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 redefines kindness. Rather than abstract philosophy, she traces a can of baked beans through countless beings—farmers, workers, designers, shop staff—showing how every object involves the effort of others. Most people call someone kind only if they get what they want; she argues true kindness is beings helping each other exist. She reframes how we think about mothers: instead of blaming them (Western psychology), we should recognize karma—we chose this life through our own past actions. The teaching then addresses lojong, or mind training, particularly exchanging self for others, which requires building healthy self-worth first so cherishing others isn’t codependent but genuine. She teaches tonglen meditation—breathing in another’s suffering, breathing out relief—and illustrates its power through prison stories and real-world encounters. Pitched at serious practitioners ready to reshape their habitual self-centeredness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 20 2002 01 20 BYT.mp3
UUID: ce906564-39e2-4ef4-bdc4-51664802f26f
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Be Your Own Therapist (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2002-01-20
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~10,347
Into each other beginningless times. I mean, it doesn’t sound like something comfortable for us. It doesn’t seem something at all reasonable. It’s an outrageous idea, but it follows logically according, you know, fitting with Buddha’s explanation of there being beginningless mind. So, you know, if we bumped into countless sentient beings countless times, it follows logically.
They’ve been our mother. They’ve nurtured us in all kinds of lives, all kinds of times. So this is something just it’s just a way of thinking this way, to try and learn to think this way again and again to get some genuine sense for this, some sense of the truth of this. You know? They say that the person who’s really contemplated this very deeply, doing all the other meditations as well, is a person who anytime they see any living being, an ant, a dog, a roach, doesn’t matter, is like this sort of this spontaneous feeling of, oh, mother, you know, kind of kindness coming to the heart.
And it sounds funny, doesn’t it? We don’t think of this way at all. So the next idea that comes from this one, and all these are contemplated very deeply using many, many ways of looking and, you know, changing the mind, changing usual assumptions about reality, is to then think, well, you know, to how kind mothers have been kind to us. So my feeling is we should add another meditation here about just how I mean, what does it mean they’ve been kind? Because we actually think the opposite sometimes.
So I suppose if we look at some of our assumptions in the West, then it’s reasonable we think our mothers are to blame for our problems because obviously we think that our mother made us, don’t we? So So then it causes a strong assumption that if our mother made us and then she, you know, she’s a less than perfect person, well, it seems a bit shocking that she should dare go along and make us, isn’t it? She should have waited till she was at least a decent person before she made us. That’s how we feel, isn’t it? It’s very strong in us.
And, actually, it’s the basis of a lot of our psychological models in the West because we’re desperately trying to find the reason for something. Well, the first person we can turn to, obviously, is the person who gave birth to us. It seems logical. Well, you know, as we’ve been saying, the Buddha doesn’t have this view. You know?
That our consciousness if you like, you can say, we chose our mom. Sorry. Don’t blame your mom. You know? But due to karma, strong karmic connection, there we were from the previous death, certain virtuous karma ripened.
We’re on autopilot by now, and then we go zapping, running like a magnet towards that mother’s womb. So who choose whom? Know? Who chose whom? I mean, Buddha doesn’t say technically that we chose to have the actual volition like you choose to walk out that door, that same thing.
But our karma, the the karma we created set us up to be yet again after countless lives together, being with that particular mother or that particular father or whatever you like to say. So already, just this alone is a very profound point, you know, can help us really shift the emphasis from this one of blame and all of the stuff that we tend to have, you know. Because, yes, of course, our mothers are deluded. I mean, we’re surprised. They’re in saṃsāra like us, you know.
Come on. But when you have this shift of emphasis that you actually created the cause to have that mother, that father, that school, that scenario in your life, it’s a very different, different view. You can hear it even intellectually. But it it takes time to psychologically come around to this one. And so then the the, you know, the experiential implication of this is eventually there’s a strong sense, as we talked about of karma, a strong sense of ownership.
You know? So then immediately, we we can have so even let’s say we’ve got a mother who hasn’t been so kind to us, and it’s very common, of course. Plenty of mothers are unkind to their babies. We know that. We’re definitely in the West.
But, nevertheless, you know, with this view of karma with this view, yeah, of karma, there are still many ways we can see that person’s been kind. So what it demands that we do is really, really redefine what we mean by kindness. You check this one. Right now, our view of when a person is kind to us, it’s it’s it’s defined by our needs being met, isn’t it? It’s no.
It’s defined by attachment. So as long as a person gives you what you want, you call them kind. I do. Do you see my point? We don’t ever think a person’s kind when they don’t give us what we want.
You go to a restaurant, and you order chocolate cake, the person brings the wrong cake, or it’s a bad cake, or it’s a cold cake, or it’s a stale cake, or whatever, something you don’t want. Even she worked just as hard as she would have if she brought you the right cake. She wrote it in the pad, she walked away, she gave it to the cook, she thought about it, she presented you a plate and a serviette and a knife. Excuse me. She did just as hard at work.
But because you didn’t get what you want, you don’t think she’s kind. You’re rude to her, you know? Don’t give her a tip or whatever. Oh, people don’t tip in Australia anyway, do they? I know.
I’m discovered. So it’s, you know, it’s really interesting. We have again, we just take all these things for granted. We don’t analyze the very basis of all our thoughts and feelings and emotions. And our basis here is self centeredness.
Yet again, I’m sorry to be so cruel to us. We can see the logic, you know. The basis of whether a person is kind is whether they do what I want. I’m sorry. That’s not kindness.
We all know it’s coming kindness is if a person simply does any I mean, you can actually see kindness as a person doing anything for you at all, facilitating you, even bringing you food. And this is the thing. There’s there’s another meditation here that you can do that’s more profound even than this one. We meditate on how all beings have been kind to us, are being kind to us every moment. This isn’t a shocking idea.
Well, let’s look at this one, you know. But let’s look first if our mother’s been kind. It’s really helpful for our mind, especially when we think they haven’t been. Especially if they have beaten us or they have given us up since when we were a baby, we think, I didn’t have a mother. How can they be kind?
Well, you know, there’s one reason we can be delight we can we can thank our mother and be grateful and develop great kindness towards her in return. And this is so simple. It’s that we are still alive. You analyze it. I think I’ve heard figures that it’s probably true that more human beings who who get the karma to be born in a human womb die before they’re even born.
Do you understand my point? In other words, more more fetuses die. The human fetuses, they’re human. They got won the lottery. They got the human womb.
They die even before they’re born than those who are actually born who then die. Now it’s an interesting interesting perspective, you know. So we were one of the ones who got who lived, and here we are even living till now. We didn’t die when we were two or three or five or ten or whatever. So the one thing we can say that our mother who gave birth to us, and we all know we got born out of a mother’s womb, this is new ways I haven’t heard about, then she didn’t kill us.
I swear to you, this is one reason to have eternal gratitude towards your mother. She didn’t abort you. That’s enough. If she did nothing more in her life, this is a reason to have gratitude. And this is a fact.
I mean, if you think about it, we don’t think about it like this normally, but you think about it. How fortunate. Probably I mean, there must be mean, not even talking about the miscarriages, but there must be so many millions, billions of humans who are aborted. I’m quite sure. I don’t know what the figures are.
And if it already does, I’d interested to hear it, actually. So that’s a reason to think to be grateful to our mother, to thank her for her kindness. You know? Then even if we did have a mother who kept us, right, who kept us and looked after us, we’re still here. We got educated.
We got fed. Yes. She might be neurotic and have attachment and have anger and be manipulative and be demanding and bossy and needy and all these things we think our mothers are, and they probably are because they’re human like us. You know? Nevertheless, you’re still here.
You’re alive. You’re educated. You know? There’s many, many, many reasons to think. Not just because you didn’t get what you not just because you got what you want, because here you are.
You know? So it’s in this way we can then expand the mind and then do another kind of meditation, which is thinking about the kindness of all beings. And this one is is, again, very, very obvious, but, again, one we absolutely never think about because we’re so eye centered. And this is the way to way the way to be analyzing this one is to think of any single thing you wanna point to right now that we use in our life, just your clothing, you know, your watch, my beads, my glasses, the house itself, the food we’re eating. Anything at any moment you want to point to that we use in our life, there there there are numberless sentient beings involved in the bringing of that to us.
Numberless. You can’t find you won’t ever be able to find the beginning of those numberless sentient beings. It’s a fact. Anything you wanna point to. And for this reason, every single one of those beings, just by doing their job, by being killed when you, know, they all the beings who suffered, for example, when the the vegetables were picked and when the the tree was chopped down that, you know, the that that made the the the the wood was taken to the factory that turned into pencils that we used to write things or the, you know, the the cloth, this cloth here, polyester and cotton.
No idea where polyester comes from. Nylon. Don’t know what it is. Probably some thing. I have no idea.
Let’s just say the cotton part. You know, where does cotton come from? Cotton comes from trees. Right? Little human beings pick you know, planted the trees.
Little human beings working away planting trees, and little human beings harvesting them. All little sentient beings have got rained on. They watered the trees when the rain came. You know? People who then picked the cotton, the people who then put it in the truck and took it to the cotton factory, people who made the truck, check it.
You know, check it. People who made the truck, but for the truck, you couldn’t truck the cotton. But for the cotton, you couldn’t have the truck, you couldn’t have couldn’t have my shamtab. I’d be naked. You know?
How embarrassing. So is everything everything you point to, the people who served me, the people who made it, the people who picked, you know, the man in the shop in San Francisco in Union Square who took the big bolt of cloth off the shelf and kindly and politely showed me all the different ones until I got the color that I wanted. Right? Very polite. And the person who took my money from me, the person who put it in the bag, the person who made the bag, the pic you know, the the car park man who took my money when I parked the car in Union Square underneath and to go blah blah blah like that.
You know? All these people involved, this myriad number of human beings are all involved in the simple little tasks of doing their everyday job that facilitate you having anything at all. At all. This is sentient beings being kind. You know, you go to the supermarket, get a can of boring old baked beans.
You never think of all the kindness of all the people who swept the floors, opened the doors, who unlocked the doors, who were allowed to even in, you know. People who put the trolleys there so you can pull it out and go into the trolley, people who made all the door things nice and clean, people who made all the shelving up, who put all the baked beans in nice order, people who put the prices on the shelf, who made, you know, put the not to mention even the baked beans yet. We’re getting to the able to get the baked beans. All the human beings involved, you know, countless. It’s obvious.
You know, didn’t fall shelves didn’t fall out of the sky. It was human beings, little human beings like you, who walked up and did their job. Then you think, well, excuse me. How are they kind? They didn’t think of me.
Of course, they weren’t thinking of you, but the fact that they did it is enough to be this facilitated you getting your baked beans, isn’t it? Easily, especially for us in our culture. Then there’s the baked beans themselves. Where do they come from? Trees.
Beans grow on trees or what? Oh, where do beans come from? Oh, it’s the same plants under the ground. Okay. Trying to think, baked bean trees.
You know? Okay. Under the ground. The people who picked them, all the sentient beings who died, people who put them in the truck, and the people who made the truck, people who went to the factory, and the people who made the metal, and the metal coming from the mountain, the people who mined it, all the hardworking miners, you know, trucking it to the cake baked bean can factory. The people who made the label of trees where the the paper came from.
We’ve trucked the trees. I mean, just you can go on and on and on and on and on. And where all the way along the line, you got little sentient beings working away. Come on. You know?
It’s unbelievable. Mister Hines, who invented the baked beans, know, then then the person, you know, they’re all they’re all the people we made, and then the people who designed them. I mean, sort of design. So I usually pick the baked beans that looks the nicest design. I don’t care about the nutritional value.
Right? So I look at the the best design packet. So the person who designed it. I really appreciate the designer there. The person with their pencil drew the design, construct you know, conceived of it.
The the typesetter. The person who invented the type, Mr. Gutenberg, you know, way back in the whichever century. The people who did the typesetter, who did the proofreading, know, who wrote the words, the copywriter. The person who spoke who taught the copywriter English so the little copywriter could write the words, so you could have nice words and you could bake bean cans so you know what’s in it. I mean, all this is true.
It’s a fact, isn’t it? You can’t deny these things are facts. They’re not religious ideas. These are facts. And where?
What what’s involved? Who are doing it? Little sentient beings. So but for the work of countless trillions of sentient beings, we would have zero. But for sentient beings, we wouldn’t even have a body, wouldn’t even exist.
Your mommy and daddy, kindly having sex, so you can have a body, you know, or getting a petri dish. Or like my friend in Seattle, was thinking my my lesbian friend in Seattle who got her gay friend to squirt some sperm into a bottle, and so then she squirted it into her vagina with a big fat syringe, and she had a very nice looking daughter. So, I mean, maybe you got born like that. But, you know, you think of your body. What’s your body?
You know? Your mommy and daddy working hard, this egg and sperm come, they join up. And then then what happens? It goes into your mommy’s body, and then your mommy starts to eat. All the blood and all the things because of the food sheats.
You know? Basically, your body, even before it gets out of the womb, is a mountain of potatoes and tomatoes and carrots and chickens, isn’t it? You think about it. Where is your body apart from the chickens, apart from the carrots, apart from the tomatoes, apart from your mommy’s hard work, apart from the milk, all the things in the body already, even in the womb? Where’s my body?
Excuse me. Apart from that, it’s a joke. You know? No way you have a body unless it’s all those things. All the kindness of all those creatures.
You know? Then you get out of the womb. And the kindness of nurses in the Mercy Hospital in Melbourne, you know, dawn on the twentieth of December nineteen forty four, all scurrying around on the early shift. This wretched baby being born, disturbing their sleep. So they get up and they put blankets around me, they clean me, and they wash me.
My mother feeds me and takes me. So but for the, you know, for the cooling in the hospital in the middle of summer in in Melbourne, there’d be no Robina. You know? For the little nurse who wrapped me in the blanket and the little blanket and the warm water, there’d be no Robina’s body. Then all the food my mother fed me, the milk and everything.
And what’s the milk but from the food that she ate? All the kinds of sentient beings. You know? I mean, we can see. Up until this point, this fifty seven year old body, where does it come from?
Again, mountains and mountains and mountains of chickens and carrots and tomatoes. You think about it. Where is my body apart from all those things, but for all the work all the farmers did? So excuse me. There’s enough here to make you absolutely weep with compassion for every living being and want only to repay their kindness.
Now, okay, we can hear these things are facts. Right? I’m not making up stories here. These are facts. But why aren’t these facts in the forefront of our heart?
Because I’m in the forefront of my heart, and so full, there’s no space for anything else. And what I want and what I don’t want and selfishness and not being mean about it, but just observing. This is why Buddha is saying this is what causes us suffering because we can’t see the truth. And this is just seeing the truth isn’t something kinda abstract, like only emptiness. We can’t see the most obvious truths like I just said them all.
They’re all truths. You know? They’re not things made up. We know they’re facts, but they don’t have impact upon us because we are overwhelmed by the self centered, completely this powerful sense of I and what I do have and what I don’t have and what I do need and what they don’t give me. We understand this.
We can see. So it’s just the the the wrong assumptions in our mind that are very ancient and old, we’ve dragged along with us from life to life, you know, that blind us from truth. So the truths we’re talking about here are the truths in relation to others. You know? So, you know, by thinking this way, we slowly open our hearts.
And so if you’re a bodhisattva, they’d probably be prostrating their way into the into the supermarket with an unbelievable gratitude and tears. Every moment at the thought of the kindness of all beings, you know. And they say that’s what a bodhisattva is when they finally have achieved this bodhicitta, the first moment of bodhicitta after many, many, many, many lives of working on equal, immediate love, compassion, great compassion, blah blah blah, and all these techniques which we’re talking about. They they they the the main one of the criteria of having of achieved the first moment of bodhicitta is that there’s no longer, they say, no longer the thought of I. You know?
Now, I mean, they don’t make a mistake and think they’re you. I don’t mean like that. I’m not silly or anything. They have no longer the sense of I that we just that pervades our being that we take as an assumption of truth and the sense of neediness because they no longer have that. They fulfilled, if you like.
By doing the first wing, they fulfilled their own needs if you think about it. So now there’s this massive space to put others in there. So others become now the main focus of their lives. And it’s not in the kind of the codependent way we talk about it. So try and adhere to something way above the usual garbage.
You know? It kinda sounds tiring. I agree. You mean I’ve gotta love everybody like that? How exhausting, you know?
Isn’t it? So you need hard work loving one person. There’s no space for more than one inside our head, isn’t it? That’s only because we’ve got delusion. That’s all.
So just looking at these things to expand ourself. And the point is with all this stuff, it’s not enough to hear it just once. We can even hear the truth of some of this stuff just hearing it once. But the second we walk out the door, the default mode returns. So we eventually have to make all this the default mode, and that just takes time, and that’s what practice is.
Doing kind of these annual contemplations, thinking in this way. So every time you go to the supermarket, instead of thinking you want the baked beans with that and that and just taking it all for granted, not just thanking the people who are kind to you get out of your way or hand you the can or take your money and smile at you and they say, have a nice day. But you see that just you you think of all the beings who’ve worked to make this happen. But usually, again, we see everything through the filter of attachment. We see that I’ll see the baked beans in terms of whether they’re nicely designed.
Or we might see the baked beans in terms of whether they’ve got good nutritional value. We might see it in terms of whether the price is what suits us. We might see the supermarket in terms of how ugly or beautiful it is. So because I like things that are nicely designed, I’m gonna be very happy to walk into a gorgeous shop with gorgeous design. I feel they’ve all done a lovely job.
But if walk into an ugly shop, I’m gonna know how disgusting these people. Haven’t got a clue how to make nice shops. You know? And so we don’t thank anybody then. Isn’t it?
Again, why? Because we have attachment. Attachment likes nice things. We don’t like nice things. Conclusion, we don’t like the thing they make.
Conclusion, the people are ugly. That’s how we all judge everybody, isn’t it? Completely false. Completely not true. We can think if we have a if we have kids, you know, and our little kid makes something for us when they’re little and they make this hopeless looking thing.
You know? Oh, darling. Thank you. Our little hearts are so touched. Right?
I remember our mother when she died. I wasn’t there, but she when they told me, and I knew this anyway, she had seven children. Her you know, all her drawers were full of every little tiny thing, all little things seven children have ever given her since we were born, you know, Little stick, a little sixpence, a piece of hair, a something. I mean, you know what? I mean, if you’re a mother, you know what it’s like.
She treasured everything we gave her. Not because they were beautiful design things. My mother was a real snob. She loved good quality things, but she loved anything her children gave her. Why?
Because her heart was touched by our kindness. Well, that’s what kindness is. You know? Seeing the kindness and having in return a wish to repay that kindness, that’s what comes from this. And this is this gradual development we’re talking, these meditations, brings us to this huge space of wanting to repay the kindness of all sentient beings, not just the kindness of the one or two people who have helped us, which is how we are now because of attachment.
But we’re expanding, expanding, expanding, going beyond our usual limits, you know, trying to repay the kindness of every living being. This is what eventually culminates in bodhicitta. So many much, much, much contemplating in many ways on these points. And then a whole area of these techniques is is actually a type of practice that they call exchanging self for others, which is a sort of a lineage of teachings that have come from Atisha and his his disciples. And, actually, they said they were you know, it’s a certain kind of practices that you need to be, as I say, a suitable vessel to really hear them and work with them appropriately.
Because this whole approach is quite is quite kind of astonishing. It’s like this the example of Harry. That was an example of that type of mind we call it actually mind training. All of this is mind training, but a type of very extraordinary meditations of really learning to really learn to exchange yourself for others. Harry put himself in the danger spot in order to save others, you know, without a second thought.
So this all these types of meditations, there are many, many. I’m just touching on a few points. Okay, in this tradition. They’re they’re called in Tibetan lojong, mind training. And they’re all they’re also or they’re called techniques whereby you learn to exchange yourself for others.
So the very first step in this is again contemplate again and again and again on, how others are equal to me. Equal in wanting to be happy and in wanting not to suffer. It’s like the same logic you’re using for the equanimity one. But in this one, the equanimity, you’re thinking equal to the each other. Now we’re looking at learning to exchange self for others.
So we’re learning to see how others are equal to me and wanting to be happy and not wanting to suffer. So therefore, we’re equal. Whereas, you know, even if we’re lonely and depressed and have low self esteem right now, again, being very honest with ourselves, it actually we don’t have any appreciation for others at all. We actually even though we are feeling miserable and lonely, we also actually don’t like anybody else. So we really still, in our own sad way, are being self centered, just like an arrogant person, self centeredness.
And it’s also thinking mostly of ourself. Again, not being cruel. Don’t take this sort of like in a being cruel way. We have to have the courage to see that this is why we suffer, not to have guilt for it, but to break have our hearts break for ourself that the way we are is why we’re suffering. You know?
So when we have low self esteem, it sort of sounds like we have high self esteem high esteem for everybody else. It’s not true. We like resent anybody else because I’m I’m lower than them, and how dare they be higher than me. It’s not really like a happy mind at all. You know, you think about it.
So to exchange yourself, to learn to see that others are equal in wanting to be happy, of course, it’s gonna open your heart hugely to others, you know. But this one of being a suitable vessel to hear these teachings is very reasonable. It’s, you know, that means that you’ve done some work on the first wing. Because if you haven’t done much work on the first wing, it means we’ve got huge attachment, huge low self esteem, huge, you know, depression, huge anxiety, huge anger. There’s no way that you’re gonna hear something about how other people are equal to you.
You can’t even hear how you’re worth anything either first, you know. So you gotta first know that you’re worth something before you can start to see that others are worth something. That’s what happens on the first wing. It’s so important. So there’s a whole series of techniques.
There’s like one little text that’s used a lot for practice called the Eight Verses of Mind Training. And the very first verse in that says, basically, when you’re with others, you will see yourself as the lowest of all and others as most precious. Now that for for those of us for most of us who haven’t done much work on the wisdom wing, who already have low self esteem, this feels like really cruel, doesn’t it? Excuse me. Buddha’s telling me I’ve got to see everybody else’s you know, myself is lower than others, but I already do that.
We’re thinking, what’s the benefit of this one? You know? So that’s why he says, Pabongka Rinpoche, in his commentary, says we have to be a suitable vessel to really hear these teachings appropriately. In other words, the only person who can really hear that appropriately is a person who’s already done the work in the wisdom wing and got enormous sense of their own worth, great self confidence, or definite good self esteem, who’s really gone beyond attachment, anger, jealousy, and pride, and all the rest because they are what are preventing us from having high self esteem right now. They are what cause us to have low self esteem.
So we need to have done all that work first, then we can really begin to hear in a very tasty way the meaning of this type of approach, to see yourself as the lowest of all. So what does that actually mean? You know, for a healthy person even, what does that mean? How can that be good? So what’s interesting about it is it sounds like it’s still our emphasis on I.
And so the constant wishes, if you’re with others, you keep you keep thinking, I’m very low. I’m really low. I’m really low. I’m really low. Rubbish.
It doesn’t mean that at all. In a sense, what it means that you’re seeing everybody else as wonderful, not in the kind of miserable, oh, they’re so fantastic. Who do they think they are? They’re so more beautiful and rich and better than I am. You know?
I and so really, like anger, actually. It’s like resentment. It’s not a happy mind at all. So it’s having this sense of kind of just being who you are, but a genuine ability to to rejoice in the qualities of others, a genuine respect for other human beings, whoever they are. That’s what it is.
So, really, the emphasis when you say to see yourself as lowest of all is the emphasis is really on on the goodness of others. And it encourages you and and feeds you. It doesn’t make you depressed. Whereas now when we have low self esteem and we meet other people who are better than us, which is we think the whole world, then we feel even more miserable, don’t we? It’s kind of interesting, you know, because it’s eye centered.
It’s kind of this neurotic grasping at eye. In the same way as an arrogant person, you know, walks into the room completely with this overdeveloped sense of I, but actually is very fearful. It’s a neurotic state of mind. All the delusions are based in I, right, in the neurotic sense. And so pride, which sounds so strong, you know, is really very scary.
It’s like this little person inside all kind of inflated saying, please see me. See me. See me. Acknowledge me. Acknowledge me.
You know? Whereas a person who’s got low self esteem, in a way, wanting just the same thing, but is all walking around all kind of scaredy baby. You know? They’re both sentient beings of the same problem. Like I said, one looks in the mirror and says, I’m great.
One looks in the mirror and says, I’m what a creep. But they’re both so you you check what happens to the proud person, the arrogant person. They’re scared of having anybody who’s better than they are, more beautiful, more rich, or whatever the basis of the pride is. So they’re constantly kinda reaffirming themselves and just trying to squash the competition. So as soon as they do meet a person who is better and they they win, they lose the competition, they become completely deflated.
Now they become low self esteem. I’m so hopeless. I’m so miserable. I’m so ugly. I’m so horrible.
Hate, hate, hate. You know? So it’s kind of interesting. We can see this. So really low self esteem, it sounds cruel, is the flip side of pride.
You know? It’s like deflated pride. And the emphasis is I. And it’s like a blaming mind. It’s a negative mind.
It’s a critical mind of other people. It’s not kind to other people at all. It’s a person who’s got low self esteem. A person who’s got good self esteem, but has humility, which comes with it perfectly. That’s a person who’s got not a strong neurotic sense of eye, a very content sense of eye, such that they’re able to see others very comfortably.
And a person who’s got you know, who’s really good at something but has humility is delighted to meet a person who’s better. Please show me more. You know? They learn from it. But a proud person is terrified of it, It’s very scared.
You know? All the delusions are so painful. Even if they look arrogant and they can be very destructive to other people, of course, they can. But they’re rude in that person, fractured sense of self, no decent sense of self at all. The commonest thing a lot of my friends in prison say, especially the guys in America and the gangs, they say that it’s you know, that to see be seen as kind is to be seen as weak.
And so it’s a really hard balance for them to learn to wanna give up being violent. You know? It’s very hard, actually. That’s incredibly hard for them. Unbelievable.
It’s like it’s like saying when they make the vow, they say, they become a Buddhist and make the vow never to kill again or never to harm. That’s really, like, terrifying because it’s really saying, okay, I’m ready to be stabbed. Because they say it’s like you’re living in a war zone all the time. You can be stabbed at any moment, especially if you give up the gangs, you become an outcast, and that is the scum of the scum, you know. You deserve every everything.
So one of these I mean, very nice stories, there’s one story of one of my there’s one guy, Mexican, called Francisco. And he was about thirty when he first wrote to me, he’d been in the self of another person who’d been writing to me already, who’d been practicing, a younger guy, Mexican. And he he just talked a bit about himself and how how this this experience happened to him in this cell. He was in this prison in Pelican Bay in California where they’re their cells twenty-three hours a day. And they shared the self, and they were they’ve been friends.
They’ve been kinda like homeboys for years, you know, in prison mostly, fighting all the same wars because they’re both on the same side. They’re the Southerners. Does anybody have the Southerners and the Northerners, the enemies? I didn’t tell you that. Unbelievable.
These gang I could tell I spent a whole weekend talking about these gangs. They fascinate me. Anyway, whatever. But in the Mexican gangs, let’s say in Los Angeles, where they’re they’re most strong, there’s numberless gangs. It’s according to what neighborhood you live, what block just about, you know, what street.
So we’ve got these new different gangs given name. They all have their own dress code. I mean, incredibly precise dress code and the way they behave, how they talk, whom you speak. And when you meet an enemy, have to do this and you do that, and hold your gun this way. Mean, it’s like unbelievable.
It’s like rule books. You know? This beat was only their heads, of course. So then they go to prison. All that thing goes out the window.
Then they’ve got two gangs in prison, the northern Mexicans and the southern Mexicans. And the the division line is roughly Fresno, which is sort of halfway between LA and San Francisco. So the southerners all come from kind of LA and south of Fresno, and all the northerners come from San Francisco and north of Fresno, and they become the most their worst enemies. So now then, they are the worst enemies. So they’re the one they hate each other most.
So any wars the Mexicans have is between the southerners the southerners and the northerners. You know? I mean, if we could go out on the streets, they could have been the mortal enemies in LA, but now they become the best of friends in prison because their gangs keep changing. Right? So anyway anyway, even when so when they had their wars and they love their wars.
I mean, you know, the authorities call them what do they call them? Riots. They call them war. You know? It’s very serious business.
And they all had their own knives. They make their own knives in prison and everything. Even out of plastic bottles, Francisco said, I asked him what you make them out of, he said, but then on metal, you can only use them once. Anyway, they had their wars. When they had their wars, they had really big full on wars.
The the they hate also the blacks, and they also and the Mexicans the blacks hate the Mexicans, the Mexicans hate the blacks, the Asians hate them all, and they all hate the Asians. Everybody hates everybody, and then within the white fascists. So when they have their big wars, the northern Mexicans team up with the blacks against the southern Mexicans and the white fascists. Cause they they don’t hate them quite as much. They team up, you know, then they have their wars on the yard, all their knives and everything.
Anyway, why am I telling all these stories? Oh, yeah. I’m talking about Francisco. That’s right. About giving up violence in prison.
About being kind is said to be weak. Okay. This is a nice story. So Francisco has been a gangster since he’s a little kid, been in prison, in and out since he’s a boy. Know?
And he sort of he said, since I was twenty, I wanted liberation, he said, but I didn’t even know such a thing existed or even how to get it. But in his heart so you can sort of if you think about karma, the imprints were strongly in his heart, you know, in his mind from past. Past. So yearning for something, but yet there he was. Everywhere he turned was violence and gangs, and this is what you know, you couldn’t see any other way to get out of it, you know, and it’s their total world.
They never go past it. You never go anywhere else but the gangs. Right? So there he is in prison with this guy Francisco, and Francisco’s been practicing for six months. But, of course, he doesn’t tell anybody because you don’t trust anybody, even your own homeboys, because you never know.
You know? So one day, they had this really nice talk, and it was a very good feeling between them. He said they really opened up for the first time and talked about things. Then Arturo, Francisco said, he reached for a copy of Mandala, the magazine, to share some quotation with him about something or other. And he said, I happen to get this is Francisco.
I happen to get a glimpse, he said, not sure any sound would come out. So I lay in my bunk for a long time looking at this picture. And then he said, when I came out of my trance, the joy that I experienced, which was so clean and so pure, was what I knew and which I had never experienced in my whole life, was what I knew I wanted all living beings to experience. And then he said and then from then on, he vowed never to harm another living being. You know?
And actually, the most scary thing. He because he knew that he had now no defense. You know? He could easily whatever. Because he had to sort of announce that he was no longer a member of the gang.
He could soon see that from his behavior. And there’s many like that who won’t even take refuge and, but yet are Buddhists because they really feel they’re not brave enough yet to be able to say they won’t harm anybody because it’s too scary because you’re being attacked every day, you know. But what I’m getting at here, the point was this is the point about the mind, the power of the mind. This is what I’ve discussed with quite a few of them, and they they understand it, you know, because they often say, like I said, they say, but to be seen as kind is to be seen as weak. And the point is this that I’m getting to.
That with a person like Francisco, when he really made this decision, came from a very deep place in his heart, a very courageous place. So somehow that courage, you know, to bring up that amount of courage, but not out of arrogant courage, not sort of like defensive courage, but genuine heartfelt coming from love, which had happened with him, then he had the courage to say, I will never harm another living being. And because of that, then he somehow he he wasn’t being weak. He wasn’t being weak. He was being unbelievably strong, and somehow that is the message he would convey to others.
Do you see what I’m saying? So usually the way we’re kind now, it is weak. Because why? It’s coming from attachment. So you you look craven when you’re being kind.
Because most of the time we’re kind now, it’s kindness because we want the other person to love us and respect us, although we don’t think of it like that. And we can all smell that, you know, especially when we’re into sort of things like gaining so much power, the psychological thing, all the time. You can smell a weak person, and you come smashing down, you know. But when a person is really strong, really their own person, which is what happened to Francisco, then his he his being kind and not wanting to harm, actually, it it would be it would be strong, you know, so he wouldn’t be harmed. Do you see my point?
So we really have to look into our minds deeply. You see, even the kindness we have now is like just it’s coming from attachment. It’s kind of like craving kindness, like codependent kindness. So when it’s genuine kindness coming from a strong place in the heart, then you are not seen as weak. Actually, people would leave you alone, and they left him alone.
You know? It’s an interesting point. Do understand what I mean? So we have to look at it really into our own hearts. You know?
Because even when we think of kindness now, it’s sort of all this kind of, you know, kind of California huggy kissy kind of kindness. You understand what I mean? I’m always criticizing America. I’m not really trying to criticize America. I live there.
I’m not criticizing. But you know what I’m trying to say? We think of kindness as all kind of all kind of all lovely. Heck, good to see you. Give me a hug.
Kiss kiss. You know, all kind of expressive. That’s not necessarily being kind. That’s being that’s being emotional attached sometimes. So we kind of always overdo it.
You know? Kindness is coming from some genuine appreciation of the qualities of the other human beings and just allowing them to be, you know, having a warmth in our heart and accepting people, not having to all the time express and hug and everything. That’s not necessarily kindness at all or doing things all the time for people. It’s half the time, it’s inappropriate because we haven’t got the wisdom to see what is the right thing to do. And just kindness is just being who you are sometimes, allowing people to be, you know, that’s kindness.
Instead of all some interfering and kind of poking our nose into everybody’s heads, you know, which is what we do, calling it kindness. It’s not kindness. So, anyway, exchanging yourself for others. And I was giving the example of this little particular text in this particular tradition of practice called the eight verses in the first verse saying, when you’re with others, see yourself as the lowest of all. So what I’m emphasizing here is that this kind of when you’re a strong person within yourself, confident about yourself but not arrogant, comfortable, therefore, humble and unassuming and naturally kind of who you are, then you’re very capable of being around, grouping other people and having genuine, excuse me, genuine respect for other people.
Like walking around thinking I’m low, I’m low, which is what it sounds because we’re always thinking of I, you know. But it’s more an emphasis on others and having a delight in their qualities. Even we practice. We have to practice this going around each person in the room, even just with the group in here, you know, finding something really good about each person in this room quietly to ourselves, privately, you know, to rejoice. Because if we look at our mind, we have strong attachment or strong anger.
And even if we’re not doing it very strongly, it’s hard to see it, it’s embarrassing to see it, we’re always finding fault, you know. Don’t like that person. That person’s too fat, and that person’s too this, and don’t like those clothes, and don’t like the way they talk, and they talk too much. We can’t help it, even if we’re smiling and chatting and being friendly. We all the critical minds all the time going.
I know it’s painful to look at it, it’s true, isn’t it? We can see. So we have to practice using those voices. Don’t suffocate the voices. Just change the voices.
Find something nice about a person you just find your mind criticizing. Don’t Don’t feel bad and guilty and then beat yourself up. It’s ridiculous. It’s just it’s just natural because we’re so addicted to these views, you know. Just find something good to rejoice about that person.
Do it with each, and we train ourselves in this way. So learning to delight in the qualities of other people. So eventually, that becomes spontaneous. You delight in whoever you meet, you know, eventually. It comes.
It just takes time. So it’s a conscious thing we’re trying to do and observing all the time our own mind, all little tricks our mind’s playing, all little old voices, you know. And, of course, there’s so many layers of them. It’s hard to see it clearly. To see our minds is a very, very difficult job.
And, of course, it keeps getting more subtle and more subtle and more subtle. We keep unraveling more and more of the complexities of all the stuff inside deeper and deeper. You know? That’s what we need to do. We’ve to start where we are.
You know? So eventually, we we meditate many, many, many times in many, many, many different ways thinking about how, you know, others are equal to me. And eventually, we can even go to the next contemplation, which is to learn to see the disadvantage of cherishing oneself. So they talk very much on this wing. In the first wing, you can really say the main problem, the cause of all the problems in the first wing, the wisdom wing, is what they call self grasping or ego grasping or really this ignorance, the root delusion that is the source of all our suffering that gives rise to attachment, anger, pride, and all the rest.
Okay? Grasping. And we’re gonna talk more about this later. This primordial mistaken sense of an independent, inherent, lonely, separate, bereft meaness. Ego grasping, they call that.
So in the in this compassion wing, effectively, they talk about the main problem being self-cherishing or simply what we call in the West selfishness. But, again, it’s hard to hear. It sounds cruel, you know, to say I’m selfish. It’s a painful thing to hear. So we have self-cherishing.
We cherish self most now because of self grasping, because we have this fundamental wrong view. But we can talk about this effectively as being the main the direct opposite of bodhicitta. The direct opposite of wisdom that realizes emptiness is self grasping. The opposite of bodhicitta is self-cherishing. Just the way they talk.
So learn to see how because we have this sense of self, that is mistaken, we are then have a sense of separate self, which gives us gives rise to seeing friends, enemies, strangers and all the other things we have based on all those delusions. You know? So the whole world view we have now is this one. All these which Buddha is arguing with and saying they’re all wrong assumptions. You know?
They’re coming from the wrong place. So here, we’re trying to learn to see the disadvantages of cherishing self most. So it it’s so deep in us. I mean, even if I’m saying the words, it almost seems like a silly thing to say. Well, you think I think, well, excuse me.
Of course, I cherish me most. I am me, for god’s sake. And then you think of cherishing others most. It sounds like one of those goody goodies. You know?
So it’s really hard to get kind of a a sensible view of it. But it’s only because of the stronger you’re grasping that it just comes intuitive. Just cherish me most. So then, of course, we you know, like I’m saying, if we haven’t done the wisdom wing properly, we’re not gonna have healthy cherishing. The cherishing of others won’t be healthy.
The goodness and kindness we do won’t be healthy. It’ll be that codependent neurotic kind like we’re talking. So here, we’re talking of a kind of love and compassion that’s kind of got itself beyond all the grasping and the ego. We’ve already done a lot of work on cleaning up our ego. We were very clear now.
The idea is, you know, much more clear and more balanced and more self confident and more relaxed in who we are with less neurosis and less ego gains. Then we can really soar, you know, in the development of this love and kindness and compassion and cherishing others and all the rest, you know. So all we’re talking here are various techniques to get us to the point of developing enormous love and then eventually enormous compassion. So this whole kind of scenario of practices called exchanging self for others are ways of developing strongly love for others, wish they be happy, compassion for others. The very heart Okay, I’m talking here.
This one of cherishing, learn to see others are equal to you. Then eventually thinking about how self-cherishing is the cause of your suffering. Then expanding your mind even further, going the other way and thinking of the advantages of cherishing others. Then eventually being able to do the very heart meditation in this whole tradition, this little package of teachings, which is called tonglen in Tibetan, giving and taking, giving and taking. So, basically, you can do this in a multitude of ways, but there is a way to do it in formal meditation, and it’s a very amazing meditation.
So simple, so difficult. So, basically, you can first, you know, you can you can visualize in front of you, anyone. Even begin with yourself, says. Even in the morning, do this meditation. He says, you think of yourself in the afternoon with a headache.
Even yourself, you start with that. And then you imagine in this meditation, you visualize that you when you breathe out, when you breathe in, you you imagine the suffering of you in the afternoon, even this is when you first begin, you you breathe in now the headache upon yourself. You take upon you you take upon yourself the suffering. And then when you breathe out, you give all your good qualities, your health, your happiness, all your good things to this person. Giving and taking.
So the the thought of giving to others is is is development of love, isn’t it? Giving them what they need that causes you to want them to be happy, to give them what they need. And then taking upon yourself their suffering is a very specific way of of having compassion. So we can see this I mean, we can be as creative as we like with this meditation. It’s so simple.
They often say to visualize at your heart, your own self-cherishing, like a like a rock. When you breathe in, it kind of comes in with this kind of yucky smoke, and it smashes yourself cherishing. And when you breathe out, there’s blissful light. You give whatever it is this person needs. So, of course, you graduate from yourself in the afternoon to a dear friend.
It’s easy for a friend, but we start with that. We have to have courage. Eventually, we can go to strangers and even enemies, you know. You can do it in your meditation very formally. There are very extensive ways you can do it this way.
And then you can do it in the street. Wherever you’re going, you walk down the street, there’s a smelly old homeless person whom the first thought that arises that brings up in your mind is, oh, what a relief. That’s not me. Well, this one is the opposite. You imagine.
Almost know, you can do it like this. It doesn’t say this in the book, but it makes sense. You can imagine that you sit there in their place, and you give them the key, they go home to your nice comfortable house. Just even imagining this is outrageous. So we we might think, well, excuse me, how does that help?
Well, it doesn’t help them at all because you’re not really doing it, actually. But what you’re doing is training yourself to be able to do this. You can’t do anything unless you train, you know? So you can’t do these things unless you unless you you can’t become, you know, a compassionate person who actually genuinely loves others until you train yourself to think this way. And so eventually, the thoughts become your status quo.
They become your default mode. They become your instinct. That just takes time. We have to train in the mind. So thinking in these ways is how you do it.
This is this is an amazing meditation, Tonglen, they call it. One of the most amazing meditations, hugely purifying for oneself and hugely growing like, you know, virtuous seeds in our mind. It can heal. I mean, I’ve got so many Lama Zopa Have you got his book, Ultimate Healing, in the shop? You have?
This is really recommend this book, Ultimate Healing by Lama Zopa Rinpoche. It’s an amazing, wonderful book. It’s talking about healing, you know, how you use various meditations to help heal, how many multitude of things Lama Zopa talks about, and it’s a very big thing. He has he talks a lot about this, using the medicine Buddha, many, many things. And he has many stories in there of people who’ve had AIDS, cancer, and so on who’ve healed themselves by doing meditation on compassion, by doing something like Tonglen, you know.
And not even intentionally. It wasn’t their intention. There’s one story I always remember he quotes in the book of this young Chinese boy. I can’t think of where he’s from. But he Rinpoche just he he talked to this boy.
It was his own lama, this other boy’s lama, who gave him this simple practice of compassion. Maybe it was Tonglen. I can’t remember. And he had AIDS. Right?
I mean, he was he was actually infected. He was sick. I don’t know what the right words are, but you understand. He was sick. And so he he he was given this meditation to do by his lama, and and he apparently completely cured his own AIDS.
You know? And, basically, what he did was he meditated. He He took I think he was Tonglen, or he just had compassion for the suffering of other people with AIDS. He contemplated it, and it moved his heart so strongly that he healed himself. It wasn’t his intention, but he healed himself.
The power of the mind, in other words. It’s like the power of the mind. You know, it it saved him. Compassion for others, you know, is like this extraordinary extraordinary level of transformation. I mean, we can really do it.
I mean, the story of Harry, for me, was a classic. Unbelievable one. Wasn’t it so powerful, that story? Another story, interesting too. Very interesting.
This one. There’s this bloke in New York. He’s just a very devoted student, and he keeps his vows very purely. He wants to not lie, steal, kill. Very sincere practitioner.
And he owns a cheese store, and he’s called Joe the Cheese Guy. I can’t remember what his name is. And apparently, the health inspector came in one day and started telling him what to do here and what to do there and kill the rodents and do this and do that. And he kept saying, well, I can’t I can’t kill them. No.
No. I’m a Buddhist. I couldn’t kill. And she’s getting annoyed with him. And she had a clipboard, and this fly landed on her clipboard.
And she said, you kill that fly now or I’ll close your store down. And he said, I’m sorry. I can’t. You know? So she stopped.
She burst into tears. She hugged him. She said, please pray for me. She wrote a perfect report, and she left. Isn’t that amazing?
For a fly. I mean, this man was brave enough to do this for a fly. I mean, you gotta be brave, isn’t it? That’s the point, you know. That’s not weak.
She saw I mean, if that you know, to save the life of a fly can look like really wimpy, but that was so powerful, so strong, and it completely transformed her, you know. The same was I tell the BMW story. These are three stories I always tell. I didn’t tell the BMW story? No.
Okay. I’ll tell that story too. You know, because, you know, the view of karma is, of course, as we’ve been saying, that whatever suffering you get is because you’ve done it to others before, done it to that person before. So and then if by pure by taking responsibility and purifying that, like I said already when I talked about purification, that can even have the delightful and surprising response of of stopping the suffering coming at you. Although we never think that way, but we can really do it this way by taking responsibility and having deep regret.
So, anyway, what happened, this story, roughly speaking, there’s a friend in Sydney, a group of people of Buddhists in Sydney, and, one of them, Renata, who’s a student of Lama Zopa, and they were