Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Margaret McAndrew shares a personal reflection that reframes how to work with a precious human rebirth: Dharma practice over two decades has not eliminated her difficulties, but has transformed her relationship to them—problems that would have overwhelmed her are now manageable. She explicitly addresses a Western tendency toward self-doubt and inadequacy, showing how meditating on the rarity of this rebirth directly counters that obstacle. She then guides contemplation on three dimensions of the rebirth’s value: how it enables us to create better karma, achieve enlightenment, and generate merit moment by moment through bodhicitta. The session includes guided breathing meditation and Q&A.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 35 PHR 1998 06 11.mp3
UUID: 93da5d64-5d2c-44b9-a3dc-18f8e1675412
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-06-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~6,365
I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly.
From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I prostrate with body, speech and mind in faith, each and every offering I make, including those really performed and those mentally transformed. I confess everything collected from the beginning of samsaric life. I rejoice in all ordinary and noble beings’ actions. Please, Buddha, by living as our guard until saṃsāra ends, reveal the teachings to sentient beings.
I dedicate the virtues of myself and others to the greater enlightenment. By the virtue of offering to you assembly of Buddhas visualized before me, this mandala built on a base resplendent with scented saffron water and incense, adorned with Mount Meru on the four continents as well as the sun and the moon, may all sense of being share in its good effect. So we should set our thoughts on the motivation that we’re going to do this evening’s activities with. And if we want to really get the full value out of our Dharma practice, out of our virtuous activities, then we need to set the best motivation, and that’s the motivation of bodhicitta. So if we’re going to want to to gain the result that we want, we have to set our minds on that thought right from the start.
It’s on the motivation, on the thought, on the way we direct our minds that determines whether we gain one thing or another. And in particular, when it comes to Dharma practice, it’s the motivation determines the result of our actions. The same action can bring a different result depending on whether it’s done with worldly motivation or whether it’s done with Dharma motivation. When it comes to dharma motivation, the best motivation is the motivation not just for our own benefit, not just for liberation from saṃsāra for ourselves, but particularly for the benefit of others. So for this purpose, we have to set our minds on gaining the state of full enlightenment so as to have the real means to benefit others.
And with this thought and understanding the suffering of sentient beings, seeing how they’re suffering, understanding that we’re suffering ourselves and want to attain liberation from that, and seeing that sentient beings are just the same as ourselves. And there are so many of them. So if we want to do something really worthwhile, we should want to help not just one person ourselves but all these others. And in order to have the ability to do this, then we focus on attaining the state of full enlightenment. With this thought, we can do tonight’s session.
So I thought, anyway, we might manage to fit in a little bit of meditation tonight. Would you like to come forward a little bit? Go back. Oh, you might be more comfortable with a cushion under your feet too with something to keep your feet off from dangling in the air. So, anyway, last week, we were going through the precious human rebirth, and we went through the various different we went in more detail last week through various different factors that have had to come together to make up the fact that we have this particular kind of human rebirth, not just any rebirth, but a precious human rebirth, which is one that has all the factors necessary for the practice of Dharma.
In other words, a rebirth that we can really use to which doesn’t just bring us temporary, brief fleeting occupation of the upper realm, but which actually can lead to lasting good, lasting happiness through the practice of Dharma. So we we meditated last week or we looked at the eight freedoms and the ten endowments, and these were the various different points that we had to have in our life, checking them off one by one to see that we had, if not all of them, then practically all. And in this case, we had a very particularly fortunate situation because to have had all these factors gathered together is really a very chancy situation. Time you bring in another factor that we have to have, it makes the odds against getting them all together at the same time more and more unlikely. So we can see that we’ve really been extremely lucky.
We’ve had a a very unlikely sort of chance in this result of the precious human rebirth. So it’s important to think about what we actually can accomplish by having this precious human rebirth, not only by having a human life but in particular by having a human life which has the causes and conditions necessary for spiritual practice development. So this week, we’re going to take a look at this, and this is the topic that follows on after looking at the Eight Freedoms and Ten Endowments. It’s not enough just to say, Oh, yes, I’ve got the Eight Freedoms and the Ten Endowments. We need to look at what we can do with this rebirth and how we can use it well and what we have to avoid in order to avoid misusing it.
So this got me thinking about our human life and how we seem to have a built in tendency to feel unhappy. It seems to be very, very easy for us to feel unhappy. The Dharma teaching could explain this in terms of our negative karmas and our habitual thought patterns from previous lifetimes. But in any case, it seems to be a human factor or a human fact of our psychology, Whether you look at well off people or poor people, whether you look at educated people or uneducated people, we’re always discontented, and we’ve always got something to to make us unhappy. And this is just the nature of samsaric beings.
You can see, of course, that it’s worse with some people than others. Some people seem to have more basic unhappiness. If you look around at people, you see that it doesn’t necessarily depend on their circumstances. Some people don’t seem to have had a lot of good luck, but they still seem to be pretty happy in themselves. They seem to be fairly cheerful and to be able to take things in their stride.
You see other people who, in spite of perhaps seeming to have everything, strike you as being absolutely miserable. And we might have also experienced ourselves in our own lives that we might have had various ups and downs and that perhaps at various times of our lives we might have been particularly unhappy and that we might not have necessarily been able to attribute this to external circumstances, but it might have been something that was more just something that seemed to be part of our nature at that time of our lives. Maybe it changed later on, or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe we seemed at one stage of our lives to be happy, and then perhaps at some later stage of our lives, found it was harder to stay on top of things and harder to stay cheerful. Well, what do you think about that anyway?
It’s something that does happen in human life, isn’t it? Anyway, the whole thing is that we can have a tendency to fall into depression, and we have a tendency to disparage ourselves and think that we’re useless and to think that we’re no good or that we don’t shape up or that we don’t come up to scratch or that other people are going to feel that we don’t meet the required standard. And this is something that we worry about a lot. And sometimes we can get to the point of view of feeling that we’re absolutely hopeless and that everybody else is going to think that we’re absolutely hopeless, and this can cause us to feel really despondent. And so this state of mind is actually quite a harmful state of mind to us.
It doesn’t do us any good. Even if things are difficult, it doesn’t help us to fall into this sort of despondent state. But it’s not enough to say, Oh, well, it’s not doing us any good, because sometimes when we get into this despondent state, everything just seems to pile in on top of us and we can’t see the wood for the trees. Really, we just get surrounded by problems, all we can see is the problems, and we can’t see past the problems. So these problems the the reason that that we get so unhappy is because we focus all the time on the problems and can’t see the bigger picture.
We’re all the time focusing on this small picture, which is just the problems that are surrounding us. And it’s we might even know, theoretically, that if we could look at the big picture, it would help us. But we don’t seem to be able to do that. Would you agree? Uh-huh.
So, anyway, of course, it’s it’s not easy to change that. There’s no magic thing that can just change that way of thinking immediately. When we’re caught up in worries and problems, they do tend to overwhelm us and to fill our field of vision. And, of course, problems often have the nature of being something that we have to try to do something about. In order to try to do something about them, we focus on them so we can end up getting into a sort of downward spiral and we get really into such a state that we find that we’re not really functioning effectively anyway and we can’t deal with these problems effectively.
So if we can enlarge our scope to actually see the bigger picture, to have a wider vision, then it’s actually going to help us a lot with our problems. And this is where our Dharma practice really helps us, because it just brings this change of perspective into our lives. Once many years ago, somebody said to me that difference between Dharma practice and having Dharma practice and after having Dharma practice, before having Dharma practice you felt that you had a lot of problems. And after finding the Dharma, after having Dharma practice, you still find you have a lot of problems, but you don’t see that as being a problem. So the point is that you do take a different perspective on your problems, it just becomes easier to cope with them.
Still have the problems. You’ve got to expect that until you reach the higher levels of being a great bodhisattva or something and have all these wonderful states of continual bliss and continual peace of mind and so on, we’re going to have to go through a lot of ups and downs, and this is part of our present status of being an ordinary being. But we can have a big change in our lives just by taking the Dharma perspective on things. And, of course, that will lead to further development, further growth, so that we’ll, as time goes on, have more and more happiness, more and more stability, more and more ability to cope with problems without letting them overwhelm us. Can see, looking back on my own life, I think, I’m just as down.
I have just as many problems. I worry just as much as I did twenty years ago. And then I sort of think I stop and think about it, and I think, no, not at all. The thing is that I’m taking on more and more. I couldn’t have taken on a fraction of the things I’m taking on now, and I sort of just kind of work on my level of, you know, of stress levels.
But the things that I can take in without going over the stress level is so much greater now than what it was twenty years ago, that twenty years ago I have even tried, for instance, to talk in public or do anything like that. So really, there has been a change. And if I choose to go on doing things that are going to bring me up to my stress level again, well, that’s my choice, isn’t it? So I can’t go blaming anybody else for that. Pity?
Yes. Yes, yes. But then you’re sort of missing the point. You know, so if I start thinking that my stress levels are a problem, then I start seeing it as a problem, and then I start really thinking, oh, this is terrible. I’m not functioning right.
Then when I look at it and I say, oh, look. I’ve really chosen to take on these stress levels, and nobody’s doing it to me, but I sort of obviously do it myself because there’s some part of myself that wants to do these things, and then it doesn’t seem such a problem anymore because they think, well, you know, I’m just doing what I want to do, alright, so it involves some stress, but, you know, all the time I’m learning and working with it. So this is what dharma is all about really on the basic level it’s just working with our psychological elements and getting some sort of value out of it so we’re still going to have problems but we’re going to be working with them all the time and learning from them all the time and growing and developing. And then when we see that that process is happening, then instead of seeing these things as being problems, then they actually come to seem sort of sessions for us. It’s just another thing.
Just another Step on the way. Step on the way or something. Well, sometimes I just get really annoyed with myself because I say, look here. You know, you you’ve got all these advantages. You’ve met the most wonderful teachers.
You’ve had years and years in India, and you’re a nun and all this, you should have everything going for you. Why haven’t you gained any realizations yet? And I started sort of beating myself. Then I sort of realised that I’ve had all these obstacles, I’ve had all these problems, and it might look like I haven’t got anywhere, because, you know, in some respects I haven’t developed my meditation, haven’t done this and that, but then when I look at it, at least I’ve put all these obstacles behind me. They’re obstacles that I won’t have to go through again.
So I think if it’s like if you’re sort of walking along a path somewhere and you come to this very, very high brick wall, then, you know, it might take you days and days and days to sort of tackle how you go to get over that brick wall and finally do it. But then when you find yourself on the other side, you you really only got about six inches. You haven’t got anywhere. But if you look at it from another point of view, you’ve got that brick wall behind you instead of in front of you, so you really have made some progress. So that analogy anyway sort of made me realize sometimes you can sort of get into these little thought trips and you just have to sort of see what your mind is doing.
But I think Westerners are particularly inclined to put ourselves down and feel inadequate. I think it’s a particular problem of our society because of our competitive values and our superficial values and all the rest of it. And think that Asian countries are going the same way now, so they could be starting to have the same sort of problems that that we have. But, anyway, whatever our problems are, they’re they’re nothing new, and they’re nothing that sentient beings haven’t been having since beginningless time. We might be tending to have more emphasis on certain problems in this society and perhaps less emphasis on certain other problems, which perhaps other societies might have more of.
But whatever it comes down to, they’re just basic problems that arise out of our basic nature as human beings, the graduated path teachings do have helpful methods to deal with these things. And I feel that for us Westerners, contemplation on the precious human rebirth is a very important one because it’s something that’s going to help us to overcome this particular obstacle, a feeling that we’re no good and that we can’t do anything and that we’re basically just not good enough or not capable of achieving these sort of spiritual goals. Of course, last week we were going through the Orthodox presentation of the precious human rebirth, for those of you who are here, which dealt with things like contemplating on other realms, how fortunate we were not to be born in the hell realms this time around, or in the hungry ghost realms, or the animal realms and so on. So I think if you can think about these things, of course, then it becomes very powerful. If you can’t think about these things, you can still think about the preciousness of the human rebirth, because there are also so many situations in the human realm that are unfortunate for us.
It would be an obstacle to us. And if we can see that we’ve got a particular kind of human rebirth that is free of the obstacles that afflict a lot of other human beings, We went through them last week. Those of you who were here, you’ll know that there were things like mental and physical incapacities and various kinds of rebirth situations, such as being born in a country, what’s called a barbarian country, where the teachings are not existing or having been born perhaps as a human being in a dark age when the Buddha hadn’t descended to this world and all this kind of thing. So by thinking about these facts, we can see that we’ve got a very rare situation, a very special situation, because the majority of human beings don’t have this. And it also requires some things from our side.
We have to have an interest, a spiritual interest, a receptivity to the teachings. If we have these things, and the fact that we are here listening to the teachings is evidence that we have this interest and these other factors. We’re able to put this practice into our lives and really gain some benefit out of it. And if we meditate on these things, it makes us see the bright side of our lives rather than feeling that perhaps we’ve been disadvantaged or that we’re stupid or inadequate in a lot of ways. We can see that we’re actually very fortunate that whatever our difficulties in this life, we’ve got the opportunity.
It’s compared to precious treasure. So when we reflect on these things, then the example that’s given is that we find that we’re like a beggar who’s been searching through a rubbish heap and comes across valuable jewel. And in the same way, in a lot of ways, can compare our human life to a rubbish heap because it is full of suffering and problems, but it’s got this precious jewel, which is the fact that we have this precious human rebirth, or fully endowed human rebirth, which enables us to engage in the practice of the Dharma. So we’re able to meet the Dharma. We’re able to put that into practice.
And this is something that is going to lead us to everlasting happiness if we follow it through and make good use of it. Any questions up to this point? Yes. I think, yes, in Asian countries it’s a lot easier for people to know what’s expected of. For instance, in India, you see somebody running a little shop and their father runs the same kind of shop and their grandfather and their son’s going to do the same kind of thing, and it’s all very structured.
And our society is much less structured, so I think particularly young people find it difficult to quite work out exactly what they should be doing with their lives. I think that is very hard on people, especially young people. And I think also it gives us advantages because it does throw us into the situation of having taking responsibility for our own lives. We don’t expect once we reach a certain age, we don’t expect to be just told what to do or to just follow what everybody else has been doing, but rather we have to work it out. That means that we do have this capacity for taking on responsibility, which I think is something that comes a lot harder for Asians, is when they have to sort of take on responsibility for doing something from their own initiative.
There seems to be a they find it very a lot easier than we do to follow instructions and to conform and so on, I think, but they find it a lot harder to actually have to just take charge of something or to organize something for themselves or to decide what to do and run something, whereas we’re thrust into that comparatively early in life. So, you know, there’s good and bad sides of all these things. I would say that perhaps people in Asia tend to be happier on the whole. It’s a bit hard to judge, but they you get that impression that perhaps Westerners are unhappier on the whole than Asians. And I think that has a lot to do with this sort of uncertainty about our life.
Well, I gather that the people in Asian societies don’t normally go to Dharma teachers to solve their marital family problems, and that kind of thing. That’s something that’s very much a part of Western society, because the ministers and the priests have been fulfilling that role for quite a long time, so people tend to do that kind of thing. Of course, people would go to the Lamas more for dharma instruction or perhaps for getting observations done. If they had family problems, they might go and get an observation, you know, should we do it, should we do that? But they wouldn’t so much just go and say, oh, you know, I’m unhappy because my husband’s left me or something like that, you know, which the Westerners do.
So, I mean, I’m not saying it’s right or wrong either way. It’s just a different way of thinking. I think that it’s one of the things that the lamas have to get used to when they come to the west. So anyway, we need to do this contemplation on the precious human rebirth, and we need to actually meditate on these things. It’s not enough to just hear the words, because that doesn’t really make it strong for us.
So we have to imprint it by meditating on it. So when you look at the Tantra teachings, the Tantra teachings tell us that our problems, our unhappiness, all comes from our mundane view, our very limited view, which keeps us from realizing our divine potential. And so tantra teachings are all about cutting off this mundane view. And that’s why we have the deity practice and various aspects of practice of tantra. And, of course, the tantra teachings are based on the sūtra teachings, and the sūtra teachings focus on the need to purify the disturbing emotions and negative karmas, but it comes down to the same understanding.
The Sūtra teachings assert that we have the essential pure mind nature, which is called Buddha nature. So the essential nature of our mind is not oneness with all our deluded mental states, emotions, with our unhappiness and problems and so on, and also not one with our calmness. All these things are adventitious, and they’re something which is like can be compared to dirt on a clear mirror. Or perhaps another analogy is the the sky, which is always clear, but can have clouds obscuring it. But the, the clouds can be blown away by the wind, then you can see the clarity of the sky.
Or, you can remove the dirt from the mirror because it’s not mixed with the glass of the mirror. And so we can realize this essential nature of the mind. When we are able to realize this, this allows us to achieve liberation and to achieve enlightenment. It might seem something that’s a long way off, something that’s not easy to achieve, but in actual fact, this Buddha nature is with us right now. It’s not something that we have to get.
It’s with us. It’s just a question of removing the obscurations, removing the delusions and all the things that keep us from getting in touch with this clear light nature of the mind. So if we live in accordance with the dharma, then we can do this just little bit by little bit, And we don’t have to feel that we have to make some sort of tremendous, massive effort and get rid of it all at once. We can’t do that. But we just have to bring the dharma into our lives and develop little by little.
And if we do this, then we can feel a great change coming about in our life. And this is something that means in our lives right now. It doesn’t mean that we have to wait until we attain all the higher realizations as a path. It doesn’t mean that we have to attain single pointed concentration. By the time we’ve achieved these kinds of realizations, we would have already made a lot of progress.
We would have already gone a long way. And so we can see that if we start to live our life with the dharma now, then we can start to see a great change coming about in our life right from the start, just by giving the dharma principles the first place in our life. We can be a lot happier and more stable. And these external ups and downs won’t be upsetting us in the same way. And we can have lots of other benefits.
We can have more harmonious relationships with others, and we can become of more benefit to others. All these kinds of things will be bringing great benefits in our life. As I already mentioned, as we develop, we just don’t get so thrown about, so upset by the various different things that happen to us. Even if we have physical problems, sicknesses and so on, even if we lose members of our family, all of these things, of course, not pleasant. These things will cause us unhappiness.
But we’ll be much better able to deal with them. We’ll be able to just deal with them as they come and not be thrown off course by them. So all these benefits are really something really worthwhile. They make a big difference to our lives. I’m probably telling you what we all know already.
Some of you have been practicing Dharma for You know these things already. But anyway, the point is that we do get all these benefits from our Dharma practice, and they make a big difference to our lives. But in order for the Dharma teachings to work, we have to be focusing on this long term goal. We have to keep it in mind, even though we’re putting our main energy into just dealing with things day by day, practicing Dharma day by day. But we’ve always got this long term goal in mind.
And it’s because we have this long term goal in mind that all these other things are working for us. Would you agree? So anyway, in order to fully appreciate the possibilities of the precious human rebirth, we need to contemplate on its value. And after having identified the precious human rebirth by contemplating on the Eight Freedoms and the Ten Endowments, then we have to go on and look at the value of our precious human rebirth. That’s the next meditation.
And this is something that has three main points to contemplate on. So we contemplate on the temporal value of the human rebirth. We contemplate on its ultimate value, and we contemplate on its value in each moment. So these points are not terribly detailed, but we just need to think about them and get a feeling for them to get the idea that our precious human rebirth does really bring us these benefits. So the first point, the temporal value, is that by having this precious human rebirth, we can use it to accumulate good karma and to purify our negative karmas, and in that way to attain upper rebirth next time around.
In particular, of course, we’re aiming at more precious human rebirth so that we can go on with our Dharma practice. But in any case, we can use it to accumulate the causes and conditions for rebirth in a higher realm. So the second point is that we can gain the ultimate goal. And the real ultimate goal is Buddhahood. We could also follow the Hīnayāna path and achieve arhatship.
That’s not really regarded as an ultimate goal, because the Buddhas eventually called the arhats out of nirvana and make them go back onto the Bodhisattva path again. So I think they’re having a loving time and it’s going to last forever, but then they have to come and work for sentient beings. But actually, the state of mind of Buddha is far more blissful than the state of mind of a arhat. So they really get more out of it in the long run. But that’s not to say that an arhat doesn’t have a pretty blissful sort of experience.
That’s why they remain arhats, because once they get to that point, unless they’ve got tremendously strong compassion, that this is just so great that they just want to stay with it. So, of course, ultimately, we do want to attain Buddhahood. But there are people who could use this one human life to achieve Buddhahood. It is possible to attain Buddhahood in this lifetime. There’s some detailed explanations of actually how many years it takes you to attain Buddhahood.
It’s all written out in the wish fulfilling golden sun, which Doc is always advertising, but we haven’t got a copy in the library here. I think it’s something like twelve years or, first of all, it’s a long lifetime. If you practice Kriyā Tantra and use various practices to extend lifespan, then it can be in a human lifespan which has been very greatly extended. Or by practicing Maha Anuttara Yoga Tantra, you can achieve it in twelve years or even three, I think it says, the wish fulfilling golden sun, because the Maha Anuttara Yoga Tantra is particularly powerful. And so even if we don’t attain Buddhahood in this life, we might manage to become a bodhisattva, perhaps we might manage to become a Ārya bodhisattva by realizing renunciation of bodhicitta and emptiness.
And if we don’t manage to achieve that, there are other realizations on the path that might be achieved, such as realizing the meditation as the graduated path, the preciousness of the human rebirth, for instance, when we’ve really realized that that’s quite a powerful attainment. Might actually, I think, have to realize single pointed concentration in order to really realize any of these graduated path meditations. So, for instance, there are meditations such as impermanence, which are very important topics on the path to be realized. If we don’t, or we might gain single pointed concentration and be able to enhance our practice very much by gaining that. So all these things are things that might possibly be achieved by making good use of our precious human rebirth.
Even if we don’t manage to attain any of those things, we might manage to progress on the path. And that’s something that we should aspire to, that we should make some progress on the path and make sure of getting another precious human rebirth next time, hopefully an even better one with a stronger accumulation of merit, that we can keep on going life to life, having better understanding, more depth in our Dharma practice, and eventually attaining these particular realizations and goals, which are stages on the path, and going on to attain full enlightenment through practicing sūtra and tantra. Any questions about that? Anybody want to have a go at explaining that? Somebody who is but yes.
When you dedicate your merits, you first of all create the merit and then you dedicate it for bodhicitta, Paul said. Is that what Paul asked? Well, actually, we really should first of all, before we start doing the virtuous action, we should set our motivation first. It takes really two things: motivation and merit. That makes it really motivation and dedication makes it really powerful.
And if we set our motivation when we get up in the morning, then it works for the whole day. So if you forget it throughout the day, you’ve still had it in the morning, so it’s still taking care of the whole day for you. But particularly when we start a particular virtuous action, such as listening to teachings or meditation or something, we always set our motivation again. As you know, we always say these bodhicitta prayers, and sometimes we reflect on the four immeasurables, or we might have a bodhicitta motivation to go through. And so then when we do the action, if we’ve done it with the motivation of bodhicitta, then it’s going to be a much stronger merit than if we did it without any particular motivation.
If we do it without having the motivation, it’s still a virtuous action, but the merit is much smaller. bodhicitta motivation, even if it’s just an artificial one that we’ve had to produce by reflecting on it, is very powerful in increasing the amount of merit because it’s involving all living beings. And so it’s not something we’re just doing ourselves, it’s something we’re doing for all others. And so the object of our actions is huge, and that makes merit really immense. And then, after having done the action, we dedicate the merits for enlightenment, and that ensures that the merit doesn’t just ripen as some sort of transient good result of happiness in saṃsāra, but instead it gets directed towards the path to enlightenment.
It becomes merit that supports our practice on the path to enlightenment. We need this huge collection of merit in order to get enlightened. We need two kinds of collections: merit and wisdom. Wisdom is concerned with emptiness, mainly with emptiness, and we have to study and meditate on emptiness to gain that one. And all our other good actions, such as observing moral conduct, generosity, enthusiastic perseverance, and so on, all go into the merit accumulation.
So that’s something that’s the two support each other. We we need both. And dedication makes sure that it it goes where we want it to go. Well, it has its effect, but there’s different kinds of mindfulness. The Hīnayāna the Theravadans practice mindfulness.
Hīnayāna practice mindfulness. So it doesn’t have to be mindfulness of bodhicitta, but in Mahāyāna practice, we always make our mindfulness on bodhicitta. Yes. We always bring bodhicitta into everything. So then the third point so the first point was the temporal value.
The second point is the ultimate value. And the third point is moment by moment. And that’s actually covered by what we’ve just been discussing because the value of the precious human rebirth moment by moment is explained in terms of the accumulation of merit that we can make even moment by moment with the practice of bodhicitta. Particularly through the practice of bodhicitta, we can really make our human rebirth meaningful and really gain a tremendous accumulation of merit of progress towards the goals by this means, which, of course, is going to bring us great happiness as well as helping our practice for the benefit of others. The Lama’s always say that if you want to be self-cherishing, then be self-cherishing in a really big way.
Don’t be small minded about it, but in a big way, and practice cherishing others. So those are the three points, and I think we’ll meditate on those a little bit now. So maybe we just do a little bit of breathing meditation, focusing on the breath. And then I’ll ding the little gong, and then we can meditate a little bit on each of these points. I’ll just mention them briefly when we get to them.
Everybody here know about breathing awareness? You’re all familiar with breathing meditation? Okay. No worries. Yes.
Yes. That’s one way that an animal might she she she missed us tonight. Yes. Yes. So, there’s actually two causes of the human rebirth.
Does anybody know what they are? Well, there’s one main cause, and there’s another one that’s desirable as well. Is that karma? Well, what sort of previous karma? Right.
Yes. So human who? Yes. So in our previous human lives, we have created some of this kind of karma. But what sort would we have to have create what actions create the right sort of