Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Robina Courtin opens with September 11 as an image of impermanence — thousands going to work on a beautiful day with no idea they would die. She establishes the foundation: we are all dying, yet live as if we have unlimited time. She traces how karma ripens across lifetimes, using a fisherman’s story to show how past karmic imprints blind us to the suffering we cause, even when we believe we’re doing good. She explores how real compassion arises: not from pity, but from seeing that all beings harm themselves through ignorance. She addresses practical ethical questions — eating meat, euthanasia, helping the dying — and introduces the four opponent powers: the Buddhist method for purifying karma. For anyone exploring karma as lived psychology rather than abstract doctrine.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 2002 01 19 BYT.mp3
UUID: 19a6abf6-fbce-434e-9aeb-2eb8d713c312
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: Be Your Own Therapist (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2002-01-19
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~10,146
Well, of course, we don’t even think that I’m alive. But it’s like if we really realized impermanence. This is what they say, main conclusion from realizing impermanence is that you really do know in the front of your mind like you’ve been given a death sentence and you don’t know when they’re gonna do it. It’s like you’re on death row and they haven’t given you a date and they can tell you. You like that vacation idea, that holiday idea.
It’s like they can tell you anytime you’re gonna die today. You imagine? You’d be I mean, just unbelievable. Well, that’s actually the truth. Don’t think it’s like a hysterical idea.
It’s the truth. So we should be totally surprised every minute we’re still alive, you know, And therefore, had this enormous wish to use this life to make the most of it, not to waste it. It’s so precious. This amazing opportunity we worked so hard for is still here. How incredible, you know?
I mean, you think of all the this is way you use all the examples we know of everyday life. You think of those people on September eleven, that one example because the sky was so beautiful that day. It was stunning. It was a gorgeous day they said. And they every one of those people who said goodbye to their wife or their husband went to work, not one of them would have said, I’m gonna die today.
They would think you were insane. Right? Why? Beautiful day, feeling good, young, handsome, healthy. They died.
I mean, are not like accidents. This is the point. It’s to see that this is the way Samsāra is. It’s the tragedy of it. It’s just how things are, you know.
So then why not wake up wake ourselves up and think, you know, even though every now and again, even once a month if we’re lucky, wow, I’m amazing. I’m still alive. How incredible. All my conditions are still here. Let me use them.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche says you should wake up every morning and as soon as you wake up, you know, think, great. I’m still alive. How amazing. I didn’t wake up in a lower realm, you know. And then give yourself the energy you want to use your life, not waste it.
So here we are, know, we didn’t die in the tea break. We’re still here. How incredible. Let’s use it. Okay?
So we’ve talked about karma. So let’s go for the next topic now. Leave karma oh, no. I’m gonna talk about how to purify. No.
That’s important. Okay. So we talked in terms of how we roughly speaking, you create a main karma. So okay. The other now I’ll tell you more depressing story.
Okay? Another depressing story, then I’ll talk about how you purify. Okay? Lift you up. Okay?
Just giving you an example which I always use for how karma ripens and even the different kinds of karma. Okay? And this is again why Buddha would say there’s so much reason to have such compassion for ourselves and others. So there’s a friend of mine who came to me in tears after hearing some teachings about karma and her her one of her beautiful three sons, who was twenty nine had died five years before. And she’s just getting over the grief, know, the loss.
And she was hearing about, you know, killing and the karma and everything and she was in tears because her boy had been a fisherman, Thirteen years a professional fisherman. So it dawned on her that perhaps if the Buddha’s teachings are correct, her son who, you know, her beautiful boy would now be suffering in the lower realms. Unbearable thought. So she was talking about this. And anyway, I told her to go and see one lama, you know, who this lama is said to be clairvoyant.
I’m saying said to be because, you know, I’m just telling you that that’s what he said to be. I can’t tell who he is, but he is said to be, but I trust. And they very rarely tell you what they see. Like I said before about those pilots, I was very surprised when Lama Zopa said something like that because they very rarely tell you these things. But in this case, she went to see him.
She was talking about all the suffering and everything, and she had this grief and all that. And she was talking and she went to this Lama and just mentioned his name, her son’s name. Okay? And so the logic being with this lama, his clairvoyance was so profound that just by hearing the name of this person, he kind of accessed it in his own mental computer and he could see exactly where this consciousness was at this moment. This is how they talk.
So he said to him, he said to her, he said, oh, yes. He said, first he was born in the animal realms and now he’s in the hell realms. You know, mean, you know, it’s like when we hear these things, it sounds like I mean, you couldn’t get you couldn’t get heavier kind of, what’s the word? You know, hellfire and brimstone teaching, could you? It’s like so heavy when you hear these things.
And then you visualize, was a really nice human being. She said he was a very handsome man, a lovely human being, very generous with his fish. Right? Kind person, moral, you know, a lovely human being. Like, all of us are lovely human.
We don’t have be wicked, in other words, to be negative. This is the point. This is the Buddhist point. And so this is the point about the karma. Okay?
So this is so using the way we talked about the four karmas before is a really good example of how karma works in Buddhist terms. Okay. First one, the logic would be in Buddhist terms that he’d been in the lower realms at some point in the past, cleaned up the karma of having killed, worn it out, finished it up, the gas tank ran out, the petrol tank ran out. Right? And then eventually due to some kind of miraculous coming together of various conditions, when that killing karma finished and his lower realm karma finished, he got a human life again.
He had one of the karmic imprints in his mind due to very many things coming together. He got a really good human life and a really good human life, a really kind mother. He had very good environmental karma. Was part of California, be it by the sea. It was very beautiful, you know, very peaceful environment, very good mother.
So good karma in many ways. So there four kinds of karma. So he had really good, you know, environmental karma, really good family. He had very good qualities. He had actions similar to the cause, many very good qualities.
But among those good qualities, he had, like, let’s face it, most human beings, he had the karma to kill. Not humans. He never killed a human. He killed fish. Now this is a tragedy, just using the Buddha’s perspective now of our culture.
We can see, you know, it’s totally accepted to kill fish, to kill ants, to kill dogs not good dogs, because we’re attached to dogs, aren’t we? To kill kill, you know, to kill the things we call pests. Right? It’s okay. It’s our culture.
We accept it. It’s normal. Even in our great respect to my Catholic upbringing, but I was taught, and this is the teaching, that animals don’t have souls. God made them for humans to do what they like with. So therefore, even among the Christian, which is, you know, it’s a Christian culture we live in, so therefore, that’s why Christians kill.
I’m being rude now. I’m just looking at the philosophical, you know, presentations. So the thing is in, you know, in our culture, maybe it’s considered wrong to go if he if he ran around killing, let’s say, people’s cats, he would have been in big trouble. You agree? And he would have been called a monster.
You agree? Really evil person. But he killed fish. He wasn’t evil. He was a nice, good human being who enjoyed nature.
Right? This is the this is the assumptions. So we can see even the assumptions we have. We can see even in an immediate way they’re completely artificial. They’re completely kind of emotional because we we don’t we’re not attached to fish as pets.
We are, many of us, but because it’s seen as kind of part of nature, you go out and you catch them and it’s interesting and all these people have this art of making all these little flies and everything. Once it’s mixed with nature, we assume, we make the mistake of thinking that fishing is nature as well. Well, excuse me, ask the fish. Do they enjoy it? Course they don’t.
But it’s interesting how our culture is, you know. So therefore, of course, he’s living in a society that accepts his actions. Now it would have been almost better for him if he’d said he had this addiction to killing cats because he would have had to stop. They would have chucked him in prison, he could have stopped creating negative karma. Good for him.
Because he because fishing is accepted, he was never seen as doing something negative, therefore he never looked at himself. So in a way, it’s quite tragic for this reason. But the key point here is, one, the kind of karma called actions similar to the cause, which is his personality and the tendencies he has. There he is. This is the tragedy of of of the past karma.
He’d been in the lower realms, cleaned up the main karma, but unfortunately, the residual results were still there. The habit to kill was continuing. That’s kind of the residual result left over from the main karma. He had the habit to continue to kill. This This is why purification is so important, which I’ll talk about later.
So that’s the tragedy. That’s the worst one of all. He had a good human life. He had good qualities, but he continued to kill. And she said, his mom said, since a little boy, he was unbelievably attracted to to the river and to fishing, you know.
Again, not criticizing, just looking. So, of course, this is one of the things about what is the most about karma? And if you look at this one, this is why it is so painful for us to change, that we have all these habits in our mind that we totally take for granted. We assume are just our personality. We know no one taught us these things.
No one taught us to lie, to steal, to kill, to be lazy, all the regular old habits we all have in one way or another, you know? So we just assume this is who I am, what can I do? We can see it makes us miserable, we don’t really think we can change, or we defend our right to be those things. And certainly with killing, we certainly defend our right. He would never have thought for one second that it was a wrong thing to do because no one said it was, and he didn’t heal it in his own heart.
So this is a tragedy because he had the habit to do something. We can see this. You check. When you’ve got the habit, let’s say, to do something negative, and it’s even the same with positive. When you’ve got the habit to do something, you go towards it like a magnet, don’t you?
You don’t have to make this strong choice. I I mean, I didn’t have to go, I will now be angry. I will bear my teeth. I will clench my fist. It just happened.
Everything worked beautifully. Right? Because it was a strong habit. We all know this. So when you have strong habits, you go towards it like a magnet.
Now you check the other thing that’s so sad about the negative qualities, great about the positive ones. Whatever you’re attracted to doing, whatever you go towards like a magnet, you naturally think it’s a good thing. Because why? It gives you a good feeling, doesn’t it? Even when you’re angry, you have this really a sense of kind of really good, you know, so righteous.
Only afterwards, you you kinda feel embarrassed because you know how awful it was. But when you’re doing it, you’re really caught up. It feels like it’s a good thing. So the same when you’re doing anything good, in your mind, you have this philosophy. We don’t notice, but it’s all there that that defends the right to do it and calls it a good thing.
We have to call what we do a good thing. Otherwise, it’s too it’s too it make you insane. So I can think of all my gangster friends, you know. These guys, especially the Mexicans, have been part of gangs for years since they’re little boys. I mean, it’s when you look at the actions, they rape, they stab, they shoot, they steal.
They do all the classic things that in our society are called, quote, bad, you know, unquote. But, of course, they had this elaborate philosophy that defends their right to do it because it’s you know, so that you have to call what you do good. So with someone who goes fishing, they think of all the things about it’s good because it’s this and it’s nature and it’s that, and I’m feeding people. All these logical reasons that we use to to support what we do. It will be unbearable, unsupportable, insupportable, whatever the word is.
If we say, I am doing a bad thing and it’s okay. I mean, it’s very rare we say that. And this is the whole thing about free will. We do choose to do what we do, but we we we put it in the context of a philosophy that causes us to see it as the good thing to do. So therefore, it’s really hard to see.
You know, if we’re lazy, if we can’t be bothered, if we steal, if I mean, when I used to steal when I was a hippie, I had a very clear philosophy that really gave me the right to just steal. I could never have just boldly said to myself this is a wrong action but I’m gonna do it. What you just deal? What did you just deal? I was the hippie.
Cigarettes, alcohol, go to the supermarket, pick up all my things, put them in a cardboard bag and walk out and say excuse me and walk out. Easy, isn’t it? Oh, because I just acted I was arrogant. I acted like I it was my I didn’t sneak it out. So the karma of that, if if it hasn’t been purified, you didn’t care either.
That sort of fourth action was you felt justified. Is that what you just No. I just I used to feel I was clever, that I could get away with it. I didn’t sneak it. I didn’t hide it in my bag.
Would put them all in a big box, then walk out through the barrier and sort of like I just belonged there. I was normal with my big box of things. I was living in Alice Springs, but if I’d been an Aboriginal, excuse me. But, I mean, it’s very arrogant here. But I always knew if you look like you know, you go into cinemas and not pay, right?
Because I always knew if you looked like you belonged there, no one would ever but if you looked guilty, they’d catch you, So I never looked guilty. Anyway, at some point, I realized it was dumb. Know? It was ridiculous. Everywhere ever I saw something that didn’t belong to me, I took it.
I thought this is ridiculous. That’s a great story. Anyway, I stopped. Just as well. Yeah?
What if you say eating meat, but you you didn’t kill it? Okay. I’ll talk about that in a minute. Good one. Good point.
Okay. So let’s finish this one about this boy, karma. So the habit to do, he had the habit to kill. And so, naturally, he had a a philosophy that, of course, was supported by cult culture that made it very easy for him to to see this action as good. You know?
And his mother said she he even used to sing this little Japanese mantra on the fish. So he really did believe it was a good thing he was doing. And I mean, this is very common, very common. But this is showing if this Lama is correct. I’m only just taking this as a given that Lama with his clairvoyant experience was correct in seeing what he was seeing.
If that is true, then it’s the most fascinating story. So it indicates even this is what I’m saying about we even think we’re doing good is not enough. It’s gotta be coming truly from a place. And secondly, one of the things with him is because it was a profound habit. He was born with his instinct to kill, born with his habit.
He was going he went like he went to the water like a magnet. He even called himself salmon. You know? This enormous kind of infatuation with fishing and addiction to the fishing. He couldn’t help himself.
He’s like a junkie to fish. That’s very common among people who are fishermen, but that’s a junkie to that action, to kill. Many people live by the water but don’t ever think to kill because they haven’t got the karma to kill. His mother said she went fishing with him one time, and she found it unbearable. This is what’s interesting.
Because she didn’t have the karma to kill, she therefore didn’t have a story in her mind that supported it. Therefore, it was naked. What she saw and what she saw was suffering. What she saw were these beings suffering. So probably he just thought, poor old sentimental mom, know, how stupid she is, you know.
But this is the thing. It’s like when you see when you see these fish I think very one time I saw fish. My my my Lithuanian uncle used to fish and shoot the you know, shoot at the shooting season and fish in the fishing season. That’s what he did. Right?
I remember the first time when I was down, he used to live in on the Murray River in Mildura, just across the border. And, I remember seeing all the fish all flapping around, you know, and he’s sort of watching them and checking. I was thinking, what are they doing? Why are they flapping? You know?
And then I realized that’s how you kill fish. You let them die this painful death. Right? I couldn’t believe it. Well, they bashed their heads on the thing, one or the other.
They’d ruin the fish. Wouldn’t know if you did that. It was so stunning to me. I never really thought about how fish died, you know. It was so shocking.
These beings clearly not wanting to be on that naked piece of wood but wanting to be in the water, please. But when you when you’ve got this habit to kill and you have this story in your mind that it’s good, then, of course, you don’t it’s blight this is the point. It blinds you from seeing the harm you’re doing. See, when you check when you’ve got a habit to be angry, I was blind. I couldn’t see the harm I did as I was doing it.
My friend who was patient could see it nakedly. His mother could see nakedly the suffering of the fish because he had this story in his head, he was he couldn’t see. Was blinded. And that’s the tragedy that we cannot see the harm we’re doing. We just couldn’t see it.
All those years. So then what happened? He was scuba diving. He drowned. He was twenty nine.
So that’s called the experience similar to the cause. He got the experience of dying young. Now this is an interesting point about what you do. Does it act does it bring on the negative karma? You could very easily say excuse me.
Beg pardon. You could very easily say that let’s say he’d heard about killing and he’d really thought about like a lot of people in this room, we kill and we stop killing. Right? He’d heard about it and he decided to stop killing. You could say that if he’d really purified his karma, would have prevented himself from dying.
He could have extended his life, you know. So but as long as he kept killing, that that activated his other karma to be killed himself. So he could have shifted that if he’d stopped killing maybe. This is possible. This is the point.
So there he is. He had had in the past, and this is the logic of why he killed because if you look at your habit, one of the key things is from having done it before. So you know if you’ve done it before, you’ve killed, you’ve been in the lower realms according to the view of karma. Number one, he worn that out, finished that karma, but he still had the habit to kill, which is the most tragic. He got a good human life, but he got one of those habits.
He got the So he start, and he was born in an environment where there were plenty of fish with whom he had strong karmic connection. All those fish there waiting to be killed by him. You know, he wasn’t born in Alice Springs or somewhere where the river’s empty. You know, it’s a bare kind of red dirt. He was born where there were fish.
So he thought, of course, he was lucky, didn’t he? It was his livelihood. You know? And, tragically, he wasn’t lucky. He was unlucky because he had this karma just to carry through.
So he carried it through. He killed and killed and killed for thirteen years, and then he died. And then according to his karmic story, whatever whatever, karma takes care, you know. So it’s very interesting. This is a karmic view.
And the point is, it’s, as I said, the basis for compassion. And compassion in Buddhism is interesting. It’s it’s based not on the poor thing. Look at them. They’re being harmed by that mean person.
It is look at that poor person killing and doesn’t realize it’s causing him unbearable suffering in the future. So it’s like the mother with her junky kid again. Seeing the terrible things this kid is doing to himself and she’s seeing the harm he’s gonna bring in the future to himself and it’s unbearable to her. That’s what compassion is, you know. And so that’s the basis.
When we see sentient beings, all of us blindly following our own imprints, following the delusions, following the anger, following the jealousy, following the killing, following the pride, thinking we’re getting what we want, using these methods to get our own needs, not realizing we’re just perpetuating terrible karma and we’re gonna bring suffering to ourselves. So what practice is is realizing this and waking ourselves up and realizing, okay, let’s look at this. Do I wanna be happy? Yes, please. Do I wanna suffer?
No. Thank you. So what do I do about this? Start creating virtue. It’s not meant to make you scared, but we’re looking at where we’re at first.
And if you think about this one, if the world could really understand, everybody in this world could really see how our anger and our pride and our jealousy and our killing and our stealing and our harming and our blah blah blah, that is what brings us future suffering. Then who in their right mind would do a negative thing ever to harm another person? Because that’s the point. It harms yourself. It harms yourself.
And this takes time for us to see, you know. And this is the one about responsibility. This is the real one to get about the one of karma, not it’s not punishment. It’s not someone being mean to you. It’s the basis for your incredible own self respect.
In just the same way, we understand in our society now about the environment. Back in the sixties when I used to wear, you know, my hair in a French roll, I’d spray it with hairspray, and some let’s say some visionary came along and said, Robina, you’re putting a hole in the ozone layer. I would have thought they were nuts. Right? You agree?
No one heard about ozone layers then, holes in them. Now, bitterly, we are learning from our dumb experience that we’re out of ignorance, thinking we’re making our hair look cute, actually causing environmental causing suffering in the environment. This is a real it’s an example. So we understand about this one of not knowing out of ignorance what we’re doing and therefore bringing future suffering to other people. So here, we’re talking about bringing future suffering to this continuity of this consciousness.
That’s all. So the principle is one we well know about. Nothing new about this idea, you know. So it’s it’s it’s actually what comes with a view of karma is enormous sense of self respect, an enormous sense of not wanting to harm yourself any longer, you know. And when you’ve got this, you have a sound basis for genuine compassion for others, which is you cannot bear to see that sentient beings are harming themselves, you know, by harming others.
This is the point. So it’s a really strong one of compassion for oneself and others, not vindictiveness. There’s this huge sense of responsibility for every action we do because Buddha says everything we do say and think will produce experiences in this very consciousness that I call mine. And again, this is not something unusual. We understand it, you know.
We understand that even in this life, if you see a person who spent their life being angry and mean and nasty, well, excuse me, we can all see they’ve just created their own suffering, haven’t they? They’ve laid their they’ve made their own bed and now they have to lie on it. We say all these things. So it’s not as if this idea is totally foreign to us. We understand very well when we see a person suffering.
But we because we see a little a person who’s innocent now, this is a big shift for us. So, you know, you think this. If Lama Zopa Rinpoche in his assessment of what happened to those two pilots is correct, that means okay. What was that? September?
October, November, December, January. They are now four months in a womb. Let’s say they’re born in an American mother’s womb, which is not totally not feasible, being born dying in that country. Right? Who knows?
Maybe even in one of the wombs, you know, by the one of the mothers of the people who died. Who knows, you know, who was gonna who was the mother of one person who died. So there’s this person having a new baby, and their little beautiful new baby comes out, a little beautiful white Christian baby, you know. And, of course, it’s a nice child. It’s got good karma, like the fisherman.
And so then you have this little beautiful child, then it dies a horrific death just like the September eleven people. Now, of course, who is gonna say that that person is an evil person from before and they were the pilot of the September eleven flight? Of course, that doesn’t look like it. Look like an innocent innocent little baby, you know? Well, this is all the more reason to have compassion.
There’s this story. I always forget the exact details, but this is one story. Let me have that book. I’ll look it in there. It’s in there.
I’ll read it out correctly. Thank you very much. See if I can find it. See if I can find it. It’s in the teaching of karma I think.
Let’s see if I can find it. Maybe I forget where it is. I’ll just have to tell you loosely the story. It’s the story about, one one of the disciples of Buddha was he was clairvoyant, right, and walking past this environment, little family. Oh gosh, where was it?
I wish I’d always forget where it is. It’s too late. He’s walking past his family and I think it’s something like this, you know, that the mother I’ll have to remember the next time I read it. The father is sitting in a kitchen with the baby in his lap and he’s eating fish, and he’s kicking a dog, and the wife is there doing her job or whatever. And he looks he walks in and he says he looks walks past and he sees it and he says, what a farce Samsāra is.
And what he saw basically because he was clairvoyant was something like this. The baby was the previous enemy whom he had wanted who he had killed, who was now born as his baby. The dog was like his grandma or something, whom he didn’t who is now you know, there he was kicking his dog. The fish was his previous somebody or rather, like his child who had died or something else. Something like that, you know.
So what and the Buddha is saying, we’ve got all these countless lives and countless environments and countless different scenarios. But what we because we have so much attachment, we’re so caught up in this in the now, all we see is my enemy, my friend, my baby, my fish, my dog, my this. We don’t see the big picture. So he said, what a fast saṃsāra is, you know. No, I can’t.
There’s something like that. You’re supposed to laugh, but you didn’t. There you go. Thank you very much. You thought it was too ridiculous, did you?
Did you think it was too ridiculous to laugh? Here it is, here it is, found it. Okay, so let’s take an example of our past and future rebirths. Our enemies, friends, parents and so forth change place. Once a layman’s old father, a man’s old father, always used to eat fish from the pool behind the house.
The father died and was reborn as a fish in the pool. There’s maybe the answer to your question. Probably he caught the fish as well. Let’s have a look. Yeah.
You probably would have caught the fish. So he he died. He got born a fish in that pool. Right? So the the mother the the man’s mother was attached to the house, a very full of attachment.
So she was reborn as the man’s dog. K? The man’s enemy had been killed for raping the man’s wife. So because the enemy was so attached to her, he was born as her son. And the son caught his father the fish and killed it.
So while he ate its meat, the dog, his mother, ate the fish bones and was beaten by her son. His own little son, his enemy, was sitting on his knee. And so Śāriputra saw this and said, he eats his mother’s flesh and he eats his father’s flesh and hits his mother. The enemy he killed sits on his knee. A wife gnaws her husband’s bones.
Samsāra can be such a farce. You got a bit of an interesting story. Okay. I’ll remember in the future. General Suffering in Samsāra, four seventy eight.
I mean, is just the Buddha’s view. Have to keep telling you this. This is just Buddha’s deal. Okay? You can take it or leave it.
It’s not meant to be a fantasy. It’s meant to be truth. Okay? What he sees. Okay?
Alright. So how do we purify? So the story about fish. Okay. We’re killing.
Alright. We’re have have another day here, I think. Okay. So it’s like this. On the one hand, we can definitely say every single thing we do has an effect of one way or another.
Everything. We can’t avoid interdependence. It’s just impossible. And in the same way, you can see, you know but this is why the key factor in the in the strongest karma we create, the key factor is intention to do it. Strong intention.
So the strongest action of killing is when you have the intention to kill, depending on your motivation. There is a sentient being that is alive. You do the action, and it dies. Now, obviously, from those four points, we can see only one of them is valid for eating eating meat. Looking at this from the point of view of there.
So they say the closer you are to the action, the heavier the karma. So from that point of view, you can see the further you are away from the killing, the weaker the karmic connection, the weaker the karmic imprint. It’s the same with when you eat vegetables, and we never think of this in the West. It’s most fascinating. You know, if you check the number of sentient beings who die from the rice you’ve eaten, who’ve who’ve been drowned in the water, the creatures who’ve been killed, either either this is an interesting point.
Either with the insecticide or in your nice organic gardening where you bring in this creature who eats that creature so you can have nice fresh carrots. That’s heavy duty for Buddhism. You just use creatures to kill each other so you can have healthy food. It’s outrageous, in fact. It’s heavy heavy duty.
You’re using beings to harm each other so you can eat well. I mean, there’s there’s you know, but we get so holy when we talk about vegetarianism, you know. Excuse me. Billions of beings are dying all the time whenever we eat any food whatsoever. So we didn’t directly kill them.
It’s true, but just the same as the meat. We didn’t directly kill it either. But beings are dying all the time for whatever we eat because this is the nature of saṃsāra. So the Buddha’s point is this, as much as possible to have the intention to not harm any living being, if we can possibly help it. So with intention.
It’s impossible to not harm. Otherwise, you might as well die now. You can’t eat anything. You can’t do anything. You can’t walk without harming others.
You can’t even breathe without breathing in and harming little creatures. So this is why the intention is so powerful. Given the fact that we’re living in this environment where everything is harmed and being harmed, we have to develop this very pure intention to avoid harming whatever we can. Which is why when you saw in that Tibetan film, know, the seven years in Tibet, making all that big fuss and bother about removing the worms off the road, you know. So Tibetans interestingly eat meat.
So most people find this a big contradiction. They eat meat because it’s their culture, especially in India, in Tibet. Whereas in India, a lot more about vegetarian, right, because it’s much more killing in India than there was in Tibet. But, you know, they will go out of their way to save one tiny insect. They would never consciously kill anything.
So sort of you can say that that the karma is weaker. So as if so if you have in your mind this excuse, oh, I don’t wanna kill, but I’d rather they kill, then I can eat it, then there’s no karma. That’s rubbish. Because as soon as that’s in your mind, you’re creating negative karma. But if you know someone so it’s like if someone eat offers you meat or meat is there, well, you need to eat it for your health and so you have a purest motivation as you can, and then you eat it.
You know? And it depends even on the person. Let’s say a person’s got strong karma to kill from having killed in the past, let’s say, in this life, it’s much better for that person to be vegetarian. There’s a friend of mine who’s a monk, an Australian, and his family are this big rich butcher company in Melbourne. Right?
And so he was brought up on the back of, you know, the the death of millions of beings. And so when he became a monk, Lama Yeshe said to him, you don’t touch meat. Don’t you touch meat. No way. You know, of his karma, very strong.
He never actually actually killed, but he got his Mercedes and all these fancy things because of the death of animals. Right? So another person might have no karma at all with killing. So for that person to eat meat, it wouldn’t be so bad. It’s everything’s very varied.
It’s like a person who’s an alcoholic to have one glass of wine, terrible. A person who’s not an alcoholic to have one glass of wine, no big deal. You can talk objectively about the qualities of wine, the qualities of killing, but then all these other factors play a part, you know. So it’s not an easy thing. I mean, in general, we have to look at our own minds and see.
There is always karma in whatever we do, including with the vegetables. So as much as we can, it’s best to do anything that doesn’t have you know, that hasn’t harm. And it’s obvious that that, you know, I mean, insects die in a terrible way when they when we pick our veggies or when we grow them. And the same with the animal. I mean, they’re terrible.
They’re terrible. They’re killing, especially in the waste. It’s so monstrous. This industry around the killing, isn’t it? So as much as we can.
Yeah. I mean, at the moment, I’m on this diet where I’m eating virtually all meat all the time, you know, because of my health. So then at least given if we have to do it I mean, are Lama’s Lama’s Opus says, look. The animal has given its life for you. At least you can do something for it.
So, you know, then you blow mantra, for example, a mantra onto the creature. And Buddhism and Lama Zopa would say that that mantra, the power of mantra is such that that flesh, even though it’s dead and the consciousness is way gone somewhere else by now, it benefits that consciousness because of the karmic connection with that that flesh, you know. So even if you’re gonna eat meat, at least you blow mantra and be conscious and be aware. And do something for the fish, do something for the chicken, you know. Blow mantra so it blesses that consciousness.
Consciousness. But, you know, yeah, but we can’t avoid. Like I said, we can’t avoid. It’s not a question of getting away with anything. It’s a question of really being aware of ourselves, knowing what’s the right thing to do.
You know, fantastically vegetarian is probably the best. But don’t think you’re being so holy, you’re not killing creatures. You’re killing plenty of creatures. You can’t help You’re not because the intention isn’t there. But you’re, you know, part of the scenario of being interdependent is that they’re dying for your carrots, you know.
So then have strong at least have awareness of this and strong compassion and make strong prayers for all those beings’ consciousnesses, you know, and make aspiration to never kill and never harm others. Be very conscious. This is the idea. That makes sense? Yeah.
This is the karma of killing a small creature less than the karma of killing a large creature? The reason they talk in general because we’re big and the creature’s very small, so it does it doesn’t suffer so much because it’s so quick. So if we killed an elephant, you have to sort of if you’re kind of doing it manually, it takes a lot more to kill it because we’re so little, you know, in comparison. That’s what it means. So, yeah.
And also, they’re very like I said before, with the intention, the intention is the main thing. The intention has to be there, the object has to be there, the action is done, and then there’s a completion of the action. So with the intention, let’s say in terms of killing, the intention has to be there to kill the being. That’s the main karma. Then within that, you’ve got the motivation.
So if the motivation is attachment, you’d kill it carefully because you wouldn’t want to mess up the flesh. Right? So it’s not nearly as severe as as as aversion. And when you kill with aversion, it’s strong aggression, you know. Then there’s another factor that makes a big role, plays a big role and then the result of the karma for yourself, which is what I just said is whether you’ve got the habit to do it.
And that’s the reason for this fisherman, even though he had, you know, seemingly meant well and wanted to feed people, even blew mantras, because he had this powerful habit to kill. The imprint was very deep and it’s like ingrained in his mind. The karma is very strong because of that, because of the habit. Therefore, completely mindless. So for this reason, the animal karma is worse, the karma of animals, because they’re killing out of profound habit.
It’s instinct, what we call instinct. Instinct in Buddhism is just a habit of having done it so often that now it’s virtually instinctive, and that’s far heavier karma. Whereas in the West, we think it’s the opposite. You know? Then also another factor that plays a part, like, is how you kill.
Let’s say you’re very sadistic. That’s much worse. Heavier karma for your mind is so heavy. Or the other one is, like you said, where the being is very big or whatever, you know. Or, obviously, you can kill to kill a human is worse karma than to kill an insect.
Both have got Buddha nature. But as a human, there’s more chance for that human to do benefit and be a reasonable person than the poor little insect, know. So in that sense too, can see worse karma to kill a human. So these various factors play a part in the karmic result. Yeah.
Sure. Assisting someone. Yes. Okay. Let’s look at this.
Very interesting. If you take these four points and we take the person so first of all, there is an intention, isn’t there? It could be out of care. Yeah. But let’s look at this.
I’m gonna analyze. So let’s say there is the intention. You agree? Then there is the opposite person there, a live person. You do the action, the person dies.
Actually, they have to die before you for it to be a really complete action. So all of those are there. You agree. Now let’s look at motivation. So what would be the motivation?
Okay. Let’s just you give an example. It could be, like, some seeing a loved one suffering or Yes. It’s, you know, watching them suffer anymore. Okay.
So let’s just say it is it is we have a motivation of compassion for the person. We wanna stop their suffering. You agree? That’s the reason most people do what we call euthanasia, whether it’s for our pets or for our mommy or whatever, isn’t it? Okay.
Now there’s very clear points here. First yeah. Get your darling. Oh, yeah. Her question was euthanasia.
I always forget. Please remind me. It’s good. Thank you so much. She said, what’s the point about euthanasia?
And so I said, okay. Let’s look at it. Let’s analyze. First, there is the intention to kill, isn’t there? There are those four things I said.
So then then I said, let’s look at the motivation for killing your grandma or your dog or whatever. So I said, as I said, the usual reason we want to do that is because we have compassion for them. It’s not because we hate them. Right? We all agree with that.
So this is the point. There’s very clear points here. Again, the one about karma is to do with the karma that we create that brings results to us. It’s not discussing what the result is for the person. That’s from the point of view of the karma we create for ourselves.
So from that point of view, as we said already, motivation plays a major role. So you could say if your heart were truly full of motivate, I mean, really truly wanting that person to stop their suffering, it breaks your heart to see them suffer, and you really want to stop their suffering. Let’s say it is that mostly. Well, that clearly is a pretty it’s not a bad action. You don’t get much negative karma from that if you’re really not if you’re not denying it, you’re not lying to yourself.
Do you see my point? That truly is what’s in your heart. So that means you, let’s say you, would not get a very deep negative karma karmic result from that. Now that’s that’s you. Right?
Now let’s think about your grandma. Because it’s reasonable. We it is reasonable to ask the question, which we never do. I wonder if my killing my grandma actually helped my grandma. Do you it’s a reasonable question.
Right? So let’s look at that. Because that’s the point of view of the karma is that benefits me or not benefits me. Now we’re looking at the person or the ant, you know? Let’s say you kill one person kills an ant with aversion and one cause person kills an ant with compassion, then as far as the ants are concerned, they’re dead.
They don’t care what our motive is. But we’re looking at so that’s for them. But outcome, we’re looking at that. So that’s that one. Now let’s look at our grandma or the ant or whatever.
Now, okay. It is reasonable, would you agree, that if it is true, as Buddha says, that consciousness continues after death. And if it is true, that that consciousness will take another life depending upon the karmic seed that ripened at the time of death, which is determined by what arises in its mind at the time of death, then and we we could agree that as we’ve discussed with Buddha on Buddhist teachings, that you’ve got positive you know, good good rebirth and bad rebirth. So unless, it seems to me, the only way I can say, yes, that definitely benefited my grandma is if I have the clairvoyance, which Buddha says is possible, but but which I certainly haven’t got. Let’s say, if I had the clairvoyance to see that definitely she now has taken a much great rebirth and she’s, you know, she’s progressing along her spiritual path, Then you could say, not only was your action compassionate, which you got good karma from, but it was a very wise action.
You actually even did benefit your grandma. Now who can say this? None of us. Therefore, Buddha would say it is quite arrogant of us because we mean well, but we really do not do not know the consequences of that action. We don’t know.
With absolute certainty, even if you don’t believe, quote unquote, in anything, you don’t know consequences. And we all know in our ordinary life, we will not do any regular action unless we know the consequences. We all know that. Do you see my point? I mean, you know, sort of like, you know, I’ve got a headache and you’ve an aspirin and a cyanide pill, but you can’t remember which was which.
Robina, please, I wish you’d stop your headache. I really mean well, please take a pill. You’d much rather I have a headache than than than risk it, wouldn’t you? Well, same with killing creatures then. I mean, it doesn’t mean, you know, Buddha’s not saying just don’t do it because for no reason.
He’s saying think about it, and this is the way to think about it. So then we would definitely think twice. Not to mention the other point, which is and we’ve already been discussing with karma, that any suffering a being has, that ant, that grandma, it’s the purification of their past karma. So the main the best thing Buddhism would say the the best way to play safe for your own karma and to help them would be to help them in their death process. Give them love and encouragement.
Even your little dog, you know, support and blow mantras into its ears and help it help it alleviate its incredible fear. Because this is a very interesting point too. You check this one. I mean, I remember when I was before I was a Buddhist, I was driving on the Pacific Highway years when I was back in Australia, I know in the seventies sometime, in the seventies. And we were driving along the car one way, and this truck was coming this other way, and we saw a goanna in the middle of the road, and the truck swerved to hit the goanna.
Can you believe it? We could not believe it. This little goanna, a arch back, little white stuff coming out, you know, it’s not blood. It was white stuff. I we couldn’t believe it.
And so, of course, we were like, oh my god, this poor creature. So the first thought we had was we must kill it to stop its suffering. Now you analyze this. It’s insane. You can tell.
The poor goanna, already it’s had a bloody truck run over it. Excuse me. Now so there’s these maniacs who are meaning well and are crying for it, chucking rocks at its poor little head. You know? I mean, can you think of the poor Goanna?
He’s not sitting there in peace thinking, this is really nice. I’m dying in peace. He’s sitting there completely freaking out of these maniacs chucking rocks. I mean, it’s obvious that poor Goanna guaranteed to die with great delusion and and enormous fear on his poor little mind. So it’s very likely we chucked him from the frying pan into a very horrible fire.
Excuse me. We meant well. Even then, I know I I realized as we were doing it, this is insane. You know? But somehow it was just this immediate response because we had compassion for the goanna.
So this is the point. We can see if anybody’s threatened. What arises in the mind? Primordial fear, you know, and that is the primordial ego grasping that rises so strongly, which we’re gonna talk about soon, the way the mind works now. Get to the second scope after this.
That this is the primordial delusion that’s there that grasps so powerfully that sense of I that when it’s rising strongly, it it just activates all the delusions, you know, because it’s just complete paranoia there. So to die with that in your mind, how terrible. As much as we think that, oh, they look so peaceful, you know. I’m sorry. Somehow, we can’t guarantee they’re so peaceful.
Even if we put them to sleep as we call it and that, know, the vets all kind and everything, we can’t tell because we don’t have their karma. Sure. So she’s saying if you ask someone to help you die, two things. One, you would, you know, give yourself negative karmic you’d give yourself negative karmic result, or you would miss an opportunity for purifying.
And two, you create the cause of another person to create negative karma. Well, their their motive would be they’d mean well. So their karma’s not too heavy, but it’s sort of something there for sure. And yes, for yourself, it’s like, you know, the the what needs to be on the mind in order for the action we do to be very positive, as I said before, has to be genuine compassion. For who?
Well, in this case, for yourself. So compassion for yourself doesn’t mean you know, it’s usually fear and the anguish and the thought of that suffering. I’m just trying to criticize this. You know, there’s gonna be many, many factors in the mind. It’s not easy.
So it’s not an easy answer. I’m saying we should sit there and just suffer, But the Buddhist approach but and this is what I’m really noticing. This is very interesting. One time very few times I’ve been around people who are dying, you know, sick. There was two people I met on one day, both when I was when I was in America, and it was very clear to me the mind, how their mind was, really was the main thing about their suffering.
So they both had similar really bad diseases. One woman who’d lived there for years with this disease, living in her bed with her old, both about ninety, the old husband, they were the most blissful people you could meet. He was this old, dottering, half blind, old bloke who would lovingly been taking care of her for years, dying in her bed, you know. You looked in her eyes and you saw a very blissful, peaceful person. She’s incredibly suffering, but her eyes she was her mind was happy.
Her mind was at peace. This other woman, her you look in her eyes, you just saw just rampant fear. She was out of her mind with fear. So this is of tragedy. Know, they both had a similar suffering, but one’s mind was peaceful and one wasn’t.
So the point is when someone’s dying, the main thing is like what you gotta do this is why how how to help people who are dying is to be is to give them kind of courage and support. So it’s like, you know, when you’re a kid and you’re panicking. Who you run immediately to mommy to make it all better. So it’s almost like when we’re dying or when we’re very sick, we’re desperate for somebody. We’re desperate for mommy.
We’re desperate for someone to turn to, to take refuge in, you like, you think about it that way, to help us bear this kind of mental anguish. And I think that’s the most powerful thing to realize we can do for someone who’s very ill and dying. Help them help alleviate their pain and mental pain. Help them alleviate their fear. Help them know that it’s okay to die.
It really is okay. Now I mean, even if you don’t know what’s gonna happen, by that kind of because everyone’s desperate to trust anybody at that point. You wanna trust anyone. You’re desperate to trust somebody. So if you act with confidence and with love and it’s really okay, darling, everything’s gonna be alright, relax, everything is fine, you know, already their mind becomes peaceful.
When their mind becomes peaceful, it activates virtuous karma. So it’s the most skillful thing to do, just to be very confident and loving. So whether it’s your little dog or to your mommy, it’s the same, you know. This at least can help them bear the pain and allow their mind to become more peaceful and allow karma to ripen at its own pace, you know, because it’s a very subtle kind of thing. This is the ideal, you know.
Nothing’s ever that simple, but that’s an ideal scenario. Good. Okay. So now let’s talk about how you purify karma. Okay?
In the same way that it’s very interesting. In the same way that karma ripens in four ways, remember I said the throwing karma, the type of life, the main karma. The action is similar to the cause, experiences similar to the cause, and environmental karma. It’s four ways. And if you look at these four things.
There’s all the stuff that’s inside you, there’s all the stuff that happens to you, there’s even the form that you are and there’s the universe you live in, there’s no other thing left in life, is there? That’s everything. karma covers everything, you know. So, okay, how you purify, there are four steps. So we call it this process.
We call it excuse me. I’m being very rude. I can’t help it. The microphone here. I’m burping away.
Okay. The process, we call it the four opponent powers. It’s just, you know, words, but, actually, again, it’s a psychological process. Okay? It’s psychological.
All this is psychological. Okay? So there’s various steps you take, and you can take them in different order. Any practice that you do, this is a practice we do every night. Okay?
And says, you’re insane not to. Because he says as many moments as there are in a day is as many karmic seeds that you plant. So, obviously, you know, we’re not all perfect yet, so bound to be some negative ones following attachment, following anger. Even if you’re not Hitler, you know, then there’s obviously negative imprints in your mind. So you wanna clean up your garden.
You wanna do weeding every day. Otherwise, it gets impossible impossible, isn’t it? So it’s reasonable to do it every day. So these four steps, and there’s a nice analogy I like to use they use in the teachings, and I find it pleasant and helpful that indicates the order you do them in. You know?
So the first one is regret. Oh, because the point is, yeah, these four steps, for opponent powers, each of them purifies one of the four ways that karma ripens. It’s so kind of tasty, you know. So regret. What’s regret?
Well, first of it’s a very specific state of mind. Okay? Excuse me. I have a big sniff. I need a hanky, I think.
Guilt someone asked the Dalai Lama one time what’s the difference. He said guilt is like this and I’m paraphrasing. This kind of paralyzed sense of hopeless, bad me who looks into the past and what I did and feels that I can do nothing about it and just kind of get steeped in it, you know. It’s hopeless. It’s useless.
It’s kind of impotent. And then regret is this wholesome dynamic attitude that says, I have done this, and, oh my god, what a fool. It’s gonna bring me ridiculous suffering in the future. How idiotic. I’d better do something about it.
That’s a very different attitude. Right? It’s just like if you’ve take you know, this is the point about regret. The analogy is you’ve just eaten poison. It’s like you just had your lunch and and, you know, someone says, we’re beating this poison in there, darling.
You go, oh my god. What a fool. What have I done? And then you just then you don’t go, oh, I’m a bad person. I just ate poison.
Oh, I’m a terrible person. I ate poison. The next week, oh my god. I’m getting worse, and I ate poison. I’m such a bad person.
Excuse me. Do something about it. You know? This is the attitude. It’s very proactive.
So regret is this recognition that I did this, you know, lied and steal and kill and blurt and harm and act angry and jealous and depressed. And that is what is poisoning me. And it will bring me suffering. It’s already causing me suffering right now, not to mention future. And so regret is this wholesome attitude that you don’t want the future suffering, and so you quickly want to do something about it.
So the very next step, which comes on from regret, is, well, whom can I turn to, please? To give me the medicine.