I have to get up and rush out the door. And so you don’t do it in the morning. You don’t do it at night.
And then, you know, you should come to a dharma class and listen to a talk, but I’ve gotta drive all the way over there, and then I gotta drive all the way back, and then this, and this. So you put that off, and you keep putting off, putting off, putting off. So the opposite of joyous effort is this laziness, which says, I’ll do it another time. I’ll put it off. So there’s a there’s a lama, that they used to talk about in Tibet, and he said, well, for the first twenty years, I did nothing except, you know, went to school and studied.
And then the next twenty years, I had to sort of establish myself. And then for the last twenty years, then I started thinking about the last forty years. So when do you ever get started? You know, it’s always thinking about future, future, future, but you can get to sixty years of age and still thinking, oh, I need a bit more money. I need better circumstances.
Then people think, oh, when I get to sixty and I’ve retired, then I’ll do it. Presupposing that we’re going to be alive after sixty, but also presupposing we have a mind that can do it, that we’re not going to be sick, that we don’t have any obstacles. So when you think about the future, you always imagine yourself to be healthy, to have a long life. It’s all gonna be fine. But in actual fact, you’ve only got today.
Take advantage of today. Right? So in order to stay in it for the long haul, you’re going to start today and it’s like running a marathon. You know, I’m gonna run a marathon. If you’re going to run a marathon, you don’t immediately start running from where are we?
Auckland and you’re going to run to Dunedin. So you say, I’ve never trained, never done anything like this before. You put your shorts on, you put your sneakers on, and you start running to Dunedin. You’ll get three kilometers down the road and you’ll collapse, and then they’ll take you to hospital and you’ll have to have emergency treatment. We’re not used to it.
Right? So if you want to be in it for the long haul, you have to train. You have to start with small actions and thinking in small positive ways, and you start to develop the habit of being joyous about your virtuous activities. So I find often with Westerners, what we do is we don’t rejoice about the virtuous activities. I mean, how many of you today did good activities, did virtuous activities?
Right? Probably every one of you. Didn’t you? You’re the one who won’t say you will. You did.
Didn’t you? Yes. You did something good today, didn’t you? Yes. Right.
So she’s a bit embarrassed about it. But it’s not like bragging. No. Because you’re not telling anybody. Yeah.
The pride is a You have a fine mind. I know. But, you know, I think better to build up good self esteem first because in here, we’ve got three prides that you should develop. You know, everybody has this idea that pride is a bad thing. There’s actually a good pride.
There’s a virtuous pride, you know, sort of a, you did well today. We don’t do that because we think somehow when we become Buddhists or we’re studying Buddhism, well, we can’t have pride. We can’t think, well, done. You know, you did you did well today. Right?
But, actually, you should look back over the day, and you should pat yourself on the back. And you should say, you did that well. You did that well. You did that well. Because it’s reinforcing the fact that you’ve done positive actions, and you’re going to redo them.
You’re reinforcing them. Right? You need to reinforce your positive behavior. Behavior. Because if you don’t, you might not do it again.
If it’s particularly if it’s new behavior, you know, you’re usually crankily irritable. And for once in your life, in a particular situation where you would have been cranking irritable, you weren’t. And you think, wow. Incredible. That was magnificent.
But we go, oh, you didn’t do it that well. You know? As if we’re using it to beat ourselves up about instead of saying, well done. So I think this goes into our past where maybe we weren’t encouraged. You know?
So we weren’t given encouragement to do positive things, or we weren’t given teachings on how to do positive things. We’re worried about pride. We’re worried about ego. I think from a Buddhist point of view, better you have a really huge ego, and then we’ll cut it. Then we’ll work on it.
Right? But if you have negative ego, I’m useless. I’m terrible. I’m the worst. Very difficult to get that person to do anything, to have any joy.
You know? Lama Yeshe used to say, give me the very strong positive or very strong negative people. I can do something with them. They’ve got a lot of energy. But the wishy washy ones, very difficult to do anything.
So don’t worry about ego at this stage. We’re gonna cut it later. Now build your positive ego. You know? The the sense of, well done.
You did well. And don’t go around emailing everybody. You know? Don’t have the carbon copy masses of you know? And I did this because half the people will write back and say, big deal.
So what? And you think, oh, dear. Maybe I wasn’t that good because others will judge the situation in a different way. We need to judge what we did. For somebody else, it wasn’t very good at all.
But for you, it was good. That’s what’s important. You know the change of behavior. You know it’s something beneficial. You know in the past, you wouldn’t have done what you just did.
And then you need to say, that’s great. I’m really happy. Okay? Then the things that you did, that are harmful to yourself or to others, you need to regret. Not get guilty about it, but you regret it.
And you think, well, yes, I did get irritable or I did get angry or I was impatient or whatever it is. I didn’t practice generosity when I had the the opportunity. I wasn’t joyous about helping when I had the opportunity. So I do regret that. And then try and find a way of purifying it, of removing the negativity from your mind.
So we very much need to think of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, and are we doing it in the most positive way possible. Because as I said to the people who were here in the past teachings, then we have three things that we need to remember. Three intentions. You have a motivation, you have the action itself, and you have dedication. These are three very important parts.
What’s your motivation for doing the action? Make sure it’s conjoined with bodhicitta. Then the action is joined with bodhicitta. Whether you’re working in the office, whether you’re with your kids, whatever you’re doing, if your motivation for that action or for the day is bodhicitta, the day is bodhicitta. Okay?
So this is a very important point that you can join your day with a very positive action a a very positive Sorry. And then the second part is the positive action. So in accordance with your motivation, you now follow through because your motivation is what sets the course. It’s what gets you going. Alright?
And then the third part is you did something really good. Now this is what we call merit, positive karma. And what are you going to dedicate it to? Usually, we don’t even think about it. But now we’re really thinking about it because it’s very positive, and we can dedicate it for all sentient beings.
You can dedicate it for yourself. May I quickly reach enlightenment so I can benefit others, but also may others not suffer. May they have happiness. Or if you know somebody particularly suffering, a friend or a family member, there’s a lot of cancer around now. You know, a lot of sickness around, And often you feel there’s not much you can do.
You can dedicate. You know? And I I like for myself, Śāntideva’s dedication where it says all the people who are sick, all the people who are this, all the people who are this. It gives a very nice dedication. You can just read that, and it means you’re thinking about all the beings who need this positive energy.
Give it away. So that means you’re accumulating positive energy, and then you’re even practicing generosity with what you’ve accumulated. You’re not holding on to it. Okay? So you need to think about the path that you’re following.
At the time when you’re thinking, maybe I won’t do this, What sort of habit are you creating? What sort of habit are you going to do to generate for the future? Is this going to help you in the long run? Because whenever you think, I’m not to do it today. I’ll do it tomorrow.
This is procrastination and laziness. You keep putting it off, putting it off. And it’s a habit that we’re trying to develop of thinking, I must do it. I must get on with it. And why?
Because life today is very precious. I don’t know if I’ve got tomorrow, but for sure, I’ve got today. So then, we’re going to stop for a tea break in a second, and you have Pavlova. This is the way of bribing you and making you think I’m absolutely incredible. So then you can think about, these holy beings who did incredible practices.
You know? If you if you have this sort of sense of, oh, dear, you know, think about Śākyamūni Buddha. Always think about him sitting under that tree, just eating what dropped from the tree for six years until he was so thin and so weak that he couldn’t even meditate. Right? But he sat under that tree for six years, not when he became enlightened, but before he became enlightened.
Then he thought ascetic practices starving himself was the way to get enlightenment. It was one of the things they did in those days. So he just ate one seed that fell from the tree or one leaf that fell from the tree. So in six years, he became so thin, you could see his ribs. And so you often see a statue or a picture of him looking very thin.
So it’s not to say all Buddhas should be thin, but it’s saying this is a practice that he did. Yeah. Many people don’t understand why he looks like that. Then you can think about Milarepa, incredible practitioner. You know?
Killed so many people in his village, had incredible remorse, and then with determination, with joy, said, I’m going to purify this. I must remove it because if I don’t, in this life, if I don’t remove it, my suffering is future, my future is, suffering. And so he did very ascetic practices, only ate nettles, lived in the mountains, for years and years and years, and in the end became, enlightened. Lama Tsongkhapa, the founder of this tradition, did a hundred thousand prostrations to each of the thirty five Buddhas, means he did three million five hundred thousand prostrations. Three million five hundred thousand full length prostrations.
Did so many mandalas that he wore away the skin of his arm because he was only using a stone. He didn’t have a proper mandala set, so he was rubbing the stone, rubbed away all his skin. So these beings did incredible practices in order to become enlightened. What do we do? We watch TV, recite the mantras at the same time, then over to the prayers in the break, back to the TV.
You know? Or we’re driving along to work and reciting the because we don’t have time to sit on the cushion, and then we think we’re going to become enlightened in the same lifetime. We have to spend a bit of time really concentrating on what we’re doing instead of, like I said in the other days, this multi tasking attitude that we’ve got that we can drive the car, speak on the phone, recite mantras, do everything at once, and get the result enlightenment. We need to have a very good motivation. We need to do the practice on the cushion in order to have that dedicated time for ourselves because it’s the only time you’ll get in the day for yourself.
Most of our day is spent for others, isn’t it? Whether it’s working, friends, whatever it is, family, but it’s mostly for others. You need to recharge yourself. And if you don’t sit on the cushion, you’re not recharging. And so it’s very difficult to get that sense of joy into your life because you’re not getting the energy from your meditation practice.
In order to get yourself to sit on the cushion, then you need to think, today’s the only day I’ve got. There is no tomorrow. There’s only today. And if I don’t do it this morning, there is no tomorrow morning because I’m going to be dead tonight. This is it.
This is the end. You know? It’s the end of the world at ten o’clock tonight. So also thinking in that way gets you on the cushion, but it keeps you joyous throughout the day. And this is really hard for many Westerners to understand because when you think of dying tonight, you might go into depression.
You might think, well, that’s it. There’s no point in going out. I might as well just stay at home, eat cake and watch TV. You know? So if you’re like that and it doesn’t motivate you, don’t do the death meditation.
It’s not working, right? It needs to be a meditation that stimulates you into thinking, what am I going to do with today? You know, what would I do if I only had twelve hours left? And so that gives you a lot of energy. And then the best thing to do with the day is practice virtuous activities.
What would you not do with the day? Practice negative actions. Because you’re thinking, today’s the day. I’ve only got today. And so naturally, that brings some joy and pulls you back from doing negative actions.
Yeah. It’s it’s very skillful. But as I said, it has to be skillful for your mind. It’s not skillful for everybody’s Okay. So we’ll stop there.